Normal-Bad Sex

The brief

Most of us have a story we don’t quite know how to tell. Normal-Bad Sex is a series of playable podcasts that gives those stories a place to land. Each episode pairs a real interview , recorded with someone willing to talk honestly about an uncomfortable sexual experience, with a small set of mini-games that don’t dramatise what’s being said. They just sit beside it.

The series was conceived and co-designed with Nyusha Impolski. The goal was to make oral history feel like a game, and a game feel like sitting next to someone who is finally being heard. The first episode, about people-pleasing, is the proof of concept; the second is about aging, built around an interview with a woman in her seventies who agreed to share what her sexual life had been across the decades.

The approach

The first design decision was an abstraction. The speaker on the audio is real; the scene on screen is not. Characters appear as personified animals in a jungle, they keep their human attributes, but the visual remove gives the listener room to bring their own image to the story.

The second was about pacing. There are no fail states, no time pressure, and no required progression. Audio auto-plays. Mini-games are slow, accessible, and easy to complete; players continue at their own pace. The whole thing is built around the rule that the story is the centre of gravity, and the game is a way to keep your hands and your attention on it.

The mechanical reference was Wario-Ware, a single verb in the top-left corner of each mini-game, no overflow, no instructions, no friction.

The work

I built most of the systems for the first episode, the menu, the connective vignette, the bar-scene popcorn mini-game, the mini-game pattern itself, and the UI that closes each one out. Episode two added a new scaffolding piece I’m still building: a procedural building generator for a New York City laid out by decade.

The title sequence opens with a small motion piece I made in After Effects, and resolves into the in-game menu, where everything else is animated directly in Unity. The handoff is invisible, the player just sees the title settle into the world.

Between the bar scenes and the mini-games, the player drifts through a slow vignette of the jungle world. It is meant to be quiet , a transition that gives the audio room to breathe and the player a moment to sit with what they just heard. The bar scenes themselves have their own small mini-game, a popcorn-eating loop, designed to keep the player’s hands occupied during the long stretches of dialogue without pulling focus from the voice on the track.

The mini-games are emotional, not literal. The brief was to design a small interaction that mirrors how the speaker felt in a given moment, not to dramatise what happened. Easy to play, no fail states, audio playing underneath the whole thing. The player continues when they’re ready.

Episode two is about aging. The interview is with a woman in her seventies recounting her sexual life across the decades, and the game is structured around that, each decade is laid out as a different road in New York City. To populate the streets, I built a procedural building generator: a system of variables that produces normal buildings across a stretch of road, with hand-authored custom buildings dropped in at the key story beats.

The procedural buildings are the background. The custom ones are the story. Each key beat in a decade gets its own hand-authored building , a small landmark designed to read clearly against the generated surroundings, so the player notices when the road is about to turn. The gameplay sits in that contrast: long stretches of similar-but-not procedural cityscape, then a building that feels deliberately different, and the interview audio shifts to match.

How it landed

Funded by an NYU grant. Episode one shipped as the proof of concept and was shown at GDC and Play NYC; episode two is in development.

The series sits in a niche it built for itself, somewhere between an audio essay, a small game, and a long conversation in a quiet room. People keep finding it, and they keep finding their own story inside it.