November 2024 Update: Soldiering On
Happy(?) November, everyone! Happy, of course, unless you happen to have many, many reasons to be anxious about what the future could hold for you and the people you love! Let’s get to the update.
Monstrous Liberation Work
Let’s start with some good news: as expected, aside from a small amount of optional side content that’s waiting on art, the launch version of Monstrous Liberation is fully-playable from end to end. All of the critical path story stuff has been implemented and all systems are working exactly as intended. All that remains to do on the game itself before launch is implementing that last bit of side content along with a bit of tweaking and polish. It’s been a huge amount of work to get it to this point, but I’m extremely proud of the work done by myself, Pacha, and Julian (Arden’s bit is coming up soon, now that they’ve finished their first playthrough of Veilguard.)
On to some sour stuff: despite having a completely-serviceable early-access title essentially ready to go, some unforeseen issues may wind up pooching our intended launch date. And not to the degree of nudging it back by a month or two, I mean that these issues could necessitate both a significant rework of Monstrous Liberation’s design and a significant increase in its launch content, to the order of pushing things back by at LEAST an extra six months. There’s a chance things will work out and we’ll be able to launch as planned so I can’t go into more detail than that, but suffice it to say that it’s a stressor I truly did not need this month.
Should the worst come to pass, expect next month’s update to contain ways to support us through crowdfunding - right now I’m looking at either Kickstarter or Subscribestar. There’s still money coming in from Opportunity - it’s had a much healthier tail than I could have dared to hope for, for all that it’s a fairly small-scale visual novel - but it’s drying up little by little, and we’re now at the point where BP Games could run out of money if Monstrous Liberation’s launch experiences a significant delay. I’m reasonably confident that both our studio’s reputation and the fact that we have an extremely good representative early-access build to offer would be able to carry us through a modest Kickstarter campaign to finish the game - I just don’t WANT to do that because crowdfunding is a massive fucking headache.
Of course, if things DO work out and we’re able to launch as planned, next month’s update will contain our much-anticipated early access launch date! Until we find out which future we’re going to be living in, you can keep wishlisting Monstrous Liberation on Steam - enjoy the new trailer!
From The Blog
The official BP Games website and blog have, at least, had a very good past month. Here’s the rundown:
Good Enough To Criticize - An original essay about when it’s appropriate to apply a big-boy critical lens to a piece of art, with an illustrative application of said lens to Cyberframe Studios’ Vaygren: Lustful Temptation. The Cyberframe team apparently liked this one a lot, they actually retweeted the link I posted to it TWICE and I’m pretty sure they also linked to it from their Patreon.
Grippers, or, If Overwatch Wants Goon Dollars They Need To Hire Some Professionals - An original, somewhat tongue-in-cheek essay about how Overwatch needs to be honest about its symbiotic relationship with porn and horniness in general and just start putting straight-up pornography in their game. Also a thinly-veiled excuse for me to post several pieces of Overwatch pornography to my website’s blog.
Opportunity and the Bona Fides of Queerness & Coziness (Expanded) - As the title implies, this is a significantly-beefed-up version of an essay I posted to Cohost in June of 2023. This one seems to be striking a chord with a lot of people right now!
A Broad Overview of Steam’s “Adult Only” Category (With New Editor Commentary) - Jupiter Angel Theory’s essay from the first issue of AAA, now with a bit of added commentary from yours truly. I stopped doing commentary after this one because I felt like my time would be better spent working on original writing rather than trying to punch-up stuff from the anthologies.
Corruption Of Champions And Honesty - Bud Bear’s essay from the first issue of AAA!
Queer Porn Games Just Don’t Do It For Me - Callisto Jupiter-Four’s essay from the first issue of AAA!
The Surprising Likeability of DoHna DoHna - Iyane Agossah’s essay from the first issue of AAA!
Patching In Holes And Hogs In Adult Games - Mr. Hands’s essay from the first issue of AAA!
Regarding The Implications Of The Outcome Of The American Election
Neither Pacha or I are citizens of the United States, but the results of last week’s presidential election nevertheless have the potential to profoundly restrict our ability to create and publish the kind of work we want to make. Which is to say, significant elements within the now-dominant American Republican Party have expressed interest in enacting a total ban on pornography as part of their sweeping and dogshit “Project 2025” plan. For anyone who would like to at least partially support themselves using income from pornographic material, this is obviously bad news!
It’s unclear how serious a threat this is at this point - Trump has a history of reneging on campaign promises, and also of in trying to implement them in extremely stupid, haphazard ways that wind up not working especially well. He is currently staffing his cabinet with a truly breathtaking array of profiteering venomous dipshits, and it’s possible they may be too busy looting, deregulating, and backstabbing each other to actually enact too much of their Christofascist agenda. If porn IS criminalized, it will likely be as part of a broader attempt at criminalizing the existence of queer and trans people throughout the nation. Life is almost certain to get worse and more dangerous for immigrants.
It’s also unclear what legal roadblocks such a ban could face. One comfort of relying on Steam for 80% of our income is that Gabe Newell is, at very least, an avowedly belligerent free speech absolutist with more money than God. Would he actually go to the mattresses to keep porn on his platform? Who knows! It’s also possible that, since Republicans are both massive hypocrites and huge cowards, the inevitable unpopularity of banning porn might give them pause, especially for those lawmakers who will be seeking to hold onto their seats in the midterms. There’s just a lot we don’t know!
All of this is to say that until we know more, all we can do is worry and wait. A complete ban would cut us off from 90% of our income and basically relegate BP Games back to the state of being a very unprofitable hobby, rather than a self-sustaining sideline. We might try to pivot into making SFW games, we might not. I might have to secure alternate hosting for the official blog, I might not. Pretty cool state of affairs! Do any independently-wealthy subscribers want to keep us going out-of-pocket in the event of a porn ban? I promise that we’re EXTREMELY affordable.
The Consumption Stumption
Reading: I’ve been picking my way through Fred van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey’s The Comic Book History of Comics for a little bit - it’s an all-timer, and an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of comics as both a business and art form. I also just picked up Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 from the library.
Watching: I’m still working my way through Steven Universe: The Complete Collection (I’m midway through season 3), but one standout from the past month was the absolutely stellar One Piece: Fan Letter, a piece of original supplementary content to one of my favorite series that manages to hit inside 22 minutes the highest highs of One Piece’s very best arcs. It should be legal for Megumi Ishitani to commit murder.
Playing: After buying it, playing for a little, and then not touching it for more than a year, I’ve finally started up a fresh file on Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m playing a dual-wielding Duegar Ranger (Ranger Knight subclass) named Hammerhark with a very fetching mustache.
Wrapping Up
That does it for November’s update! I very much hope to have a more positive, optimistic update for you next month. As always, thank you so much for following BP Games and enjoying the things we create!