One would think that “showing when sex happens” would be the easiest part of creating any kind of pornographic material. At the end of the day that’s the POINT of the whole thing, right? To make a piece of art where sex takes centre stage? Yes, but that’s also what makes it difficult – it’s the part that’s most important to get right. When you’re making porn, and particularly when you’re making a porn GAME, there are a great number of things that you have to consider before you start slapping meat together. One thing to note at the top: although this segment does talk a fair amount about the decisions I made regarding the porn in Opportunity, it’s mixed in with much more general thoughts about porn and porn game development. Fair warning!

Logistics

Logistics were the great bane of my existence when it came to creating Opportunity‘s sexual content. What I mean by “logistics” here is all of the time and work that it takes in order to get two (or more) characters into a situation where it feels correct for them to start having sex (or, at least, where it doesn’t feel completely INCORRECT). The degree to which logistics represent a challenge in porn is directly related to how cohesive of a narrative you’re attempting to convey – sex scenes are exactly like fight scenes in this way. In both sex scenes and fight scenes, if all you want to do is show a single scene’s worth of action, you can just throw two characters on-screen and have them get down to business. However, if the scene is part of a longer work, suddenly you’re toiling under the tyranny of Logistics. The characters need a reason to be in the location where the sex/fighting is taking place – if it’s spontaneous, what brought each character there? If it’s planned, when was it decided? What are the features and limitations of the location – how is furniture going to play into it? Are there observers to account for? How legal is what’s going on in the scene? How has the relationship between the characters changed as a result of the scene? All of this has to be figured out before any sex (or fighting) happens, because the CONTEXT of a sex scene is every inch as crucial to that scene being hot as is any depiction of penetration.

Chapter 2 of Opportunity was particularly challenging on this front. In that chapter, Jacqueline has a number of mostly-unsexy tasks: she needs to inform her friends about the arrangement she’s just made, she needs to give notice at her current job, she needs to find a new regular babysitter, she needs to go shopping to freshen up her wardrobe, and she needs to have her first official date with Roman. Somewhere, within all that, sex has to happen. Not just once, but multiple times. And, since Jacqueline is the story’s point-of-view character, all of the sex that happens in the story has to either be happening TO her or a reason has to be contrived for her to be witnessing it. Figuring out the order of operations for all of the plot points and sex scenes often felt like solving a Professor-Layton-esque logic puzzle involving foxes and sheep and rivers and cabbages.

Logistics aren’t merely a bane in the events surrounding a sex scene, mind you. They’re also a gigantic pain in the neck DURING sex scenes. You don’t know what despair is until you’re having a breakdown trying to figure out what particular arrangement of primary and secondary sexual characteristics you can fit into the frame without breaking anyone’s spine. So many times I’ve pictured a scene crystal-clear in my mind’s eye, only to have it utterly ruined by someone’s arm, like, existing. You’re under an enormous amount of pressure to make every single sex scene feel special and “worth it” for the player, which can translate into feeling like you’ve got to maximize the amount of visible pudenda at all times. You’ve really got to build up a tremendous reserve of confidence in your own abilities to make sex scenes sexy on those occasions when hardly any genitalia are visible due to your chosen angles and the characters’ respective positions, otherwise you’re going to find yourself painting with an extremely limited and frustrating palette.

Ultimately, figuring out logistics is just the cost of doing business when you’re trying to tell any story. One important skill to master is recognizing those joyous occasions when you can bypass logistics and skip right into the start of a scene, which is something logistics can paradoxically help with. For example, although having to devote time to writing scenes where Jacqueline looks for, interviews, and hires a babysitter in chapter 2 was a headache, it meant that from that point forward I was freed from the tyranny of having to explain who was looking after Jacqueline’s kids whenever she was away from her home without them. Also, sometimes you can just trust that your audience will be able to do without an exhaustive accounting of the movements of all of your characters – sometimes it’s acceptable, or better, even, to just start the fucking scene! Logistics are important, but one mustn’t allow oneself to be entirely RULED by them.

