Fair warning up top: this portion of the retrospective will likely contain very few surprises if you’ve got an experience or familiarity with game development. It turns out that making video games is still making video games even when there’s porn in them! Nevertheless, I’m going to do my best to show you how a game like Opportunity might come together from start to finish (I’ll note that I’m also using a very similar flow for the updates on Monstrous Liberation, although obviously those aren’t EXACTLY analogous due to their differing story structure). I promise to also try my best to make it entertaining, though I’ll say up top what anyone who’s ever made a game knows: making games, even porn games, is pretty hard and boring almost all of the time. However, to paraphrase Defunctland‘s Kevin Perjurer: the only thing I hate worse than making a game is NOT making a game.

Scaffolding

You can’t make a game without a plan, and coming up with the plan tends to take several stages. The first of those stages is what’s known as “the fun part”. This is where I get to sit in a comfortable chair or go for pleasant walks around my neighbourhood or lie in bed surrounded by pillows and just think of things that make me feel like the most clever, most interesting, most intelligent, and most handsome man that ever lived. I get to listen to exciting music while I’m in the shower and imagine cool fight scenes between giant robots and elder gods set to said music. I get to read books and watch movies and play video games and imagine taking all of the coolest parts of everything I’m consuming and putting it into the thing I’m making. I get to live entirely in a paradise of imagination where everything happens just as I want it and limitations imposed by petty things like “time” or “money” simply do not exist.

The only thing to keep in mind about the unrestrained creative hedonism of “the fun part” is that it is insanely seductive and you absolutely must tear yourself away from it before you’re lost forever. I’ll allow myself a couple of weeks of indulgence, maybe as much as a month, before sighing and starting to actually Write A Document. The alternative is becoming the kind of artistic creator who never actually finishes anything – picture, for example, the kind of artist with a dozen original characters who only live within context-free illustrations, outside of any kind of cohesive larger work and whose relationships and backstory are constantly being updated according to the artist’s whims. As Above/So Below only ever having a short demo after almost four years of development is a direct result of me spending far, far too long within the smothering embrace of “the fun part”. I’ve learned my lesson!

Speaking of Writing A Document, that’s a big part of what life is for me once I decide it’s time to actually get to work. I start with a high-level concept document of the thing we’re going to make, usually just a couple of pages, making sure it includes a description of how the thing is going to play, who the major characters are, and a couple of paragraphs summarizing the story as I understand it at the moment. I’ll also include a few pieces of inspirational artwork, and mention any pieces of media I think will prove particularly inspirational for the project. This is very useful because it gives me something concrete I can show to our publisher and any collaborators to give them a solid idea of what’s coming next, and also because it’s pretty easy and fun to make and tricks my brain into thinking we’re still in “the fun part” for a little bit longer.

With some ideas actually down on paper, it’s time to start fleshing everything out. This is where Pacha’s work starts, too (she gets to spend her side of “the fun part” drawing fanart of Shadow the Hedgehog and the sad lesbian robots from Signalis, for which she is enormously valid). While I’m expanding the concept document into a full-throated asset list, Pacha gets started working on concepts, focusing not only on characters but at the same time figuring out fashions, iconography, and the general visual “vibe” of the thing. There’s a lot of back-and-forthing at this point, because it’s very quick and easy to make changes to concept art. At this stage I might also hammer out a quick playable prototype that I can send to Pacha and any of our collaborators, just to make sure everyone’s on the same page about how the game’s going to play. My goal at this stage is to basically give Pacha (and any other part-time collaborators, like Julian) a complete roadmap to follow for the complete length of whatever portion of the thing we’re making (whether that’s a chapter of Opportunity or an update’s worth of content for Monstrous Liberation) so that when it comes time for me to move from writing documentation to writing the script, I can focus on that with as few distractions as possible.  This is very important, because a thing about me is that it takes several days for me to shift my brain from “concepting” to “documentation” to “script-writing”, a process that involves a lot of lying face-down in bed crushed under the certainty that I’ve completely forgotten how to write, every time.

