Jacqueline (Jackie For Short)

Jacqueline is a character borne from a confluence of many intersecting anxieties I was experiencing when first setting out to work on Opportunity: anxiety about the ever-increasing cost of living, anxiety about rising Puritan fascism, anxiety about social isolation, anxiety about aging, anxiety about my own sexual desirability, and anxiety about how uncertain and unfriendly the future looked amid an ongoing pandemic. I suppose it follows that she wound up being a pretty anxious person herself.

A lot of what I think people find true or relatable about Jackie was really just me trying my best to represent the real-world struggles of my friends who were mothers. Going back to the previous entry in this series, the real-world setting again does a lot of the conceptual heavy lifting here: everyone knows that, in our society, mothers have it rough. A mother is an amalgam of several highly-skilled jobs, none of them paid. A mother is a teacher and a counsellor, a mother is a cook and a maid, a mother is an accountant and an event planner. And that’s all before getting into the increased challenge of being a single parent with a full-time job to boot! Put all of that together and you’ve got a character who is tired, stressed, tired, experiencing guilt from a half-dozen different directions at any given time, tired, more than a little sexually-frustrated, and unimaginably tired. A character, in other words, who is desperate to make a change.

(I’ll just put a reminder here before the break: this series contains spoilers about the plot of Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story! You’ve been warned!)

Said change comes, of course, in the form of becoming what’s known as a “full-service” sex worker – someone who provides in-person sexual services up to and including penetrative sex – after accepting Roman’s offer. In terms of narrative order-of-operations, it was crucial for Jacqueline to first be understood as someone whose identity could be summed-up as something like Struggling Unhappy Single Mother. Sex workers are frequently dehumanized in popular narratives to the point of being treated like a different species altogether, and a such I wanted the main character’s identity to be firmly fixed in the reader’s mind as something that was NOT defined by her relationship to sex work. This forces said reader down the same path of logic that Jacqueline herself follows – if you’re barely scraping by, with two growing children to feed and clothe, how attractive does an offer like Roman’s start to seem? Does it make a difference if you find Roman himself attractive? Are there terms on which you’d be comfortable with it? (Jacqueline being a sex work neophyte also gave me a certain amount of narrative leeway – although I’m personally more knowledgeable than the average person about sex work I am by no means an expert, so while there is a little bit of Sex Worker 101 about her character I also get a bit of wiggle room if anything feels a little inauthentic.)

The last major priority for Jackie as a character was asserting that, although she occupies both the role of  Single Mother and that of Sex Worker, those roles do not wholly define who she is as a person. Certainly they INFORM that, but Opportunity‘s story is all about Jackie rediscovering who she is, and then deciding who she wants to become. I think this is a very relatable thing, especially for people in Jackie’s age cohort. So much of young adulthood these days is spent desperately striving, completely consumed by long-term pursuits like schooling, careers, or childrearing (in many cases, all three simultaneously). When you reach your 30s, there’s often a feeling of having lost touch with yourself during those years of intense external focus. If you’re lucky enough to have achieved some form of stability, it can be intensely rewarding to reconnect with passions and interests that have fallen by the wayside.

Jacqueline’s primary passion is fashion. She’s revealed to have completed a diploma in fashion design, but was then forced to almost immediately retrain into something more immediately-hireable after her first child was born. However, even if you don’t have the time and energy to design and fabricate clothing, it’s still possible to express yourself by putting together cute outfits. I like to imagine Jackie’s closet as being filled to bursting with carefully-wrapped items of clothing that she either made or restored during her school days, which she then picks and chooses from as needed (and, like a lot of parents, she probably has a much smaller selection of old, well-broken-in clothing items in which she spends 90% of her time, since who cares if a ratty old sweater gets toddler puke on it?) Particularly fashion-conscious players will notice that Jackie has a special fondness for Mod-era fashion, as well as the more general aesthetic sensibilities of early-60s Britain and America.

Jackie’s secondary passion (or perhaps sub-passion) is cosplay. I like to imagine her as having started out as a fairly standard-issue anime fan before going to fashion design school and realizing that, holy shit, she could make her OWN anime costumes! She was overtaken by the demands of life before she could really get into fabricating props and prosthetics, but one has to imagine that after all the fun she has in chapters 4 and 5 it’s likely only a matter of time. I was especially gratified that we got to do an entire extended homage to Revolutionary Girl Utena, one of my all-time favorite anime. The whole thing is available to watch for free on YouTube and I highly recommend making the time for it. If you want toxic lesbian indulgence, look no further.

In terms of her sexuality, Jacqueline’s biggest kinks are exhibitionism and roleplay, which I feel are supported and informed by her non-sexual passions. Jackie jumps at the excuse to put together a “slutty personal assistant” costume to support the fiction of why she spends so much time around Roman, more or less coming up with the idea independently. Putting on costumes is repeatedly shown to give Jackie a sexual charge; we see it in her texting exchange with Roman while trying on lingerie, we see it when her and Juniper are performing for Rose, we see it when her and Olive are trying on their old cosplay together and wind up risking their entire friendship. The woman loves fucking in pretty clothes while other people are watching!

