A New Game, A Newsletter, And A Wrap On AAA #1! Also: Life Stuff
Hi, everybody! Lots to get into! Here's the contents of this update at a glance:
Our latest game, Monstrous Liberation, has a Steam page now! Go wishlist it! Please!
The final essay in the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology was posted last week! The response to the anthology was extremely positive! If you want to support it, you can buy it individually or as a part of the BP Games Spring Bundle!
I quit my day job! This has Implications, good and bad! More below!
A New Game!
The Steam page for the latest project from BP Games officially went live yesterday! It's a fantasy/isekai-themed monsterfucking visual novel titled Monstrous Liberation! From the Steam page:
The Golden Shears- a magical implement capable of nullifying even the strongest of magics. This legendary item was thought lost to the ages, until they resurfaced in an unexpected way, in an unexpected realm.
Sasha is a spunky internet streamer with bills to pay. One day she stumbles across a shiny pair of scissors- The Golden Shears. They transport her to Civitas Imperito, the capital of a magical fantasy world. This great walled city is ruled with an iron fist by the dictator known as The Usurper, who uses hypnosis magic to enforce a regime built around order and repression.
Armed with her set of curse-breaking cutters and contemporary sensibilities- Sasha embarks on a quest to inject a little bit of color and chaos back into the dull lives of the inhabitants of this new world.
Pacha and I have been working on this one for about a year - we started concepting about a month after Opportunity, so it's a real treat to be able to finally show off a little bit of our progress. In addition to being written and coded by me (Bigg) with character & CG art by Pacha, Monstrous Liberation features UI art by feralroyal, as well as logo art by yotsuben.
Our current target is to launch ML on Steam Early Access and Itch in Q4 of 2024. The initial launch will have a script that's roughly 50-60k words in length and will introduce the first three fuckable monsters, with every subsequent update adding 3-5 new monsters. As opposed to being a linear kinetic novel like Opportunity was, Monstrous Liberation will be more of a "sandbox"-style VN, meaning that players can liberate (and fuck) the monsters in whatever order they like. We're planning to pack this one as full of content as possible!
(Oh, and in case you were wondering - yes, the Sasha in this game is the same Sasha as was introduced in chapter 5 of Opportunity! Inter-property continuity, baby!)
But That's Not All!
Pacha and I are ALSO in the early stages of building a short one-shot Opportunity spinoff VN starring Olive! The VN will focus on Olive and her partners going on a much-anticipated vacation together, will be 20-30k words in length, and will focus several different endings. More to come on this one!
A Newsletter!
Sick of missing BP Games updates like this one because I post them at 11PM PST on a Friday because I blew the entire afternoon sending My Dress-Up Darling panels to my friends over Discord? Never miss an update again by having them sent direct to your e-mail inbox via the new BP Games Monthly Newsblast!
I've been wanting to put together a newletter for a little while now, and since I wound up having so much news all at once it seemed like the perfect moment for it! The newsletter will go out at or around the 15th of every month, will summarize everything that BP Games has been working on over the past month, and will be crossposted to this account for good measure. I also reserve the right to send out newsletters more than once a month if there's a big important event and I don't want to wait. Subscribe here!
Wrapping Up Adult Analysis Anthology #1 (And Plans For The Future)
The phenomenal essay Fuck this Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input by MorganH was the final essay from the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology! I'm tremendously proud of the work done by myself, all of our essayists, and our wonderful logo artist pillowkisser.
The response to AAA#1 was extremely positive, well exceeding my expectations. I had HOPED that I was right about there being a significant unaddressed audience for good, thoughtful writing about adult games, but there's hoping and there's being proven right. All of the essay posts received a great deal of shares and engagement, and the anthology pdf wound up performing SIGNIFICANTLY better financially than I had dared to hope (more on that in a sec). All of the essays also got featured on the curated games writing aggregator Critical Distance, which I consider a tremendous honor that I hadn't even THOUGHT of hoping for.
Regarding the financials: my expectation was that most people would just wait for the essays to be posted here to the BP Games account for free, and a very small number of people would show support by actually purchasing the pdf. My expectation was for it to gross about $100 USD (or selling about 30 copies). The actual gross revenue at the time of writing is over triple that, at about $320 USD. This is obviously pretty encouraging!
Putting that into context - slicing off 30% for Itch's cut plus a further 11% for the BC business income tax (and ignoring other losses due to payment processor fees) leaves BP Game's actual take-home being just under $200 USD, or about enough to recoup half of what was paid out to the 8 essayists. So, between that and the money that was paid to pillowkisser for the logo art, we're still eating a loss on this one - though happily not as severe a loss as I had initially anticipated. AAA#1 was always meant to serve as a relatively low-cost proof-of-concept.
So! I'm considering AAA#1 a pretty resounding success. The positivity and breadth of the response we got is extremely encouraging, as was the financial performance of the pdf version. I'd very much like to do a second issue, because we've only just scratched the surface of adult games as a subject with the first. The main change from how things worked the first time around is that after I open and select pitches for said second issue, I intend to turn to small-scale crowdfunding to finance it. BP Games is, after all, a pretty small-time concern, and we simply don't have the deep coffers necessary to finance a project like this without sweating. Given the positive response that the first issue got, I have a pretty good feeling about our odds of meeting our financial goals. Look for pitches to open up sometime in the next month!
A Life Update From Yours Truly
I intend to go more in-depth on this on my personal account, but the short version is that a year ago I began suffering recurring bouts of severe low back pain at my day job as a massage therapist. No amount of adjustment to my activity levels, exercise, or work habits seemed to lead to the issue resolving, nor did any amount of work with a very good physiotherapist, and I wound up spending the last 6 months of 2023 practicing while wearing a back brace. My intention at the end of 2023 was to take three months (January-March) away from work, hoping that the break from physical labor would give my back the time it needed to recover.
Well, it's March now, and while my back has undeniably IMPROVED, progress has been slow and a lot of the improvement is by virtue of my not needing to spend several days out of every week performing demanding physical labor for several hours straight. As I am still a relatively young man & do not want to do myself a permanent disabling injury, I have made the difficult decision to leave my massage practice indefinitely.
I am very lucky in that I do have financial resources I can draw on, and am in no danger of starving or going homeless. It's certainly discouraging, but I could be much worse. I will likely be going back to school for retraining (likely in either September or January), though I have also been applying for full-time work in the games industry (if you know anyone who is hiring for writing, narrative design, game design, or production positions, feel free to let me know here or in the BP Games company e-mail.)
The upshot of this is that for the next several months I will have a lot more time to devote to working on BP Games projects! I'm looking forward to this part - and as anyone who has ever spent a long stretch of time unemployed knows, it can make all the difference in the world having work you enjoy to occupy yourself with. I'm very fortunate in that while BP Games doesn't currently make enough to pay my expenses, it DOES make enough to cover Pacha's, and the money we have in the bank plus the slow trickle that's still coming in should be enough to get us to our next release. If you'd like to support us I'll remind you that the spring sales are currently going on both Steam and Itch, and every little bit helps! Another no-cost thing you can do to help out is wishlisting Monstrous Liberation on Steam, which will help us appear on the "New & Popular" tab when we launch!
In Conclusion
Thank you so much for following BP Games and enjoying the things we make! And for reading this far! I mean it! Okay! Bye for now!