Volume & Variety

Depending on how generous you feel like being, Opportunity has somewhere between 19 and 23 sex scenes, of varying length. There are about 400 total pieces of sex scene art across all scenes, and even if you were to be a real stickler and only count those pieces of art with unique poses (discarding all those that are just minor variations to imply movement, cumshots, etc) the count still comes in at over 100. Perhaps that sounds like a lot to you! It certainly FELT like a lot when we were making it. However, it breaks my heart to report that by the standards of modern porn game releases, these are Baby Bitch Numbers. In terms of overall volume, I think Opportunity just BARELY qualifies as “acceptable” for the discerning Cum Game Connoisseur. It’s not uncommon for popular porn games nowadays to have sex scene counts that number in the dozens (if not the hundreds), often accompanied by other sexy extras like single-shot “bonus” images, lewd sprite animations, saucy alternate character outfits… Opportunity looks positively anemic by comparison.

Why is the bar set so high as far as volume goes? Well,

• Porn game development is frequently supported by crowdfunding on sites like Patreon or SubscribeStar, which creates a number of incentives that tend to balloon game content. Developers are incentivized to provide their audience with regular updates to keep them invested, and it’s relatively easy to create an extra scene’s worth of content every month or two. (A popular means of driving engagement with crowdfunding audiences is to hold regular votes on what kind of scenes/kinks/character pairings should appear in future updates, in fact). Devs are also incentivized to spend a long time working on popular projects, both because their relative financial security means they can take as long as they want, and because completing a popular project and moving on to a new one that their audience might not like as much is risky. Finally, devs who enjoy a lot of success with crowdfunding can simply afford to hire more help to create more content more quickly. All of this culminates in final releases with massive amounts of content, created over years – often released at cut-rate prices, since these devs will have very little in the way of costs to recoup. Very cool for those of us who make our way solely by selling product!
• Certain 3D-posing tools lend themselves to creating renders and animations in large volumes. Daz Productions’ Daz 3D has an easy-to-learn interface for posing and animating 3D characters, and also boasts an extensive asset store where those who aren’t confident in their modelling abilities can simply purchase the pre-rigged assets and environments they need, ready-made. Illusion’s library of poser programs like Honey Select and Koikatsu Party offer customizable characters, ready-made environments, and vast libraries of plug-and-play animations (the fact that Illusion has never actually sold licenses that allow their products to be used in the creation of paid software has not stopped these tools from being extremely widely-used for that very purpose nevertheless).
• In the present moment, it is unfortunately very cheap and easy to use large-data-model image generators such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion to churn out mountains of shiny, over-rendered, samey, dead-eyed slop for imbeciles. I would have to work extremely hard to overstate the contempt I feel for anyone who employs these tools, or anyone who enjoys the fruit of these rancid, plagiaristic orchards. I must content myself with the knowledge that this is a scam living on borrowed time, and once the morally-bankrupt tech conglomerates pushing this snake oil become literally-bankrupt, push-button titty images for morons will become a thing of the past.

The fact of the matter is that if you’re making a pornographic game, it behooves you to cram in as much sheer porn as you possibly can, because it is simply what is expected of you, and if you don’t people will complain. People will complain no matter how much porn you put in, but it’s possible they will complain LESS the more you add.

The other thing that’s important to keep in mind is variety. Most people might think that “variety” in a porn game might refer strictly to the size of a game’s cast of fuckable characters. However, it’s extremely possible to have a large cast and a boring porn game. Stop me if this order of operations strikes you as familiar:

1. Voyeurism
2. Hand Stuff/Frotting
3. Third Base Wildcard (Mouth/Tits/Cheeks/Pits/Feet)
4. Now We Fuckin’
5. Now We Fuckin’, Butthole Edition
6. Now We Fuckin’, Group Sex Remaster
7. Now We Fuckin’, Creator’s Specific Fetish Turbo DX

Dedicated porn game aficionados will recognize that as being the standard-issue progression of sex acts with characters in porn games that have large casts. Characters in these sorts of games will often fuck like they’re all trying to fill out the same Bingo card. Rather than having the sex be driven by specific character relationships and personalities, a checklist is followed to ensure that nobody’s favorite character is left out of any specific sex act.

