Punching Up Dev Diaries #2 - Making a Gay Game
When I first had the idea to make Punching Up, all I planned to do was take the characters from the original Animal Boxing game and put them in a game with third-person style boxing gameplay, like Fight Night or Ready To Rumble. However, I realized this original vision wasn't motivating me for multiple reasons. My first solution was to remove the female characters and focus on the male characters.
I chose to do this for one primary reason: I am a gay man with an attraction to boxing. The whole reason I got attached to the original game was because I saw a video of Apolo winning against the MC and thought he was super hot. With that particular attachment to the game, I had to find my work with the game to be just as stimulating.
Further along into the planning stage, I decided to take things a step further and infuse more gay content into the game's characters and plot. This was something I went back and forth with A LOT. In the end, however, I decided to go forward with this as it makes me the most happy. I'm not making any money off of this due to it being not my original characters/assets (which I'll make this a separate post later on, but there will be no option to back or financially support me making this game), so what matters most is making a game that makes me the most happy.
The gay content in the game will manifest only in dialogue and characters' individual storylines. By that, I mean some characters will be in "canonical" relationships with each other and have pre and post match dialogue that can be flirty. This will have no impact on gameplay and there will be no "gay" gameplay, like sex mini-games or other content like that. Any gay content will stay PG, but I may in the future create an XXX version once the original is done.