(An aside before moving on: if you are a visual novel developer, ESPECIALLY an adult visual novel developer, I implore you to think more about your characters and their relationship to their personal fashions. It is SUCH an underutilized vector for character expression. Nothing breaks my heart like seeing attractively-designed characters who never change their clothes. You don’t need to have a character like Jacqueline who has a specific interest in fashion, either! EVERYONE makes decisions about what they wear depending on income, education, location, and scenario, and everything a character wears says something about them that you then DON’T have to say outright in text! Also, it’s FUN to look for clothing references and to dress your little guys up like dolls! Making games is hard so have some FUN with it, for God’s sake.)

Luca & Aster

Luca (age seven) and Aster (age two-and-a-half) are more interesting as narrative constructs than they wind up being as well-realized characters, I think. There are a number of reasons for this, chief among them being that the direct involvement that child characters have in any pornographic story has to be so very carefully managed in order to keep them siloed-off from the sexual content. When so much of your characterization happens during sex scenes, or in the build-up to/aftermath of sex scenes, that really limits the amount of time you have to spend in the script with the kids.

(Another aside, just to dig a little deeper into managing the whole “child characters in a pornographic story” of it all. This was something I took enormously seriously. There are two main ways having children in your pornographic story can blow back on you: the first is that someone might think that you’re deliberately sexualizing them (this, of course, assumes that you AREN’T intending to deliberately sexualize child characters. If you ARE intending to do that, well, all I’ll say is that nothing in this paragraph will be particularly helpful to you). The second is that even if it isn’t assumed that YOU’RE deliberately sexualizing the child characters, something about their design or narrative circumstances invites sexualization in fan works. It’s obviously impossible to completely ensure that nobody will ever decide to take your characters and sexualize them, but anybody who’s ever watched, oh, an episode of any anime from the past half-century knows that some works make it easier than others. However, if you’re making a story about a parent of small children, you can’t NOT have the small children present, and as such you take precautions. Luca and Aster are both well below the age of puberty and do not have anything that could be in any way mistaken for secondary sexual characteristics. Neither are depicted as being intelligent beyond their age and neither is shown being in any way curious about anything related to sex. There are no scenes in which they are depicted nude, such as when Jacqueline might be dressing or bathing them (which is a thing parents do for their small children, but remember our goal is to avoid even the least whiff of any Yucky Stuff). In Opportunity, I even went so far as to structure the story such that no scene with the kids in it was ever directly adjacent to any scene with any kind of sexual activity – there was ALWAYS a buffer scene. This probably seems like a gigantic headache, and you’d be right about that – far easier and safer to just avoid all the hassle by not having any children present in the story to begin with. However, as I am fond of remarking, children are among the top three consequences of sexual activity, and if you’re telling a story about sexually-mature adults there’s a chance that children might come up in some kind of organic, non-yucky context. If you happen to be telling a story like that, maybe this perspective will be useful to you.)

Another factor is that, like Roman, I don’t ever want children and don’t find them inherently interesting or charming, which in turn made it somewhat difficult to get excited about writing them. However, Jacqueline IS a parent and she DOES love her kids – they are, after all, a huge part of her reason for pursuing sex work in the first place. In order to Jacqueline to authentically read not only as a mother, but as a GOOD mother, I had to suck it up and put in the effort and make sure every chapter had at least a couple good interactions between Jacqueline and her kids, and I tried to always keep them somewhere near the forefront of her mind.

Actually, the kids wound exerting considerable influence over the structure of Opportunity‘s story simply by being small children who needed constant supervision. Luca might be mature for a seven-year-old, but he’s still a seven-year-old, which means that whenever Jacqueline is off doing something without her kids in tow there must necessarily be an explanation for who is looking after them. These kinds of logistics wound up shaping a lot of the story. In chapter 1, we see the kids being taken care of by Jacqueline’s best friends, Olive and Juniper, which also provides a good opening to introduce those characters. In chapter 2, I give myself a bit of narrative leeway by introducing a dedicated babysitter character in Shruthi, which also happens to serve as a good illustration of Jacqueline’s increased wealth immediately improving her life and providing her with more independence. However, a regular babysitter typically can’t look after children for multi-day periods, so in chapter 5 (which sees Jackie and Olive taking a trip to Vancouver for a comic book festival) I was finally given a chance to introduce Clayton, Olive’s husband, to explain who was looking after the kids for that time. Logistics like these are major fucking pain in the neck, but if executed well they can work wonders for the resonance of a narrative.

Luca is based heavily on myself as a small child. Like Luca, I was pretty quiet and well-behaved (though Luca is probably MORE well-behaved than I was – I was the younger of my parent’s two children, and could sometimes make myself a real nuisance for my older sister). Like Luca, I was fond of making friends with more athletic and outgoing kids via my extensive knowledge of video games. And finally, like Luca, I had a fondness for making creative works that would one day lead to me doing deeply stupid things like starting a second career making independent video games.