In case it isn’t clear, I think it’s important to at least TRY to do better. Luckily, it’s actually quite easy to do better as long as you’ve got a good idea of your characters’ personalities, relationships, and backgrounds, because once you know those things you’ll know exactly how to get them into all manner of sexually-charged situations together. By way of illustration, let’s use Jacqueline and Roman’s sexual interactions as an object lesson. It’s a heterosexual pairing between a middle-aged man and a somewhat-younger middle-aged woman, which is not terribly exciting on its face, so it’s important for us to mix things up whenever possible. Here’s what we did:

• In chapter 1, Jacqueline has a wet dream about Roman groping her in a pool. Makes Roman feel desirable, mysterious, powerful, also establishes Jackie’s exhibitionist bona fides early on.
• Later in that same chapter, Jackie flashes Roman in his living room, then gets fingered by him, then blows him on his couch. Note that although we ARE moving through a similar intimacy checklist as above, we’re doing so in a condensed format in a new location.
• In chapter 2, Jacqueline sends Roman some spicy pics while she’s lingerie shopping, and Roman sends her back a post-workout dick pic in return. We’ve moved back a bit in terms of physical intimacy, but there’s a new emotional intimacy on display, not to mention another location change that again plays on Jackie’s exhibitionism.
• Chapter 2 ends with Roman fucking Jacqueline in his bedroom. Not too much to say about this one except that it’s yet another new location, with a new array of positions keeping things fresh.
• We return to Roman’s bedroom a couple of times in chapter 3, once for Jacqueline and Kate’s first time together, and then later for their threesome with Roman. The addition of Kate keeps things nice and fresh – she’s a new person for both Jackie and Roman to bounce energy off of. Kate and Roman have a pre-existing relationship that lends itself to a certain professional casualness, while Jackie gets someone who isn’t afraid to both tease and encourage her in ways Roman might find difficult.
• Chapter 4 opens with Jacqueline getting fucked outdoors by Roman in her “personal assistant” costume. This was a complicated scene to pull off, but very rewarding. We get to see Jackie being her most infuriating exhibitionist self (while also indulging her love of cosplay), and we get to see Roman pushed quite a ways out of his comfort zone, all in a very dynamic location quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.
• Chapter 5 features Roman and Jacqueline having passionate make-up sex atop a boardroom table, with a special guest appearance by Kate partway through. Another extremely dynamic and rewarding scene. Not only is it an interesting location with fun topography and a scenario that again indulges Jackie’s exhibitionist streak and love of dressing up, but there’s an added element of emotional catharsis thrown in as the awkwardness between Jackie and Roman is resolved. Kate adds a lot to the composition too, both as something of a Greek Chorus and hype man.
• Jacqueline’s last on-screen sexual encounter with Roman comes at the beginning of the big game-ending orgy scene, as she joins Kate in blowing him before getting called away to get railed and cummed-on by a succession of anonymous sex club patrons, leaving Kate to finish Roman off. It’s a trifle bittersweet that Roman isn’t Jacqueline’s last sexual partner in the game after being her first, but it also marks Jacqueline’s growth that she feels confident enough to leave Roman behind and pursue her own exhibitionist pleasure. Plus, I really wanted to get at least ONE titfucking scene in the game, and you have to admit that Kate is better-equipped to deliver that particular service.

So, despite having a somewhat-vanilla pairing as the story’s load-bearing (pun only somewhat intended) relationship, a lot of work was done to make sure that every scene they shared felt new and fresh, informed by their personalities and the state of their relationship. It turns out that it’s actually wicked easy to make sure your sex scenes aren’t stale when you like your characters and are interested in seeing what they’ll do next!

Realism Vs. Style

There is a popular saying that goes “Porn is not a tutorial”. This is straightforward on its surface: pornography is not a substitute for proper sex education, and should not ever be treated as such. However, I think this carries an unfortunate pejorative undertone, whether intended or not – the implication being that since pornography is so unrealistic as to not be considered educational, it is therefore maliciously dishonest, worthy of suspicion and censure. Even people who would likely consider themselves to be some flavor of “sex-positive” often express disdain for pornography’s frequent unrealistic excesses – its overemphasis on the orgasm as the desired endpoint of intercourse, its uncomfortable positions, its contrived scenarios that often play fast and loose with ideas of consent. Pornographic artwork tends to get it even worse – art doesn’t need to adhere to the boundaries of reality, after all, so porn art mainstays such as cocks cartoonishly oversized for the holes they’re meant to enter, penetration that distends entire torsos, and cumshots that shoot all the way through someone’s digestive tract and out the other side can spark fresh revulsion. Now, everyone has their own personal laundry list of sexual likes and dislikes, and of course nobody is obliged to be turned on by ANYTHING, let alone EVERYTHING. However, denigrating pornography based on its lack of realism misses the point of what is actually being said in “porn is not a tutorial”: porn is NOT a tutorial, it’s fiction. It’s performance. Porn employs evocative imagery in order to get our terrific inventive brains to IMAGINE sensations.

