You know how it is. Sometimes you want to write about something but the subject just doesn’t have the legs to be made into a full-length essay. Luckily, there are enough of those not-quite-essay-length topics left over for Opportunity that I think I can cobble them together into a proper post! Also, I apologize for the delay in getting this one out, but it turns out that launching a video game, and then launching a fundraiser for the next issue of your anthology, and then getting emergency gall bladder removal surgery all in the same one-month span can really throw a spanner in the works of your blogging schedule! Who knew!

Fashion

I’ve already talked at length about fashion in this retrospective – and guess what, suckers: I’m gonna talk about it some more! As I said at the bottom of the section talking about Jacqueline herself, one of the great joys of making characters in a video game is getting to dress them up and then put them into situations. Once again, if you are making a game in which we get to see the character, I implore you: put them in more than one outfit! It rules! Why even HAVE a character if you aren’t going to have fun dressing them up? Have you no joy in your heart? No sparkle in your eye? No fuck in your dick and balls?

One of my very favorite examples of characters having fun with fashion is in the cover and inside-cover illustrations Tite Kubo would often do for his characters from Bleach. I might have my issues with the storytelling in Bleach, such as how Kubo essentially abandons his manga’s compelling original premise and cast of characters to indulge in unbelievably tedious arcs of yelling about magic swords, but there’s no denying that the man knows how to put together a LOOK.

Take this one, for example. Look at that LAYERING. Look at the objects of interest around every character’s neck line! How every character’s outfit speaks to their personality, but how they’re nevertheless unified through clever applications of color throughout the layers! The accent pieces – Ichigo’s gloves and belt, Chad’s oversized wallet chain, Orihime’s boots! The different textiles! The different patterns! And Kubo just did this shit for FUN! The man missed his calling as a fashion designer.

Because Opportunity is a porn game, a specific aspect of fashion that I got to consider was a clothing item’s behaviour and utility during sex. Here is something that is vitally important to understand if you are trying to make porn: you have GOT to try to leave some clothes on, as much as possible. This is true for ALL modes of porn, whether it’s illustration, or live-action video, or written, or even AUDIO – clothing is SUCH an important, useful addition to a sex scene and it drives me INSANE when people making porn simply sprint towards full nudity. I can put my money where my mouth is here: out of Opportunity‘s twenty sex scenes, there are only THREE that don’t feature a scrap of clothing. 

Tearing all the clothes off at the start of a sex scene is leaving so much money on the table, sexually-speaking. For visual mediums, it’s impossible to overstate how much an image’s eroticism is enhanced when the subject’s sexual characteristics are obscured, partially or completely, by a well-chosen piece of clothing. Or, even better, if those sexual characteristics are being subtly DEFORMED by a piece of clothing that’s been pulled askew – look at the above picture of Kate, for example! See how her swimsuit is cupping her breasts, bringing them up and together? Can’t you just imagine how that affects them in motion? I bet you can! Clothing is also, crucially, something that can be gripped and grabbed, either for the purposes of pulling it aside or removing it completely, or simply as a handhold while thrusting. Clothing is TACTILE too, don’t forget: characters can feel sweat-soaked cotton clinging to their skin, they can feel an erection straining against tight denim, tight undergarments can pull and chafe in interesting, exciting ways. And don’t forget about sound! Fabric rustles, leather creaks, buttons pop, straps stretch and snap, seams strain, and zippers, well, they zip. I wish there was a better word for the sound that zippers make as they open or close, but this is what we’ve got.

Fashion is also a vital avenue through which you can Get Silly With It (an important part of the game development process that is discussed in further detail below). Clothing is a great place to put jokes, both implicit and explicit. I love the little croissants on Luca’s pyjamas. I love the “BIG SWEAT” emblazoned on Roman’s tank top. I love that Alejandro walks around his place of business wearing a cringey “HOT STUFF COMING THROUGH” apron. I love the reveal of Sasha’s actual hair (and eyebrow) color when she removes her wig – I’ve got to play around with wigs more in future games. I should write this down.

