Heaven For A Heathen: Postmortem

Hey everyone!  This is Naomi Norbez, aka Bez (pronouns e/he) the developer of Heaven For A Heathen.  I am now allowed to put my name to the project, so here I am with a postmortem!

Content warning: discussion of sex & kink, specifically noncon, spanking and degradation.  Religion & angels are also discussed.

_____

Heaven For A Heathen isn’t usually the kind of project I do on this account.  Normally, I save the erotica for my FurAffinity alt lmao.  But I had an idea and decided to go for it because, well. . .

This year, I made a lot of self-indulgent games.  Games with no higher purpose behind their existence.  Games that exist just because I wanted them to exist.  Heaven For A Heathen is one of those.  If it is helpful to others in some way, that’s fantastic of course, but it was not created with that purpose in mind.  It was made because, a week before the game jam closed, I got a hot idea in my brain that I couldn’t ignore.  That’s all.

As soon as the idea solidified, I immediately messaged Lolsy & LunarLegacy to play the parts of Timothy & Nathaniel respectively.  They’re NSFW VAs I've worked with before on less adult projects, mainly my aroace game Yancy At The End Of The World!  They’re both very talented, and they played these roles excellently.  They brought the characters to life in such a marvelous way.  Also, LunarLegacy came up with the game’s title—it’s such a good title omg!

As I wrote the script, the characters revealed themselves to me.  I was especially intrigued by the fantasies Nathaniel ended up having—an angel wanting a noncon scenario in bed, and degrading his partner while fucking him?  Fascinating!  I love it!

I’ll readily admit that I added the spanking because the sex scene was beginning to bore me.  Sex on its own doesn’t excite me much, but sex with kink?  That’s where it’s at, baby!  Theoretically, of course, because I’m asexual lol.

But even though the spanking scene was added out of boredom, it added an interesting shade to Nathaniel’s fantasies & character.  Now, the scene pivoted to the idea of punishment, giving a bad boy his just desserts.  Perhaps this is something he enjoys the idea of as an angel, as one of God’s executors of divine justice?

Let’s pivot to Timothy.  An experienced, confident porn star who agrees to become Nathaniel’s plaything for a night, in exchange for a ticket to heaven.  He enjoyed his time with Nathaniel, but how much of that was genuine, and how much of it was acting?  What will he do with himself when he gets into a heaven, a place that most likely forbids his kind of work?

There are a lot of things I left unanswered about him that I’d love to explore in the future.  Nathaniel too, with the biggest one being: has he snuck others into heaven in exchange for these “favors”? Or is Timothy the first?

After the script came the programming.  I asked the Neo-Interactives Discord about a tool that could reveal text in Twine line-by-line, as that was how I wanted to present the story.  After a good amount of discussion, I was pointed to the Mousey Click To Proceed macro, and it fit my needs perfectly.  It was even better than what I had envisioned, too—instead of clicking a specific link to show another sentence, one only had to click on the text itself.  I love the macro, and am grateful I was introduced to it!

Putting it all together—text, voice acting, programming so that everything was perfectly timed—was a ton of fun.  I also took the time to look for music for the project, and came across the 2020 Was A Challenge album by EMAYTEE.  Killer stuff! I definitely want to use more music from this album in future projects!  I also found a very nice spanking sound effect by Ezcah—I’ve been using freesound.org for my sound effects for years; that site & its users never disappoint.

All of this in one week!  I wish I had gotten the idea when the Anonymous Righteous game jam started, 45 days before the deadline, but alas!  The muse is a fickle little bastard sometimes lmao. I hope you liked this behind-the-scenes look into the game’s development.  Thank you for reading!