Happy June, all! It just started to get really hot here in Vancouver, right around the time that the crowds descended for the World Cup. Coincidence? You decide. Regardless, let’s get into the update!

Monstrous Liberation Work

With the launch of the Scholar District update finally behind us, Pacha and I have been full-steam-ahead on the Outskirts District update, which will introduce our new Dryad character, Prim. On my end of things, all the planning and design tasks have been finished, and I’ve made a start on writing the script. This update will add somewhere between 15-20k words to the total script, and it’s strange that that feels like a very small amount to me at this point.

On Pacha’s end, she’s finalized Prim’s overall look and completed all of her sprites, and has started work on the CGs for the first of her two full-length sex scenes. I’m quite happy where Prim ended up visually; there are a lot of elements happening at once but I think Pacha did a good job balancing everything so it doesn’t feel cluttered. I’m looking forward to playing around with the juxtaposition of Prim’s facial expressions and her flowers.

Potential New Project

A short aside for the business end of things: I was somewhat expecting this, but the sales bump we got for the Scholar District update wasn’t a large as I would hoping it would be. Between that, Itch sales becoming something of a non-entity following the deindexing (Monstrous Liberation made over $4k USD in its launch month on Itch, and less than $200 USD following this most recent update), and somewhat lackluster support for the Patreon & Subscribestar subscription sites, the BP Games finances are more precarious than I’d like them to be. As I’d like to be able to continue paying myself and Pacha a monthly salary, I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to bang out a new small-scale game project that could be completed in parallel with our Monstrous Liberation work, and I’ve put together a high-level concept for just such a project. There’s a lot that needs to be figured out still, but it would probably involve a Kickstarter with a fairly modest goal to defray art costs. The format would be a choose-your-own-adventure-style visual novel focusing on Olive (Jackie’s best-friend-turned-lover from Opportunity) having an extremely eventful Girl’s Night Out. More as this develops!

Tourney Of Tyranny

Don’t worry, Tourney of Tyranny’s second part is still being worked on! Blueparikeet is about halfway through the illustrations for this portion, which is very exciting because he’s been turning in some awesome work. This is the first illustration of the book, a huge eleven-character spread showcasing the five freaks whose fucks shall determine the course of galactic politics.

From The Blog

Following the launch and very strong response to the new issue of AAA, we’ve been posting the web versions of the new essays to the BP Games blog once a week! Here’s this past month’s crop:

• Either Way, What Bliss: The Problem Of Balancing A Game For Players Who Want To Fail by Kangoo

• What If The Player WANTS To Lose? by Stanley Baxton

• You Choose, You Lose: The Illusion Of Agency In Dark Hero Party by MxMorganic

• Do Porn Games Need Choices? by Braden Liatris

From The Subscription Sites

As I intimated above, it’d be very helpful to have some more regular support on the Patreon and Subscribestar! Kicking in even just a few bucks a month is a great help and a great boost to my personal morale! There’s at least one new post every week showcasing some new tidbit of one of our many projects - lately I’ve been showing off the previously-unreleased goblin CGs that were scrapped before Monstrous Liberation’s launch! It would do wonders for my peace of mind to see some growth there, so if you can spare even 3 bucks/month I’d sure appreciate it!

Mr. Bitch?

Improbably, Mr. Bitch continues to be everyone’s problem. New comics are posted every four days, an interval I chose completely arbitrarily. Because you’re reading this newsletter, you’re getting an exclusive early look at an upcoming Bitchventure. As of right now there are nearly three dozen Mr. Bitches. Let’s see how many more I’ve got in me.

The Consumption Stumption

Playing 1: I don’t really have a good explanation for this, but I found myself overcome with an urge to reinstall and get caught up on Infold’s Infinity Nikki, a game I played a shitload of back when it launched and fell off from in the doldrums between its major releases. Infinity Nikki is such a weird game. It has such an insane amount of visual charm in its world and fashions, it’s a shockingly-competent collector-platformer, and there’s an absolutely bonkers amount of content you can play entirely for free. The plotlines are fully batfuck - I recently played through an entire storyline wherein a community of Clothes Ghosts were attempting to uncover a centuries-old ring of Clothes Ghost Traffickers who kidnap and kill Clothes Ghosts by sewing the Clothes Ghost cloth into garments in order to make them especially magically potent. Some real Buffalo Bill shit in this fashion dressup platformer.

Playing 2: I also recently picked up Bandai Namco’s Once Upon A Katamari. I’m enjoying it fine, but I’m also really understanding the criticisms I saw of it back when it came out. There’s a real aversion to risk-taking here, what feels like a lot of cruft, and just not a ton of the trademark Katamari dark, mean humor in evidence. Also a bizarre number of the levels are built around the “roll up a lot of a specific thing/class of thing”. It’s still a Katamari Damacy game which means it’s still FUN, but it’s definitely not hitting like the original or We Love Katamari.

Reading: I finally picked up a copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard Of Earthsea. This is one of those “what is there to say that hasn’t been said a hundred million billion times” situations, folks. It’s A Wizard Of Earthsea, one of the most-influential fantasy novels of the last century, your favorite fantasy author’s favorite fantasy novel. Le Guin is crushing unlimited pussy with this novel and she knows it.

Watching: I saw Phil Lord & Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary last week, and it slammed hard. It’s so nice to see some Real Fucking Science Fiction with a Real Fucking Creature in it, y’know? Ryan Gosling turns in a great performance - I was worried through the first half that he might be a little too quippy with it, but Gosling has this way of really making you Believe that his walls have completely crumbled at the drop of a hat that I really enjoy. Wonderful score, too.

Wrapping Up

That brings us to the end of another update! Lots of progress, lots being worked on as always. If you played and enjoyed the Scholar District update, I’d love to hear from you (if you’re playing on Steam, it’s never too late to leave a nice review!) Thank you so much for following BP Games and enjoying the things we create!