Food

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I loved eating out at restaurants. I mean, I LOVED it. Growing up, my parents NEVER took us to restaurants – my father hated going out as a general rule, and my mother was notoriously thrifty. Even ordering food in, like pizza or Chinese, was an extremely rare occurrence. So, like all young adults who spend their childhoods denied certain pleasures, one of the first things I did after moving to Vancouver was familiarize myself with its kaleidoscopic food scene (my college girlfriend, who would go on to become my lifelong best friend, was instrumental in this). I had never eaten sushi before coming to Vancouver. I was completely unfamiliar with Chinese cuisine outside of the kind you got in food courts. I don’t think I had any idea whatsoever what kind of food Korean people ate. I hadn’t even ever had chicken and waffles even once in my life. It was grim.

Vancouver (and, y’know, adulthood) changed all that. I remember the first time I took my college girlfriend on a date to The Sandbar, an upscale fine-dining restaurant on Granville Island that overlooks the river. It was my first time ever having planked salmon. I recall late nights at the overpriced film school where I got my game design diploma, when a Brazilian friend would bring in bags of these dense little cheese buns that we ever so slightly rubbery and sat in your stomach like hockey pucks. I can still picture the dim sum service at The Imperial, marvelling at the carts piled with dumplings and siu mai and mango pudding and rice noodles and banana-shrimp pastries (don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it, those shits were DELICIOUS). I remember brunch at L’Abbatoir, which included mimosas and a basket of some of the best pastries I’ve ever tasted. I remember cocktails, brilliant cocktails, at The Diamond, and the Shameful Tiki Bar, and Chambar, and Royal Dinette, and La Mezcaleria. I remember when I decided that Fire Pizza on Commercial was my very favorite of the city’s legion of excellent pizza joints. I remember lazy mornings (well, early afternoons) spent reading in a booth  over a plate of blueberry pancakes and sausage at Kyle’s, my favorite greasy-spoon diner. I remember getting a big bottle of Asahi and a big basket of prawn tempura all to myself to mark the first sunny weekend of spring. I remember Stackhouse, an improbably-affordable burger joint off Davie where you could get a venison burger with Stilton cheese and a tall glass of Coke & bourbon to wash it down. I remember giant, icing-drenched cinnamon rolls that you had to eat with a plastic knife and fork. I remember being pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with five hundred other people all crowded around the astonishing array of food carts that populated the Richmond Night Market. I remember my specific likes and dislikes from each distinct location of Guu. I remember Japadogs on the Seawall.

COVID changed much of that. I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since March of 2020. I order food in a fair amount, but you don’t need me to tell you that that’s nowhere near the same as getting it brought to you fresh straight from the kitchen, to say nothing of the ever-increasing expense of delivery. If you are a deeply stupid person, you might be saying something like “what are you talking about, you silly man? COVID is over! Go forth and eat out to your heart’s content!” COVID is not over. This is not an opinion, it is the truth stated in the flattest possible terms. What IS increasingly over are any systemic measures aimed at mitigating or even tracking the prevalence of a disease that damages literally every single one of your body’s systems, that shreds your immune system, and that carries an ever-ascending risk of rendering its victims functionally-disabled for weeks, months, or years. As of writing this essay, I am thirty-six years old, with depression, anxiety, a rambunctious L5-S1 spinal disc, and a gall bladder that’s just come out – I am not in the market for any further long-term afflictions. I make games and write a lot – mental agility is the one thing I absolutely cannot afford to give up, and there is no restaurant meal so delicious that I will risk years of brain fog for it. You are genuinely an imbecile if you behave otherwise – understand that if you are going unmasked to shows, eateries, school, your workplace, or public transit, I think you are lower than dirt and are also ontologically evil. You, and the hundreds of millions like you, in rejecting the most basic interruptions to your precious comforts, in throwing tantrums whenever you’re asked to mask in public, in shoving your fingers in your ears and pretending nothing is wrong until it’s too late for anything to ever be fixed – you have robbed me of something I loved, likely forever. This is hardly the worst of your dumb, thoughtless, apathetic crimes, but in remembering the joy that I used to experience eating out, I’m feeling this loss particularly keenly. Fuck you.

Anyway.

