July 2024 Update: Anthology Finished & Launched, Lots Of Little Tasks
Happy July, everyone! The heat has finally found us here in Vancouver, which means I finally had occasion to install my AC unit (it’s happily humming away, keeping my basement apartment crisp and cool as I write this). Let’s get into the update!
Monstrous Liberation Work
Pacha and I have both had our share of setbacks this month. On her end, there was some necessary dental surgery that came with a decent amount of recovery time. On my end, there were ALSO some medical issues (both for myself and friends), a ton of appointments, and to top it all off, one of my monitors up and died on me! Everyone say a prayer for the 18-year-old Dell XPS 197 that I took with me to university back in 2006 - angels sing thee to thy rest. However, we’re doing our best to rally - medical issues are as under-control as we can get them for now, and I’ve got a swanky new monitor that I’ve wrangled into my first-ever vertical setup. We solider on!
Starting with my stuff: I started the month tidying up the prologue demo that I mentioned in last month’s newsletter. I’m pretty happy with where it’s at - the music’s all been balanced, there’s a good amount of simple character & camera animations in there, as well as some fun stuff with animating text & the like. All it’s missing is a bit of cutscene art!
My other big piece of work was writing the script for the portion of the game focusing on Drizzle, our slime! That script’s currently at about 7,000 words - I had wanted to get it all the way finished before writing this newsletter, but caring for a recently-hospitalized friend took precedence. Regardless, that script should get finished this week, after which I’ll cycle back to working on the script for Diogenes (which, you might recall, currently stands at 2,000).
On Pacha’s end, she completed all of the art for Drizzle’s second sex scene with Sasha, which was no mean feat! The gimmick for this scene is that it begins with Sasha taking advantage of Drizzle’s mutable slime body and choosing between two different body options (a fat squishy body vs big beefy arms) and two different dick options (one huge dick vs two smaller dicks), and then the rest of the scene changing based on those choices.
But that’s not all! Pacha also turned in all the sprites for Diogenes, MonLib’s resident minotaur! I personally love Diogenes’s design, and I’m super looking forward to getting back to writing his scenes. This also means that we’re now 100% art-complete on character sprites (until the revisions/additions stage, when I’m sure I’ll have a dozen extra things to cram in here and there).
UI artist Julian’s been active this month too! The game begins with Sasha (whose job is streaming as a vtuber) streaming one of four games for her audience, and I thought it would be neat to have box art for the four games, and Julian whipped those up! You can see the art for Tittygirl Deckbuilder up at the top there - the other three games are titled Battlepass Battlefield, Number Increaser Online, and Wholesome Cozy Job Fair. Julian also worked up art for a couple of new buttons on the city map screen - buttons to take the player to the Gallery and Character screens.
Adult Analysis Anthology #2 Launches To Public
Another reason I wasn’t able to work on Monstrous Liberation as much as I might have liked this month was because of all the work I was putting in on the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology! This involved a lot of administrative tasks (signing off on the remaining essay drafts, making sure all contributors got paid), writing my own essays (more on that in a second), editing/formatting the whole damn anthology (shoutouts to Affinity Publisher, fucking excellent software), making sure all the IGG backers got their rewards, and then launching/promoing the official public release! (Okay, after writing all that out, I feel a LITTLE less bad that I was “only” able to do 7k words on the ML script this month.)
My own essay feature in the anthology, “What If It Had Been Good: The Subverse Review” clocked in at a mammoth 7,200 words and required a massive amount of work, including playing Subverse for over 30 hours and reading back through over four years of Subverse developer diaries and press pieces. I would like it very much if many people were to purchase the anthology and tell me how much they liked my essay in it specifically because of how long and hard I worked on the damn thing.
If you’d like to try before you buy, the anthology’s essays will be getting posted for free to the BP Games Cohost account. We’ve already posted the first one, Davis G. See’s “Coming Out On Top: A Ten-Year Retrospective” - go check it out! New essays every Friday until we run out!
“The Vow” Kickstarter Currently Live!
This one’s not TECHNICALLY BP-Games-related, but it’s a project by two of BP Games’s longest-time collaborators so I thought I should give it a shoutout! Written by BP Games proofreader/editor Arden Ripley and illustrated by BP Games UI artist Julian Cormac, The Vow is an adult queer horror graphic novel about two monster hunters who fucking despise each other who are thrown together in a hunt for a beast that’s been kidnapping brides on their wedding night. I’ve read the first 40 pages (you can too!) and they bang severely. The Kickstarter blasted past its first goal within about 24 hours, and is now climbing the latter of its stretch goals - how about supporting it so that I can get some extra prints with my pledge? Or because you want to support excellent comics from two of the most talented people I know, either works.
Wrapping Up
That does it for July’s update! I’m hoping the next month will see a ton of work being done on Monstrous Liberation now that the second issue of AAA has been completed, so look forward to that! Thank you so much for following BP Games and enjoying the things we make!