For example, did you know that a person who loses consciousness for even a fraction of a second following a blow to the head is considered to have suffered a Grade 3 concussion? Grade 3 concussions are the most severe grade of concussion and are life-threatening (MOST things that make people unexpectedly lose consciousness are potentially life-threatening, by the by), and can require weeks, months, or even years of rehabilitation afterwards. Now think about every movie and TV show you’ve ever seen where someone gets bopped on the noggin or punched in the face, only to crumple bonelessly to the floor for a half-hour nap, the only consequences of which are a headache and a look of reproach. Curiously, I’ve rarely if ever seen someone decry this kind of unrealistic representation in things like Ip Man or The Bourne Supremacy. And of course, this kind of shameful misrepresentation isn’t limited to violence. Cooking-competition anime Food Wars frequently plays Calvinball with things like ingredient prep and food cook time. In sports anime like Haikyuu! and Kuroko’s Basketball, high school athletes frequently execute maneuvers beyond all but the most elite Olympians. Every single Fast & Furious film commits a textbook’s worth of violations of the basic laws of physics.

What all of these films and shows have in common with pornography is that they are attempting to portray situations and sensations we recognize from reality in ways that are elevated, evocative, interesting. Seeing a character throw a punch that hits someone so hard that they pirouette a full 720 degrees and crash through a full sheet of drywall (but DON’T die) is a powerfully evocative fantasy – most people have thrown a punch in their lives, some people have gotten into fights, and all of us at least know what it feels like to WANT to do violence to someone. Anyone who’s ever cooked anything knows that prepping ingredients is one of the most tedious steps of the process – how seductive, the fantasy of being able to reduce a pile of raw carrots to a bowl of perfectly-julienned matchsticks with a single flickering knifestroke! Anyone who has ever played a sport or a physical game or even exercised at all knows about the rewards of pushing one’s limits and the joy of increasing one’s own physical competency, and what greater fantasy than seeing someone operating at the very highest levels of that competency? And so, with the experiences of sexual arousal and release being near-universal, is it any surprise that pornography presents heightened visions of sexuality, visions that often bend or break physical limitations and explore more transgressive social constructs than real life typically allows for?

I apologize for the lengthy aside, but I think it’s necessary for understanding the crucial tension that exists within pornography between the opposed concepts of “realism” and “style”. Opportunity is frequently praised for its grounded, realistic depictions of adult sexual relationships, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the ways we leveraged the convenient unreality of porn to smooth away potential rough edges. For example, nobody in Opportunity uses condoms. In reality, condoms are vital for preventing unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually-transmitted infections. However, many people find they have an unpleasant texture, can dull pleasurable sensations, and the act of finding, unwrapping, and applying a condom can threaten to deflate the passion and spontaneity of a sexy situation. So, since we accept that porn isn’t meant to be a model of perfect pro-social behaviour, we can do away with condoms to heighten the fantasy of consequence-free sexual indulgence.

There are plenty of other examples. Nobody in Opportunity has stretch marks, acne, moles, surgical scars, or any other minor skin blemishes – there’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but within pornographic artwork they can be visually distracting, not to mention a real headache for Pacha to keep track of and reproduce (the same is true of piercings and tattoos, which I find quite attractive but are the bane of artists everywhere). Nobody in Opportunity has ever suffered an embarrassing cramp during sex, or gotten so tired that they’ve had to stop before either partner achieved orgasm. Consent and personal kinks might be  hugely important things to negotiate with sexual partners in real life, but it’s also a lot of tedious talking – much better for the fantasy if everyone having sex just happen to have complementary kinks that never cross any boundaries, as they do in Opportunity.