I’ll take the couple of paragraphs I wrote about the story and turn them into several pages of all-caps plot beats, things like “JACQUELINE INVITES OLIVE AND JUNIPER OVER SO SHE CAN TELL THEM ABOUT HER NEW JOB”. Looking at the plot beats helps me figure out what’s going to be required sprite-wise (what kinds of outfits will be required, what kinds of emotions characters will need to be able to convey, etc) and also what sorts of sex scenes I’ll need to outline. The next step, then, is actually writing out detailed asset descriptions for every single sprite and piece of sex scene art. Filling out the entire asset list is where the real “work” of making a game starts for me, which is to say that it’s the point at which things can start to get especially difficult and boring. Can’t get around it, though! As a designer, the better you’re able to communicate your intent to your art team, the better the quality of the assets you get back, every time. You’ll also spend much less time on revisions, which in turn saves money. This doesn’t mean that every single little detail needs to be obsessed over – part of the joy of having worked alongside Pacha for the better part of a decade is that I’ve developed a good sense for what things I need to be very specific about, what things I can leave vague, and what things I can let her completely freestyle on.

The most time-consuming part of filling out the asset list by far is gathering and creating reference. Some of the things I need are quite easy – usually specific props or clothing items, which can be found with a simple image search for something like “earthenware jug” or “black lace lingerie”. Backgrounds are another story – you wouldn’t believe how long I have to comb through Unsplash to find photos of things like bedrooms that are lit JUST the right way and taken at JUST the right angle. The real killer are the sex scene reference pics, though. Once in a blue moon I’ll be able to just pull a reference straight from my overflowing folder of pornography, but more often I need to fire up Magic Poser and make something from scratch. Being able to make 3D reference pics for sex scenes is a huge asset – Pacha can see exactly what I’m thinking of, and even if the models can’t conform to the exact proportions or poses I’ve got in mind, it gets us MUCH closer than a simple written description ever could. It’s also invaluable for setting up precise angles and blocking, too. The only drawback is that I’m a very slow worker when it comes to creating anything visual, so making the reference for even a single scene can take me days. Sadly, it wouldn’t be game development without a large amount of tedious, time-consuming work you’d really rather not do.

Making The Thing

And on the subject of tedious, time-consuming work you’d rather not do: eventually all of the planning is complete, and the time comes to actually start creating writing and art that will, hopefully, someday be experienced by the wider world in video game format. In theory, this should be fairly straightforward – I sit at my computer and write, Pacha sits at her tablet and draws, and eventually the two of us meet in the middle. I wish!!!

Pacha’s main roadblock is, well, me. Although I might have spent weeks making a very detailed asset list complete with as much reference material as I can cram in, that doesn’t stop me from making mistakes, or from not realizing an asset is necessary until the 11th hour, or (this is the worst) asking for assets that never actually get used. Every time I make a mistake, it’s Pacha who has to spend extra time making changes or creating new art from scratch. And we haven’t even talked about feedback yet! I can be extraordinarily fussy when it suits me to be so, and if this limb isn’t looking quite proportionate or that piece of clothing not hanging quite right it can take several revisions before I’m satisfied. She soldiers on quite bravely in spite of me, and I am forever grateful for her patience.

The challenges on my side of thing stem mainly from the fact that when you are a writer – a writer who regularly writes large numbers of words and has written long scripts in the past and knew at the outset of the project that they would need to practice their chosen craft of writing – very often when you have writing to do, you suddenly realize how very powerfully you do NOT want to write, at all. The world suddenly becomes AMAZINGLY full of things that are more pressing and important than writing. Things like vacuuming, or scrubbing the toilet, or running out to the grocery store for a couple of things, or working out, or laundering your bedding, or calling your parents, or getting lunch with a friend, or playing a new video game (it’s important to stay on top of trends!), or playing an old video game (it’s important to stay connected to the media that shaped you!), or sleeping in, or re-reading a 20-volume manga series you’ve read through at least a dozen times before, or just going for a long walk in the rain. It’s incredible how much more pressing and attractive all of the above can feel than doing the writing that is your primary task on the project that you decided to pursue of your own free will.

My primary strategy is to leave myself as few places to hide as possible. I get all of my chores and shopping and exercising done as efficiently as possible and then I post up in my bed on a laptop that doesn’t have anything installed on it besides a word processor and a web browser. I keep my phone nearby in case anyone needs to get in touch with me, but I don’t let myself hang out on Discord while I’m writing. The web browser is strictly for looking through reference material and listening to music, no other browsing permitted. And then I write until I hit the day’s wordcount (or until I’ve made enough of a good-faith effort to be able to look myself in the eye in the bathroom mirror). And then I make myself do this over and over again until all of my all-caps plot beat summaries have been replaced by a fully-functional script.

