So, this is the thing I've been meaning to write for a while, since I finished and published Bad Sister, in fact. I'm equal parts extremely happy about it and a little embarrassed. Writing Bad Sister and publishing it to (relative) popularity is very gratifying and certainly an achievement not worth sneezing at. At the same time, it's a dirty, dirty sex game. It's not exactly something I can hold aloft as a real achievement in real life and put on the resume. Not unless I want a career in writing porn games, and that's unfortunately a niche market right now.
Bad Sister was an experiment. A personal experiment, it's not an experimental game. God no. I just wanted to see if I could write a sex game. I actually had no experience writing erotica, my genre being closer to fantasy and science fiction. I started playing and writing normal IF but then began AIF as a guilty pleasure. I played Moist out of curiosity. Then I made my way through the Goblinboy library and the BBBen library and before long, I had actually run out of AIF games worth playing. Anyone who knows me in real life knows that at that point I'd just start making my own shit.
So, I must have started like four games before I actually started working on Bad Sister. First was a game called 3 A.M at the Gas Station, where you play as a musician who invites a strange girl to have a foursome with you, your girlfriend and your (female) manager in the back of a van. This was supposed to be a small game but I quickly realized that programming an AIF extension was going to be hard as shit and foursomes are very labor intensive.
The next game was going to be entitled The Alt Girls, which was a sex-romp through a town where you slept with a lot of girls who were into various alternative cultures. There was an punk cashier girl, a hippie girl with a broken down ride and a fiery communist girl (modeled after Damsel from Vampire: Bloodlines) planned for, but I got really bored because there was no storyline to speak of.
There was Queen of Metal, which was based on my love of the thrashing, smashing, headbanging music. It was going to be a silly RPG where you played a metal head who fought with (and, of course, fucked) the four Muses of Heavy Metal against the... well, I won't say it because I'd still like to write the Queen of Metal. But the four muses would be based on four tendencies in metal that I liked. They are/were going to be: Druya, the tiny Russian girl who represents folk metal; Clare, a Christian with a Joan of Arc themed band who represents fantasy and power metal; Nalia, the Celtic sensation who would represent progressive and operatic metal; finally, a witch (whose name I forget) who would represent black and death metal. Of course, writing an RPG is actually a lot of work and I hadn't exactly anticipated that.
That leads up to Bad Sister. When I started, I promised myself this is going to be a game I'll actually finish. I sort of half-expected I wouldn't be able to do it. So I just started with a basic premise of a person going on a date with a girlfriend. From there, it expanded. I added a "Bad Sister". I thought that Taylor was unrealistically antagonistic, so I added the back story. I threw in some lesbian scenes because yes.
The point is I didn't exactly come into it with a plan. I didn't realize, for example, that I'd switch to CYOA. At that point, it wasn't because I was incapable of making a text adventure, but that I'd never finish it if it wasn't CYOA. But I really wanted to have AIF-style sex scenes so I wrote a very convoluted method to use sex commands.
It was a lot of fun and a lot of work. Even though people still call it a small project, it didn't feel that way. It felt huge. The total amount of text contained in Bad Sister (including the programming) was about half a novel. Unlike a novelist, a game not only needs to be proofread but also debugged and playtested. As a result, it takes a long, long time to produce one simple game.
I was extremely fortunate to receive the services of Goblinboy for making the game images. He is a very swell guy and even helped to test the game. I sort of doubt that many people would have played if it weren't for him. A. Bromire made really extensive notes and playtesting. It's because of him the game was mostly bug-free, because believe me there was some really honking bad bugs to begin with.
While I guess I could have refined the thing forever, but eventually you need to kick it out the door. Towards the end the game was totally draining me and working on it was taking all of my patience. I finally pushed it out into the world in February. I was elated to see it made something of a splash and it made me really want to continue writing. In addition, I feel a bit like now I have membership in the elite group of "game makers", a feeling which is probably not warranted but nevertheless.
Still, there are things I would have wanted to change. There are corners I cut. Ending #6 really was pretty convoluted and was basically an exercise in me trying to jam through an ending that really didn't make any sense. I was actually pretty happy I got to use Jenny (it was my suggestion) but I guess it probably did invite a comparison with Meteor (which was a far, far better game, to be honest).
Another thing is that, while erotica is everywhere, it is actually really difficult to write. This may be why most erotica is pretty bad. I feel like I've got to lot to learn. Luckily, in this regard, I stand on the shoulders of giants. Even new authors give me something to learn. Brad's Erotic Week helped me realize that good porn is actually very similar to good horror, lots of buildup and tension and hinting only to be released in crazy and unexpected ways. Palmer is just an enviably good writer. Leagues better than so-called "professionals".
Many months later, it's strange. What I find the most gratifying is not the nicer things people have said about it but some of the more critical things. It's nice to hear people say good stuff of course, but to hear people say something fair but critical is, I think, an indication that they took your work seriously.
Sorry for the wall of text. It'll probably happen again. :)
No comments:
Post a Comment