Thankfully, Opportunity‘s world contains no mention of COVID, which allowed me to indulge in a bit of deeply-cathartic fantasizing about the many meals I was now being denied. Luckily, this fit neatly in with the story’s themes of indulgence and sensuality. It’s been observed that Millennials are especially fond of restaurant food – so many of us are completely priced out of luxuries like property ownership, fine art, or extended vacations, but almost everyone can afford a well-cooked meal every now and then. Descriptions of eating can also be every inch as pornographic as descriptions of fucking – sometimes more so! After all, while not everybody has gone on an all-night fuck-bender that leaves them feeling completely wrung-out and boneless, everybody HAS eaten a really good sandwich that they still think about years later. Describing food and meals in evocative, alluring terms really isn’t that different from describing sex acts, when you get right down to it. Both play with all five senses, both have strong ties to emotion, both need to take setting and mood into account, and both reflect experiences that are never quite the same twice.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes explanation of some of the notable food and restaurant mentions in Opportunity‘s script:

• Petty Indulgences, the bakery-cafe owned by Alejandro where Jacqueline works at the beginning of the game, was mentally based on Hot Chocolates, a Comox Valley chocolatier, bakery, and cafe. They do really exceptional truffles.
• Bella Buccatini, the Italian restaurant where Roman first proposes a sugar baby relationship to Jackie in chapter 1, was based on Zefferelli’s Spaghetti Joint, a Vancouver institution that just announced it’s closing down at the end of May. I am heartbroken, though one has to admit that 36 successful years in Vancouver’s notoriously treacherous restaurant scene is no fucking joke. I will always think fondly of their crab linguine and the fresh-baked bread they’d bring as an appetizer.
• The meal that Jacqueline prepares for Olive and Juniper in chapter 2 was meant to be representative of the kind of meals that were often prepared for me by my sex-worker friend (the one on whom Kate is partially based). She had been a cook earlier in life, and had a certain effortless way in which she’d casually whip together more food than either of us could possibly eat in one sitting.
• Miura’s, the Japanese restaurant in which Jackie and Roman have their first official dinner date, was loosely based on Vancouver’s world-class sushi restaurant Tojo’s. (The head chef, Hidekazu Tojo, has a credible claim to being the man who invented the California Roll). I was writing chapter 2 around the time that Berserk mangaka Kentaro Miura tragically passed away, and decided to add this little reference to him into my own story.
• I’ve never actually had a proper jar of hot honey of the kind that Clayton gives to Jackie for her biscuits in chapter 5. I’ve had it on pizza, but that’s it. I should get some and make some biscuits of my own, I bet it’d be really good.
• “The Grublisher’s Clearinghouse” (the downtown Vancouver eatery where Jackie and Olive have dinner with Juniper and Rose), is one of my favorite pun names I’ve ever come up with. The name (and most of the menu) were inspired by Published On Main, an upscale joint that makes a big deal about sourcing all of their ingredients locally. It’s the only place on the list that I haven’t been to personally, but the menu looks great.

Fun (AKA Goofball Shit)

As I mention in a previous retrospective essay, game development is mostly a long, lonely, boring slog. You’re either staring at your ceiling while you wait for inspiration to strike, or you’re writing and re-writing and re-re-writing the same line a dozen times just to get it to sound like it sounded in your head (before throwing the whole thing out in disgust), or you’re robotically copy-pasting lines from a text document into your game engine, or you’re firing up your game build for the 100th time that day to make sure the single change you made to your code didn’t break everything. Or you’re distracted by one of a million other little mind-numbing tasks that make up the intricate mosaic of independent game development. When you spot a chance to get a little silly with it, you need to snatch it up.

The nice thing about making a slice-of-life comedy with full penetration is that for the most part, you can throw in whatever stupid jokes occur to you. The “YOGA TIME/NOGA TIME” joke from chapter 1 is a perennial favorite of mine, for example. I’m also very happy with this segment from chapter 5 wherein Sasha provides a brief window into her chaotic social life:

Another chapter 5 segment I really like is the entire “Sexual Android Q.” section from Jackie and Olive’s first day at the convention. This one actually warrants a little bit of backstory. See, one of my absolute favorite things to do while playing porn games is to give the player character a really stupid name. It all started back when I first played Dr. PinkCake’s Being A DIK and decided to name the main character:

…on the basis that it would be really really funny to imagine a character screaming “Fuck me, Murder Man!” mid-coitus.

