Delayed patch. Sexuality Gender And Videogames.

I’m writing this because now is around the time I would usually release a new patch. A lot has happened to me and the past few weeks, I went on vacation, I got sick, and am continuing to deal with endless government bureaucracy to name a few. To put it plainly. Shit happened. And games made by single developers are extra vulnerable to shit happening, cause when it does, 100% of your team is down. I’m able to work on the new playable character patch now in earnest thankfully, but it will still be a little bit before it’s out.

I also know that it’s a bit disappointing to just hear about delays, so for those who are interested I included a little behind the scenes talk about what went into, what is at a glance a very simple mechanic in Monster Layer. The body preference slider.

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The body preference sliders are very simple in execution. They simply set the random weight that any Lay will generate with those features. The fact that this mechanic is implemented at all, and in this way. Is a bit more interesting.

First off. While I believe Body Preference is a sexuality slider. It is not a gender preference slider. I think the default way many people think about sexuality is through gender. Even in queer spaces the most commonly used sexuality language emphases binary gender. Gay, straight, bi. When a male describes themselves this way it means they like boys, girls, or both. This language however gets a little fuzzy in queer spaces. What does it mean to like girls? You could like people who are femme. You could like someone with boobs and pussy. You could like someone with boobs OR pussy. You could simply tend to be attracted to people who identify as female.

I’m not by any means saying it’s wrong to use these words to describe yourself. I’m an agendered nonbinary person who usually refers to themselves as bisexual. I like boobs, I like cock, pussy, a flat chest, all of it. I also like different genders as a separate marker of attraction. 

It’s not mechanically significant, but pronouns are generated for every monster, using their body type as a base for randomness. It was important to me to break body type away from gender. For one this allows monsters to be nonbinary at all. But also allows delicious nuance in terms of attraction. I like that a transman might still have boobs, or be what we might archetypically think they look like in porn. Or even gone all the way to getting a dick.

Many porn creators make games with fixed character bodies. It is certainly easier for a bisexual creator to turn their game into a purely gay or straight game for better accessibility. But that isn’t 100% the reason why I let players customize the body randomness. Frankly, I find rarity can be very very hot.

Forgive me for this tangent, but I want to tell you about a formative porn gaming moment. I was playing modded skyrim. While mods existed to put dicks on girls. The thing they would do was replace the bodies of everyone the game had tagged as Female, at least the mods I knew about at the time. So I played a world of purely cis men and women. But there was a porn story mod with its own characters, and one of the girls there had a dick. Now I would not say that this is my favourite body type, but to see that hyena with big boobs and that tiny dick after so long never seeing that in this game. It made her really unique, it made her really attractive. Rarity can be attractive, especially in porn.

And not just rarity of the person you’re fucking. I might be bi. But the idea that I have the only dick in a sea of lusty cuties. That really gets me off.

I’m not the kind of person who believes in making everything in a game a customizable slider. I’m someone who gets overwhelmed and confused when I see a menu with a hundred sliders and can’t tell which ones will make a difference, or ruin my experience for that matter. There are however some choices a player can be given, which creates new experiences, fulfills fantasies, etc. 

Porn games can be more than just a platformer that occasionally plays an animation. But to do so we need to leverage our mechanics in the same way conventional games use them to create tension, fear, or excitement. But put them towards creating erotic emotions instead,