Good News and Visual Novels

Hi All,

Well, it’s been quite a week here in the UK. Politically, we’ve just shot ourselves in the knee-cap. It’s all a bit too depressing, so I wanted to post a few bits of good news.

1) Pandora won her appeal

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OFCOM, the UK regulator, over-turned the ruling by the over-zealous and now abolished UK video on demand regulator, ATVOD, banning Pandora’s site Dreams of Spanking, which is now back online and accepting sign-ups again. YAAAAY!!!!

You can read her thoughts about it on her blog. We had a chat about it with another friend producer a couple of weekends ago and all admitted that getting the tap on the shoulder from the censorious dead hand of the state is more stifling of one’s kink and creativity than any of us had expected. We’re so glad Dreams is back! None of us know what the future holds for the censorship climate in the UK- given the political turmoil this week, nobody knows.

So we’ll just have to keep chipping away and putting our points logically and rationally and make sure that we are heard (even if they go ahead and do it anyway). To this end, I’m supporting Pandora’s Patreon campaign to support her advocacy- and if you want to help kink survive online in Britain, please chip in a little too if you can!

2) I’m feeling a bit better

As I mentioned in my last post, I had a nasty attack of gastro-enteritis at the start of June which is taking a long time to get over. Yesterday I managed to walk up one the local hills- one of my fave local walks, around two hours round trip. This is much more than I managed last week, even if I was a bit tired and achy the next day. But OMG, progress! Very very happy!

3) I just discovered a whole new genre of thing!

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Watch CINDERS trailer on YouTube

I’ve always liked computer games, from the first ones I played on Swansea University mainframe computer when I went in to see my Mum at work in the holidays through to modern extravaganzas. Having been ill in the last few weeks and needing some non-physical amusements, I played a few. I finally got through BioShock Infinite, which is OK- lovely visuals, intriguing if horrible racist 1900’s dystopia background, and some story.

Trouble is by the time I finished the game I felt like going and checking myself into a high-security prison for mass-murdering psychopaths. My word, but there was a lot of killing and gore and blood. And as far as I am aware, I got to make exactly one decision during the whole game that had much impact beyond the end of the scene.

So I went looking to see if there was a different sort of game out there, and discovered a whole new genre!

Parenthetically- I don’t mind the odd bit of violence in games. I just prefer a lot less of it than BioShock Infinite, which is why I don’t usually play first-person shooters. I really appreciate games like Thief where there’s at least an option to resolve things by less-lethal means when you can, or sandboxes where you can play the game with a less-murderous characters (Elder Scrolls games like Oblivion and Skyrim have good plot threads for stealthy characters, which require less slaughter than some other story paths).

A bit of a Googling and searching of Steam turning up the visual novel genre, which I’d never heard of. Apparently big in Japan, popular with female players, there’s a huge number of these things revolving around high schools and dating and a lot with pretty linear stories… but also some stuff that looked really interesting.

I like games where what I choose to do makes a difference through the game and to the game’s ending (which is why I like BioWare games very much). Add that to a non-violent storyline and GORGEOUS art-work and I settled on my first purchase of the genre: Cinders, a game by Polish indie development studio Moa Cube.

It takes a little getting used to. There’s a LOT of talking, quite a few decisions, and not much else. It’s like a Bioware game with all the running around and killing stuff and levelling up removed, and just the character interactions remaining. Since Mass Effect 2 is probably my favourite game of all time, I’m good with that 🙂 Makes a change from a LOT of killing, a few conversations and a very small number of decisions, which is what the routine fantasy and sci-fi RPG genres favour.

It may or may not appeal to you- playing Cinderella and trying to get one over on her sisters, step-mother, get the guy or get the hell out of Dodge, trust the Fairy godmother or really not. But if it sounds even faintly intriguing, I’d really encourage you to give it a go. Have I mentioned how gob-smackingly beautiful the artwork is?

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It’s not a long game- I got through it in one long-ish sitting. But it will bear re-playing, trying to achieve various different endings (I gather there may be “dead in a ditch” as one ending…). And the studio have another, larger game called Solstice which they just released, which I just bought and will start on once I have caught up on RE and SS stuff as I finish recuperating. The premise is really intriguing from the first scene, though.

Visual Novels for the Future?

Of course being nerdy introvert scientist Hywel, I had to look into visual novels more. I discovered a few game engines which look like they’d help a lot in setting one up. There’s an active community building them and sharing them, and a fair number commercially available.

Sad to say though it looks like MoaCube might not be making another soon. Well, unless we all go and buy Solstice and Cinders anyway!

