January 19, 2015

Uncategorized
Elizabeth

It’s mid January and we finally got around to launching our crowdfunding campaign on OffBeatr for Triple X Tycoon. It’s also 2am.  If you’re familiar with the Joy-Toilet  twitter account then you’d know that our office hours persist overnight.  This is of course natural since we’re all freaks and you know what they say.  Although if you’re familiar with the game industry you might consider this to be “crunch time”.  Well, since I’m the only programmer on the team and there is a whole website and one risqué desktop application in development there is just no time for sleep on my end.  On the other end the team consists of 1 producer/writer, our resident globetrotter (Soup likes to travel and write about it), then there’s Iris (also a writer) and a few friends of the family. That pretty much makes up everyone that sticks around.  We make the best of it.

Anyway, Triple X Tycoon is an adult industry simulation game.  I came up with the idea while playing GameBiz 3 since I really fancy games that require minimal brain usage.  But it wasn’t just that, I had previously watched a keynote of sorts for webmasters on Youtube.  The event was Xbiz 360 (where adult industry pros go to network n stuff) and the speaker was talking about how most paysites suck.  I remember thinking about how broad the niches were for some of these sites.  I returned to playing Gamebiz 3 and it happened.  Game developers know “It”, that lighting-in-your-bones idea that gets your blood pumping.  What if there was a game that took some of these ideas for innovation at the forefront of adult entertainment , a strategy game I thought, that would try and capture something as flexible and versatile as the world of porn.If you don’t know, now you know..(Proxy Paige, Like a boss)

Hell, this shit goes back.  Way back, how the hell would I bottle that up into something coherent? Now I’ve worked on games before TXT.  I’ve been in the trenches as a writer, a coder and pr manager. Some of them were “indie”, others not so indie.  Most importantly I learned that you need a scope.  So I set the history at 1975 to start since a lot of shit went down then and it would make a hell of a starting point. Off the bat we’re talking about organized crime, open prostitution, Vietnam had just ended for fucks sake.  Winter had just kicked in,  I called the boys (+girl) and we talked about it, they were sold and I was off.

I used my old game engine to get a prototype up.  I pulled consecutive all-nighters and did a whole lot of homework during which I discovered Lula: The Sexy Empire to be more along the lines of what we’re trying to do here.  I also had to go digging through LOTS of porn to get a feel for how the eras progressed.  I studied products and companies like LoveHoney and of course Playboy.  I looked into Joe Sarno’s work for perspective which of course was just one POV so I needed more. I found Porno Life on Display by Ivan of Puba and had a marathon, I blew through blog posts by real performers, way before all of this I interviewed a cam model, I read Insatiable (Asa Akira) and Girlvert (Ashley Blue) for fucks sake, now I’ve got perspective.

By now it was November, I started working on Triple X Tycoon in September.  I had a prototype and everything was cool except that the game sucked.  There was nothing interesting to look at and no way to make it interesting.  The code was fine but graphically, we were fighting an uphill battle since there was nobody in-house that could do 2D art and I had no time or references to base my own pixel art.  Well, we had to call in some favors.  Money and time (that we didn’t have) was spent until we got the game from this:

From a functional joke

To this

To a cleaner work-in-progress. (Optimized for mobile)

Trust me, I wouldn’t allow the release of a shitty game. It goes against our motto. The goal has always been to release something that everyone can appreciate.  Whether gay, straight, blue or purple. Fun and accessibility is a huge factor for us, without that it’s just not a game.  We’ve done weird before, but this is something different.  As far as the money goes, we’ve already been pouring resources into this. At this point all we need is a little boost to keep our artist on board and offset some fees that come as peripheral to any developer.  Obviously, nobody is profiting until the game get’s done, and I think that’s fair. Since otherwise, we haven’t proved ourselves. But all I can say now, is that it’s 3am and I’ve still got a whole lot of work to do and I won’t be going anywhere until that work is done, so don’t stick around.  But if you’re a night owl too or if it’s day time when you get around to this post and you’ve got some spare time (and money), do us a huge favor,  Get on OffBeatr and show us some love! I promise it’ll be worth it in the end.

Leave A Comment

Related Post