Ever since then, a porn game with a name-entry field at the beginning has been nothing short of a gift to me, especially if the developers forget to impose a character limit:

I even maintained a side page on Cohost (RIP) that collected my funnier forays into other people’s porn games, and the idiotic names I would give the characters therein. Which brings us to LlamaMann’s Sexbot. Sexbot is a pornographic visual novel about a nerdy young man with a swingin’ schlong navigating an ever-more-complicated time loop filled with extremely sexual babes who crave his plentiful cum. It’s got an extremely strong grasp on its aesthetic, which is very informed by 80s comedic sex romps like Revenge of the Nerds and Weird Science. And it’s genuinely funny to boot! Sexbot allows the player to name ALL of the major characters, so I came up with a naming convention:

And so on. In my mind, the shared “Q.” initial had a kind of mythopoetic quality to it. In Eiichiro Oda’s long-running magical-pirate masterwork One Piece, characters with the initial “D.” are marked for great, momentous destinies (for better or for worse). I liked to imagine that my menagerie of Q-initialed dweebazoids marked for a similar kind of fate. But I digress – my point is that I had a great amount of fondness for the cast of Sexbot, specifically as I had named them, and felt it only appropriate that I have them make an appearance in my own game. This one’s for you, Grendlethorpe:

For those interested, here’s a quick list of a number of my other memorable porn game character names:

• Edgar Forgetzio
• Zippity Doo Dah
• Bitch Asshole With No Bitches On His Dick
• Blood Josh
• Admiral Blueberry
• Breaking Bad Season 7
• Big Wet Trevor
• Charleston B. Blastoise
• Clown Jeans
• Dick Ass
• Grumbledick The Horse
• Bark Bark Bark
• Dribblebitch
• Spermit The Frog
• Licorice Spunkaroony
• Lurt
• Raccoon Hands
• Manglebert Cockoff
• Monster Mash
• Oppenheimer Of Semen
• Pebbled Texture
• Peter Poetry
• Plumbobbin
• Slippery Pip
• Saucewater
• “Shit Britches” McGillicutty
• Honk Fluthersby
• Shred Spread’em
• Smegmar Cuckleworm
• Spiderslime
• The Goopster
• Titty Shits
• Truck Nuts
• Obidiah Guzzlepiss
• Yart Plumples
• Yuckobean

The last avenue of fun-having in Opportunity I’d like to highlight was that which I had with coming up with non-trademarked replacement names for trademarked properties.  This is just a good time no matter what context you’re doing it in, and I highly recommend it as an enrichment activity to anyone who needs a little bit of whimsy in their day. Here is as exhaustive a list as I’m prepared to gather of all the silly names for things I came up with (and their corresponding real-world equivalents):

• Rebellion Maiden Ursula = Revolutionary Girl Utena (the characters names mentioned in conversation are all skewed versions of names from the anime too. Ursula = Utena, Flore = Anthy, Natsumi = Nanami)
• ZZZaddict = xxxHolic
• Mystical Cavalier Beamplanet = Magical Knight Rayearth
• Wyrm Mission = Dragon Quest
• Last Combat = Final Fight
• Lane Pummeler = Street Fighter (also, “Toxin” refers to “Poison”)
• Harvey Butter: Boymage = Harry Potter
• Mythknights of Magic Justice = Not actually a reference. Just a joke name I’ve used internally for years whenever I need an especially-overwrought anime name placeholder
• Beautiful Warrior Moonrabbit = Sailor Moon (or, if you prefer, Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon)
• Complete Wood Botanist = Fullmetal Alchemist
• Lone Item = One Piece
• Cowpoke Freejazz = Cowboy Bebop
• Causality = Destiny (“The Straggler” references The Drifter)
• Mars Affect = Mass Effect (“Commodore Goatherd” references Commander Shepard)
• Oiran Technical School Hostess Club = Ouran High School Host Club (Helena and Kristina are references to Hikaru and Kaoru)
• Luminous Apocrypha = Radiant Historia (“Locke” references Stocke)

That brings us to the end of this grab-bag of subjects posing as a complete essay! We’re nearly at the end of the retrospective – next time I’ll be closing it out by writing about my relationship to creative work and what I think the future might hold. 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 – this is your last chance! Also, the volume of spam comments got truly unmanageable following the Monstrous Liberation launch, so I’ve finally bit the bullet and made it so you have to register a WordPress account to comment. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than having to delete two dozen spam comments every single day. If you need to get in touch with me, feel free to use either the site e-mail, or hit me up on Bluesky! 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 10: That’s All, Folks!

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