However, every fantasy requires a certain base level of realism to function. There is a threshold of stylization at which representational imagery becomes impossible to relate to, and the range between that and the one-to-one recreation of reality is the canvas in which you can paint. For all of the liberties Opportunity takes, it’s true that a big part of my approach to making the sex interesting and memorable lay in peppering little “realistic” details throughout. Jacqueline grouses about how giving a bunch of blowjobs is making her jaw sore. A lot of attention is paid to the more sensual areas of the body – hands, fingers, mouths, lips. During Jacqueline and Juniper’s porn shoot, one of the best pieces of feedback Arden gave me was to add descriptions of the specific ways in which a strap-on harness pulls and chafes. In Roman and Jacqueline’s outdoor public sex escapade, details like the smells and sounds of the forest are deployed to bring the reader into the scene. There are also plenty of subtle visual ways that realism is injected into fantasy, very often in the form of details that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to articulate as being important but that they nonetheless have an innate ability to spot as being wrong. People notice if fabric doesn’t cling or hang or bunch the way it would in reality. They notice if joints aren’t bending the right way. They notice if characters’ bodily proportions are inconsistent from scene to scene. They notice if flesh isn’t deforming the way it usually would, they notice if a character’s position wouldn’t give them sufficient leverage, they notice if a character looks off-balance. You can exaggerate, you can embellish, you can add all the fantastical elements your little heart desires, but all of that absolutely must be underpinned by a logical consistency that will likely be shocking to the uninitiated.

The Personal Touch

Everyone who has ever done any kind of creative work knows that everything you make has a little bit of yourself in it, and porn games are no exception. In the case of porn games, I’d argue that there’s a lot more of their creators in them than most other things. Games require by far the greatest time investment to create of any media format, and it simply isn’t possible to sustain interest over the months (and often years) it takes to make a game without the subject matter being something that gets your personal motor running. This can be more than a little bit mortifying, and I don’t think it comes as any surprise to anybody that so many pornographic game developers practice their craft pseudonymously.

I don’t think anyone who’s played Opportunity will need telling what the Somethings in it are that cater to my particular tastes since those are, like, what’s in the game, but I suppose I might as well list them for posterity. I think exhibitionist heroines are pretty hot. Hypnosis/mind control roleplay is great. Mommy/Daddy roleplay is also terrific, as is generalized brattiness/brat taming. Short, chubby women are one of this Earth’s most precious resources. Big cumshots are a lot of fun. I think groping is criminally under-utilized in porn games. There’s practically no end to the ways you can make blowjobs look awesome. This isn’t by any means a complete list of my kinks, by the way – those are just the things that got significant representation in Opportunity. I’m hoping I can fit a lot more titfucking into Monstrous Liberation, for instance (it was tough finding places for it in Opportunity, given that the point-of-view main character was a woman of decidedly modest bust size).

There isn’t much advice I can give for anyone setting out to make their own porn game on this front, other than to really truly be authentic to yourself with what you find sexually-exciting. I promise that you will do a much better job creating porn about things you are genuinely a huge pervert for than you will if you attempt to hew more towards things you think are popular. Look at it this way: there are a thousand and one games about chesty babes getting all holes filled, but if you’re into some really offputting freak shit then there’s almost certainly an audience for said freak shit out there, and they are DESPERATE for someone to make a game that caters to them. Also, if you have a LOT of kinks, try not to spread yourself too thin attempting to represent all of them. Keep it to one or two big ones per game – again, you’ll do a better job, and I think you’ll be surprised to find just how many ways there are to represent your chosen flavor of perversion. This is your big chance to make exactly the kind of porn you want to see in the world, after all – you want to do the best possible job you can!

That does it for this embarrassingly-exhaustive exploration of the considerations and complications of making porn, both in Opportunity and beyond! This wound up being a lot longer and more didactic than I was anticipating, but I suppose this is just one of those things I have a lot to say about. We’re getting close to the end of the retrospective – next time it’s going to be a bit of a grab-bag of shorter subjects like fashion, food, and anime references! Also, a quick programming note: the next entry in the retrospective might be a little bit longer in coming out, as next week we’ve got the early-access launch of Monstrous Liberation happening – now would be a great time to wishlist the game on Steam, or perhaps download the demo from Itch! And please consider picking it up when it releases next Monday, March 17th! 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 Opportunity on Steam, Itch, or GOG! See you next time!

NEXT ESSAY IN THIS SERIES: Opportunity Retrospective Part 9: Fashion, Food, and Fun

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