Throughout Opportunity, one gets a sense that Luca had to become perhaps a bit more mature and responsible than a seven-year-old might otherwise be after his father abandoned the family. One of the pieces of writing in the game that I’m more proud of is Luca’s breakdown in chapter 3 as he reveals how he’s been feeling since his father left, something that still makes me tear up to this day, even when I went to go get a screenshot of it just now. I think that sometimes children, particularly quiet, observant ones, learn how to be perceived as “good” a little bit TOO well, and this manifests in a whole slew of feelings getting repressed in order to not make trouble for their parents. This is also probably the angriest we ever see Jacqueline in the whole game, which feels appropriate – there’s no feeling quite so infuriating as finding out someone you love has been suffering lingering damage from another person’s thoughtlessness.

There’s not as much to say about Aster, who is basically an amalgam of every one of my adult friends’ under-5-years-old children. She hasn’t had much time to develop anything that would be independently recognized as a personality yet, and communicates mostly via yelling and making messes. I’m certain Jacqueline, suffering the delusion shared by all parents of toddlers, would disagree with me vociferously on that point and would happily list a great number of personality traits that just HAPPEN to be currently expressed via yelling and making messes. However, you and I know better.

Here’s an assortment of fun facts about the kids:

• The game that Luca and Aster are playing with their stuffed animals in chapter 2 was based on a game my sister and I would play with OUR stuffed animals. Well, MY stuffed animals. I had about two dozen. Our game had a similar level of narrative complexity – we even went so far as to give the animals a system of quasi-democratic governance, complete with a handwritten constitution, which all of the animals signed. I still have that document, kept safe in a plastic sleeve in a binder filled with similar keepsakes.
• As mentioned in the image caption above, the children’s sprites are the only ones that actually have feet. However, even after the art update that made all of the sprites substantially larger, the children still didn’t reach quite high enough over the text box, which is why whenever a child is onscreen in Opportunity, that child is hovering several inches off the ground.
• The reason that the kids’ names aren’t that similar is that I had it in my head that “Luca” was more Rufus’s pick for a name than Jacqueline’s – probably the name of a grandfather or something. Therefore, when it came time to name their daughter, Jacqueline’s pick got preference. Jackie is very much of that generation of Millennial women who felt compelled to give their children nonstandard names, but probably also liked the idea of a floral name along the lines of Daisy or Dahlia. Asters are “common” flowers, but that just means that they’re hardy, prolific, and can thrive even under difficult circumstances where a more delicate flower might wither. Astute readers might also note that I favored a plant-based naming scheme for most of the women in Jacqueline’s life – Olive, Juniper, Rose, Aster.

Rufus (Or The Absence Thereof)

Rufus is arguably the lynchpin of Opportunity‘s story, in that if Rufus didn’t do what he did, Opportunity doesn’t happen. So in that sense, who can say if it was good or bad? I’m being facetious, of course. Rufus chose to abandon his wife, son, and infant daughter in the night without a word of warning. He’s objectively a piece of shit. If Opportunity has a villain outside of, like, society, he’s it.

Rufus is very thinly-characterized on purpose. The more we learn about him, the greater the risk of making him sympathetic, which is another thing I wanted to avoid at all costs. We don’t know what Rufus was doing for a living before he left, we don’t know how he and Jacqueline met, we don’t know what they loved about each other, we don’t know about any of his ambitions or fears or dreams or hobbies. We don’t need to! For the purposes of the story, Rufus is the cowardly dickhead who ran out on his family and put them in a terrible, desperate position for two years, and that’s all that we need him to be.

I considered having Rufus show back up at some point in the story as an easy way of generating conflict, but quickly discarded that idea. For one thing, this was exactly what happened in the second season of The Client List, and it was a bad fucking idea in that too. If Rufus were to reappear, the entire story would suddenly be ABOUT Rufus – is Rufus going to find out about Jacqueline’s new job as a sex worker? How will he react if he does? What’s going to happen if Rufus and Roman meet? What will Rufus’s relationship with Luca and Aster be like? Will Rufus and Jacqueline get back together? It would have been absolutely miserable and would have destroyed the story’s delicately-cultivated vibe. And again, if Rufus gets to be on-screen, then we would necessarily need to learn more about him, thus making him more human and sympathetic. I didn’t want to risk any portion of the audience taking Rufus’s side over Jacqueline’s.

We never even so much as made any concept art of what Rufus looked like, but in my head I always facecast him as Rufus Humphrey from Gossip Girl, if Rufus Humphrey had turned out to be way more fuckshit.

That does it for this portion of the Opportunity retrospective! Next time, we’ll continue on our way through the cast, moving on to Roman, Olive, and Olive’s family! Leave a comment if you have specific question about Opportunity or our approach to adult game development, and I’ll try to work it in! Thank you for reading! Please consider supporting my work by purchasing the game on Steam, Itch, or GOG! See you next time! 

NEXT ESSAY IN THIS SERIES: Opportunity Retrospective Part 4: Roman, Olive, and Olive’s Family

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