Sounds like the indie games industry has hit the same market maturity issues as the porn industry. The studio head has blogged about how everything seems to have narrowed down onto Steam as a monopoly distribution channel, and how hard it can be to make a ripple with an indie game there. I hear that (try making a ripple with a single long, high-production-value movie on Clips4Sale if you don’t already have a fan base or channel in that genre).

And I hear the same thing from indies on the App store and musicians with online sales channels via iTunes and Spotify. All of these things have their wild west period, like membership websites did around 1997-2001, then settle into a small number of big players. At least the games guys don’t seem to have quite the industrial levels of piracy to contend with that porn does. (If you watch something on a tube site, know that it is 99% likely to be stolen. And the thief is making money pushing tacky adverts at your eyeballs while you watch someone else’s stolen work).

But still… I love the genre, and will be checking out more.

And better yet, even as polished and glorious a project as Cinders was made by a small team in a year and half… a few person-years of effort. That means it should be possible to do something interesting on a smaller and more modest scale in one’s spare time. There are some good tool-kits like Tyranobuilder and Ren’Py around to support it, too.

At this stage Ariel is probably rolling her eyes at me. We’re wildly over-committed, as the big work backlog following my illness shows. The last thing I should be doing is thinking of future projects, especially ones outside the core business. But what can the harm be in having a little play around with these tools in the odd hour before bed? After all I’ve got quite a head-start in terms of creating artwork and storylines… maybe a BDSM visual novel (well, let’s call it a visual short story) might be fun?

4) The mega-four-hour film is done!

The mega-four-hour custom film we shot a few weeks ago is done! It’s the longest and most ambitious single project we’ve ever done, and it would totally have fallen apart without Ariel, Zoe, Natalia and cameraperson Katie.

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I’ve still not decided 100% whether to put it up on Elegance Studios or serialise it for Restrained Elegance: it is a single story, and it kind-of sits as a companion story to Slave Auction and Pony Girl in some ways (the customer liked those films so much he wanted us to incorporate elements of those into the story for him).

But pragmatically distributing it as a single 9 GB MP4 file is going to break the downloads of anyone not on a fast internet connection, and any hiccup in the stream might see you back to square one. The shopping carts system isn’t really built for downloads that big. So I think serialising it on RE is the way to go: look out for it on the members’ area soon! It’s absolutely EPIC- Natalia Forrest sent as a secret agent into the depths of a slave-trading gang! Forced to learn how to be a perfect slave, how strip naked for her master or mistress, the positions a slave must adopt, how to talk dirty… and much, much more!

Just in time to shoot the SECOND film commissioned by the same customer this week! (Fortunately not quite such a gargantuan undertaking!) Should be fun!

All the best everyone!

Hywel

About Hywel

Particle physicist turned fetish photographer, producer and director. I run http://www.restrainedelegance.com and http://www.elegancestudios.com together with my wife, who is variously known as Ariel Anderssen or Amelia Jane Rutherford, depending on whether she's getting tied up or spanked at the time.

9 thoughts on “Good News and Visual Novels

  1. Hi, just thought, you might be better off using a rar or zip program, then split the film into smaller manageable chunks, say 2 each chunk, will make it a lot easier for people to download the full thing, and also will make it better if someone loses their connection, then they can download the chunk in question. no need to compress the film, so use store for the compression.

    Hope that helps

    • whoops, sorry, I mean, 2gig per chunk, then you can link each chunk as you would like your normal movies, should make it a lot easier to download the full film, if split up. Hope that helps

      • Hi unfortunately the shopping cart systems we use all require 1 ZIP file or Mp4 file for one purchase. So the most sensible option seems to be to split into shorter episodes of 30-45 mins each, which I’ll distribute via RE members’ area as a serial, and then put up on normal shopping cart so people can buy the parts of the film they are most interested in, or the whole thing if they want.

  2. Well, the other alternative would be to use the shopping cart to buy the film, then on the invoice area, it mentions if you have download issues, you can contact support for another download link, would it be possible to buy the film but not get a download link, but then get a invoice key or serial number to contact support to verify you have brought the film, then to be given a link to download the chunks of the film to download?

    might be a bit messy, but that is one way to do it, so members can buy the complete film still, and download the film in smaller chunks.

    is that possible?

    I suppose you could fool the shopping cart by adding a tiny zip, but then see if its possible to be given a serial number, to get the link to the chunks, using support, you would have to do this manually, a bit messy, but possible?

  3. Hi,

    “The Underground” is currently up on RestrainedElegance.com serialised for members. I’ll be putting it up on EleganceStudios.com as a whole film soon and adding it to Clips4Sale too.

    Cheers, Hywel

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