May 2025 Update: What Do You MEAN I Have To Keep Making It
Happy May, everyone! We were having some perfect spring weather in the first half of the month, but it’s given way to those not-quite-warm-not-quite-cold grey doldrums that Vancouver specializes in. Let’s get into the update!
Monstrous Liberation Work
The cruel irony of launching a game in early-access is that your reward if all goes well is that you get to keep working on the game until it’s finished. This is great, because there is genuinely nothing I’d rather be doing than working on my games, but terrible, because making games is very difficult and time-consuming and sometimes it would be nice to fucking chill out and play The Hundred Line for like three weeks straight. Alas, deadlines beckon.
TONS of progress to report this month, happily. Starting with my own work, the script for the coming update is SUBSTANTIALLY longer now, having jumped from 6,000 to over 22,000 words long. Most of that is the now-completed portion of the script that’s focused on Regla (the orc), but I’ve also made a substantial start on the section for Shrill (the harpy). Apart from that, it’s been a lot of file organization, coordinating with our various collaborators, and catching up on accounting and bookkeeping.
For Pacha, this month was spent slamming out art for the second of the full-length sex scenes in Regla’s arc! As you can tell from the sample above, this one involved five total characters, so it was a lot of work, but she crushed it! Can’t wait for everyone to get their eyes on this one - it was a lot of fun to write for.
Pacha wasn’t the only one doing splash art this month, though…
Yes, as the captions under the art at the top of this newsletter and the art directly above this paragraph reveal, we’ve been lucky enough to have monsterfucking and tittyfucking aficionado Dieselbrain come on to help with Monstrous Liberation’s splash art! I’m very excited by this - Diesel’s a good friend, and I’ve been a huge fan of her art for YEARS. She’ll be handling art for a story cutscene that heavily features The Usurper, as well as the art for the mini-scenes unlocked at the Hideout for this update!
Splash art wasn’t the only thing that was worked on this month, either. Much to my surprise, Gil blasted through the entirety of the new backgrounds, and the results are terrific. Let me give you a taste by first showing you one of the extant backgrounds. This one is the interior of the Wanton Wyvern, the ailing brothel where the player meets Senza (the succubus):
Like all the backgrounds presently in the game, this was created by taking a royalty-free photograph from Unsplash, clumsily editing out any obvious anachronisms or undesirable details (in this case, modern light fixtures and a brightly-lit area in the back centre), and running it through a gaussian blur filter. It does okay at a glance, but it doesn’t bear up to any kind of scrutiny. Now, let’s look at Gil’s version:
God, that’s fucking good. Not only has all the modern architecture and lighting been replaced with period-appropriate details, but the color and style are actually consistent with the rest of the game’s art! I’m SO relieved that we were finally able to afford actual backgrounds. I think people are going to be pretty happy about these when they see the update.
There’s one more piece of art to share:
As mentioned in last month’s update, ANOTHER artist has been tasked with creating some marketing-friendly assets that we can use when announcing sales and updates and things like this! First on their docket is coming up with chibi versions of Sasha (and other characters). I love her, she’s adorable! If Sasha could see her chibified self, I think she’d be pretty excited.
Adult Analysis Anthology Progress
If you’ve been keeping up with me on Bluesky, you’ll know that there was a series of problems with the Indiegogo fundraiser for AAA’s third issue that unfortunately led to me deciding to refund all of the backers we’d gotten so far and relaunch the fundraiser on Itch instead. This was extremely frustrating, but the good news is that the new fundraiser was completely funded in just one week’s time! It’s got ten days left to go, so if you want to chip in a few bucks, feel free to do so here!
With our funding secured, all of the writers are now hard at work on their essays - at least, they’d BETTER be, because their first drafts are due by the end of the week. A couple of them are already finished, and they’re excellent. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me - not only was the perk to get me to review an adult game of the backer’s choosing claimed (I’m keeping what game it was a surprise for now), but also claimed was the perk that forces me to revisit Studio FOW’s Subverse, which you might remember me spending some 7,000 words slagging off in AAA’s second issue. To be clear: I do not WANT to do this, and I put that perk in as a joke, but five hundred dollars have changed hands and my course is set.
From The Blog
This month on the blog, I published “Opportunity Retrospective Part 9: Fashion, Food, and Fun”, which is an amalgamation of all the little things I wanted to touch on about Opportunity’s development but that didn’t have quite enough juice in them for full-length posts of their own. This was the penultimate essay in the Opportunity retrospective series - ideally I’ll be able to wrap it up with one more essay over the next month, but given how much work I have on my plate with Monstrous Liberation and AAA I make no promises.
The Consumption Stumption
Playing: It’s rare these days for me to pick up full-priced games right after they launch, but I wanted a treat and there are some things you make exceptions for. Too Kyo’s The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is one such exception. Kodaka and Uchikoshi have my allegiance for all time, man. It’s UNBELIEVABLE how amazing, ambitious, and ripshit this game is. It’s the kind of game that’s very difficult to talk about without fear of spoiling something, so all I’ll say is that it fulfills the promise of recursive, ever-evolving visual novel narratives to a degree I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’m loving every second I get to spend with it.
Playing 2: On my Steam Deck, I’ve enjoyed winding down with Memorable Games’s On Your Tail. Is it just me, or are Italian games having something of a moment lately? On Your Tail is set in a fantastically well-realized Italian seaside village peopled with wonderfully-designed furries. There are few things I enjoy better than getting to inhabit and explore a beautiful, well-considered space in a video game, and this one’s going to stick with me.
Watching: My best friend and I started watching the recent Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man from Marvel Animation on a whim, and were kind of blown-away by how much we liked it. This is a show that really understands what’s cool and likeable about Spider-Man stories while also being unafraid to get goofy and go off-script at times. The character designs are some of the coolest they’ve ever been - Harry and Norman Osborn are particular standouts, but there really isn’t a weak one in the bunch. Some terrific action set pieces, too. Highly recommend!
Wrapping Up
That does it for May’s update! I’m looking forward to bringing you news of a lot more progress next month! See you then! As always, thank you so much for following BP Games and enjoying the things we create!