Once I’ve cudgelled the script out of my brain and approved the very last of Pacha’s art assets, it’s time for me to assemble everything in code. Because we work in visual novel format, things actually come together quite quickly – writing might be hard, but at least the format requires very little in the way of sophisticated programming. It’s really more data entry than coding, if I’m being honest – a staggering amount of copy-pasting, every single individual line from the script being transferred into Ren’Py’s scripting language, most of them being accompanied by either a paired character body/face sprite set or a piece of splash art. The thousands of micro-decisions related to character sprites are what demand the most brainpower during this stage, and this is where having an exhaustive set of sprite reference pages (like Jacqueline’s above) really comes in handy. Is this line more of a “smiling” line, or more of a “laughing” line? Should she have her arms crossed, or would her one-hand-on-hip pose work better? Should I move the sprites closer together, since the conversation is getting more intimate? And so on, for thousands of times, until I run out of script.

Buff & Shine

All good things must come to an end – and this is true for long stretches of exhausting creative and technical work, too. Sadly, the game being TECHNICALLY “done” doesn’t mean it’s ACTUALLY done, not by a long shot. The game being technically done just mean it’s time to move on to yet another unavoidable stage of game development: polish!

For Pacha, this means art fixes and additions. As I do the implementation, I’ll discover whoopsie-daisies in the sprites and insufficiencies within the splash art that I either missed on initial delivery or that weren’t apparent until I saw them within their intended context. I keep a running list of every asset that needs fixing and every sex scene that I think could use plumping up with an extra panel or two while I’m elbows-deep in my coding work, and once I’ve resurfaced I hand her the list.

For me, “polish” comes courtesy of Arden, BP Games’s long-serving, long-suffering proofreader and editor. As all writers do their editors, I regard Arden with a kind of reverent terror. I gobble up every compliment they bestow upon me, and quake in terror whenever they direct me to rework anything they deem deficient. They also horsewhip my hide raw whenever I use a hyphen where an em dash ought to go, which is very often because I’m of the personal opinion that the em dash is a brutish, ugly piece of punctuation.

All joking aside, Arden’s contributions are truly invaluable. They have saved me from the embarrassment of countless spelling and grammatical errors, replaced a great many inferior words with superior words, and massaged some of the roughest portions of my scripts into work I can look back on with pride. If you are a writer doing any kind of professional work, you NEED an editor. It doesn’t matter how good you think you are, you NEED an editor. If you are very lucky, your editor might be half as good at their job as Arden.

With all of the art glitches worked out, the extra bits and bobs slotted in, the script corrected to mine and Arden’s satisfaction, and any other bugs fixed, the game can truly be called “as done as it’s going to get”. Unfortunately, this now means it’s time to contend with…

Launch

I don’t like the person I become on launch days. Launch days always start with a flurry of activity – the game goes live, you send out newsletters, make blog posts, spread your links as far and wide as you can on social media, send out download keys to interested parties… and then, all at once, there’s nothing else to do. Nothing to do, that is, except sit and wait and refresh your analytics over and over and over. Obsessive monitoring on launch day isn’t without its purpose. You want to be able to address any problems as quickly as possible, you want to be available to respond to questions, you want to do anything you can to ensure that the game you’ve spent hours and days and months and years working on is received as positively as possible. But mostly it’s just waiting and refreshing. Refreshing your socials, watching likes and shares trickle in. Refreshing your store page, hoping and praying that you garner enough sales and reviews to get just a little bit more of an algorithmic boost to your visibility. I recall being so wound-up the day of Opportunity‘s initial early-access launch that I didn’t have anything to eat until the sun had gone down. I’ve gotten better at launches since then, if only by a little.

Launch days represent a lot of things to a game developer. On the one hand, it’s quite literally The Promised Day, the day you weren’t sure would ever really come. There are moments during the long, difficult process of developing a video game, when it feels like you aren’t ever going to get there, that the thing you’re making is doomed to forever remain a misshapen pile of half-formed ideas and unfinished assets. It takes a TERRIBLY long time for a game to even start looking like anything anyone would ever recognize as a game, you see, and when you’re working on it on your own it can feel very lonely. Just you and your big idea, with an ocean of time and effort to sail across. It comes as such a relief to reach the distant shore of Launch Day. The money and compliments are also nice.

