I'm tired, and I'm not giving up

These hands weren't made for quittin' in Naughty List News #87

Dec 11, 2022

Hey, naughty news fans!

Let’s get personal for a minute. I’ve been getting crushed at work in the past few months, and I’m not too happy about it. As some of you may be aware, my day job is as a UI programmer for AAA video games.

To answer a question I know is burning on your tongue right now: Yes, you’ve most likely played, or at least seen an ad for, a game that runs code I’ve written. No, I’m not one to kiss and tell.

I work fully remotely as a contractor and am well compensated for my work. My dream is still to publish my own adult game someday, but I’m happy with the work I’m doing professionally. There’s usually not a lot of pressure on me at work, which leaves me with enough time and energy to do this newsletter. And short-form writing like this every week has been a great way for me to improve my writing skills.

But these are not usual times.

For the past three months or so, the team has been on what can only be described as a “death march”. I’ve chronicled some of the recent insanity in a post on Cohost, but suffice it to say that things have been extremely dire at work. The short version is that the client doesn’t know what game they’re trying to make, lacks the expertise to execute their vision even if they knew what they wanted, and has put a lot of pressure on the team to get things done ~anyway~

The breaking point for me has been yet another broken promise. Leadership assured us that things would settle down in December because we were supposed to deliver a demo build to the publisher at that time. Based on that promise, we were willing to pile on a lot of technical debt. We were willing to forgive many ugly hacks and “fixme” comments in our code because we knew we would be able to clean it all up at the end of the year.

But that December deadline has come and gone, and no demo was shown to the publisher. Now the story is that the deadline has been moved to January, and we need a lot of Very Important Features in the build by that time. So full speed ahead, says management, and make sure those features are in before the office closes for Christmas break!

And I’m so, so tired.

It has been extremely demoralizing to realize that I’ve been busting my ass all these months for nothing. Because I’ve doing “full speed ahead” for three months already and it meant that I’ve been unable to give this newsletter the time and attention that it deserves.

You may have noticed that I didn’t post anything last Sunday, and that was due to a confluence of circumstances. At the end of the week, I had an extremely demoralizing 1-on-1 with my lead, where he told me about the moved demo deadline. I also had to deal with all the paperwork involved with buying a house. And we had to travel to Berlin that Saturday. When I had to choose which ball to drop, the newsletter looked the bounciest to me.

But I want to do more long-form writing. I want to do more interviews and discuss more thought-provoking topics in adult gaming. But my time and energy are limited, and something has to give here.

I still want to do one more post this year. I still want to talk about my favorite adult games released this year. My list of Best Adult Games of 2021 has an insane 13,000 views right now, while most of my other posts struggle to hit 1,000 views. And that’s fine by me! As I’ve said before, I don’t do this newsletter for the accolades. This stat just means that I can tell that you all really enjoy reading this type of post.

As the title of today’s newsletter implies, I’m not giving up just yet. But I think it’s time for a break. I’m going to retreat into a cozy blanket fort, rethink my strategies and templates for this newsletter, and come back stronger than ever in 2023.

And I hope you’ll be there for it. 💌

Writing Wrap-Up 📖

Elf Girl Pinball was released on Steam. A game house deep in a forest run by cute elf girls has you playing pinball against their bodies.
Detective Masochist 3 -The Case of the Naked Truth- is now available on Itch.io. An incapable masochist attempts to be a hard-boiled detective as he investigates a multitude of strange cases with his female assistant.
Visual novel Maid for Loving You is out now on Steam. A wage slave finds an unconscious and freezing woman on his doorstep who offers to become his maid.
NookGaming reviews Didnapper 2. “As a whole, Didnapper 2 tells an entertaining story with likable characters, even if often works against itself at times in order to inject bondage into the narrative.”
OpRainFall reviewed Gore Screaming Show. “I can safely say Gore Screaming Show is in fact one of the best horror visual novels I’ve ever read.”
The Mary Sue writes about all the porn on Steam these days. The market is booming, apparently: “This year, a whopping 523 games tagged “NSFW” have already been released”
TikTok sex censorship results in the rise of euphemistic “algospeak.” Although the free speech implications are quite chilling, “le-dollar-bean” for “lesbian” is my favorite.