Why I'm Making Games About Sex

There are thousands of games with sex in them. Entire platforms dedicated to it. That’s not a gap in the market.

The gap is somewhere else.

Porn Games vs Games With Sex

Most games that include sex fall into two categories. There are games where sex is the entire point, where everything else is a thin wrapper around getting to the next scene. And there are games where sex technically exists but it’s a cutscene you unlock for clicking the right dialogue options, or a fade to black, or just… absent. A tasteful skip.

In the first category, the sex is there but the game isn’t. In the second, the game is there but the sex isn’t real. Nobody has preferences. Nobody says “not yet.” Nobody reacts to what you actually did. It’s either a reward or a secret.

I wanted to make something that doesn’t fit in either category. Games where sex is part of the experience the same way combat is in an action game or dialogue is in an RPG. Designed with craft. Responsive to how you play. Built around characters who feel like people.

Two Games

I’m building two games right now. They look nothing alike and they’re about very different things.

52 Card Pick-Up is a card-based dating sim set in a dive bar called The Neon Cactus. You play cards against twelve characters to build attraction. Every card is a social move. Every character responds differently. Timing matters. Reading the room matters more. It’s a strategy game that happens to be about dating. And for players who want to see what happens after the evening ends, the companion experience continues where the card game’s fade to black begins. Characters have boundaries, preferences, and opinions. Respecting them is the most interesting way to play.

Billie Wins a Free Vacation is a cel-shaded 3D adventure about a bisexual overthinker who won a vacation she didn’t enter and woke up face-down at a bar on an alien planet. It’s crude, surreal, and genuinely heartfelt. She explores alien worlds, helps weird creatures, breaks stuff that deserves to be broken, and yes, hooks up along the way. The game isn’t about sex. But sex is part of Billie’s life, so it’s part of the game. Treated casually, sincerely, and without the camera lingering.

What they share is a belief that characters should feel like people, that your choices should matter, and that the parts of human experience most games either skip or reduce to a reward are worth getting right.

What This Blog Is

This is where I talk about how these games get built. Design problems I’m solving. Creative decisions I’m making. The parts of game development that don’t fit in a tweet.

I’m a solo developer. These games are ambitious for one person. They might take a while. They might surprise me. Either way, I want to build them in the open, because the questions I’m asking while making them are more interesting than the answers I’d put in a press release.

Questions like: How do you design a system where respecting someone’s boundaries is the most interesting way to play? How do you write a character who is anxious and brave and bisexual and none of those things are a plot point? How do you make a game where the lawn screams when you step on it and somehow you still end up feeling things?

I don’t have all the answers yet. But I’m working on it.

Next time, I want to talk about what happens when a character says “not yet.”