Launches are crucial for resetting your perspective on your own work, as well. If you’ve never made a game, you have no idea how BORED you get of every aspect of the game you’re making. How could it be otherwise? You read every line of dialogue dozens of times as you’re writing, and then dozens more during implementation and bug-fixing. There isn’t any joke you could write that would be funny on the hundredth viewing. And the sex scenes, don’t get me STARTED on the sex scenes. I always give Arden a little feedback form with some specific questions on it for them to fill out once they’ve done their editing pass, and a question I always ask is “are the sex scenes any good? I literally can’t tell any more”. It’s really important to get your work out into the world so that people can react to it, thereby reminding you that you really DID make something that is novel and interesting and valuable.

But there’s a sadness, too. An uncertainty. Game development might be a grinding slog, but there’s a familiarity to the slog. You can get comfortable in it, to an extent. You know what your goals are, you’ve got your nice orderly list of tasks that you’re ticking off one by one. Launching is the very last thing on that list. After launch, you suddenly have a lot of scary questions to answer: what should the next thing be? Do I even WANT there to be a next thing? Should I start right away? Should I take a break? If so, how long? If I take a break, will I still want to make games after? Will Pacha still want to make games with me? Is it too late to learn a new trade? My grandfather was a carpenter. He made wooden ladles as a hobby. There are cabins up in Jasper that he made in the 1960s, alone, with his own two hands, that are still standing today. What have I made that will still be standing 80 years from now?

I find answering some of these questions easier than others. For example, I almost always want a long break after launching a game. I often have to settle for a short one, things being as they are, but I do my best. Pacha seems to be content to put up with me, at least for the time being. I generally find that, yes, I DO want to keep making games, for as long as such a thing is feasible. As for the rest… we’ll see!

Promotion, Promotion, Promotion, Forever

Of course, launching isn’t the end of working with a game. In a sense, it represents the beginning of a new stage of the game’s lifespan. As an independent game developer – as ANY kind of independent creator, really – unless you’re very lucky and get a massive smash hit, you can never take it for granted that your work is going to sell itself. You need to boost it, constantly, all the time, to anyone who will listen, and then do it all over again tomorrow. It sucks. It is far and away my least favorite part of making games, and it is made no easier by the fact that it is absolutely necessary.

As my porn-mongering colleague Taylor Titmouse once put it in an essay on sadly-defunct boutique social media site Cohost, shills pay their bills. You’ve got to shill your work, because if you don’t, nobody else will. You’ve got to have regular sales. You’ve got to link to your work everywhere you can. You’ve got to talk about your work at every opportunity. You’ve got to do it all the time, because even though YOU might feel like you’re being a horrible pest, there are far, FAR more people in the world that HAVEN’T heard of the awesome thing you worked really hard to make than there are people who HAVE heard of it. You’ve got to make it as easy as possible for people to find your work, to understand what’s interesting and unique about it, to give you money for it.

I really, really hate promotion, in much the same way that I hate getting my teeth polished at the dentist or handling microfiber washcloths. I hate writing marketing copy, reducing all of the detail and nuance of my work to a few saleable bullet points. I hate making cheerful posts announcing sales, and then having to keep my feeds nice and clean so as to not drown out the all-important promo posts. I hate linking to all my projects everywhere I go, instrumentalizing my social connections, the real human people I know becoming just so many distribution vectors. I would like nothing better that to have a project go so effortlessly viral that I never have to announce another sale again because Wario64 will do it for me. I want to go on podcasts and give interviews and say funny, intelligent things that make the hosts laugh and mentally resolve to have me on again in the future. I’d love to give a big important talk about my big important massively successful game some day, at the kind of event where afterwards they lead all the big important guests to a private room where they’re served fancy cheeses and small, elegant sandwiches and middling white wine. I’d like to make a game so successful that I never have to do anything I don’t want to do ever again, and be really INSUFFERABLE about it. Until then, I guess I’ll keep making my stupid fucking little posts about my stupid fucking little 35%-off sales and five-for-the-price-of-one bundle deals.

That does it for our look at the Opportunity development process! To make up for this section’s topic being somewhat on the dry side, the NEXT section will be all about sex – specifically, about the approach I took when writing and planning Opportunity‘s pornographic content, what I was trying to achieve, and what I was trying to avoid. That’s right, baby: we’re getting to the GOOD stuff. 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 8: Getting Sexual With It

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