As my adventures of the indie forests continue, I’ve come across another indie dev Duo making sexy visual novels.

Welcome ladies, gentlemen and everybody else, and let the guests carry it away:

Hi, I’m Duski, co-creator of the game Sanguine Rose! I draw and design everything for the game, edit dialogue, animate, and generally do lots of odd jobs. I’m a 21 year old woman, I’m British, I adore cats, I’m a metalhead. I’m the more reclusive of the two of us so people often assume my role is smaller than it is, hahah.

I’m Hallows, the other one. I handle the writing, the programming and general build management, as well as most of our audience interaction stuff since I’m never not online. I’m 25, male, and I like long walks on the beach. I’m also from the UK. Together we’re Dusky Hallows and we have no idea what we’re doing.

(Sexy_KG: I was really hoping for a demiurge and a unicorn, but I guess we’ll take these mortals instead 🙂

Sexy_KG: What were your inspirations for Sanguine Rose?

Duski: My visual inspirations actually originated with the games Bloodborne and Dark Souls as I began to plan the gothic fantasy world where SR takes place, and Carmen was the first character that came to me. She would be vampiric looking, strong, terrifying, sexy, she was inspired by all of the seductive femme fatales I’d ever loved, wrapped in the medieval aesthetic I’m drawn to. I’m inspired by women like Eva Green (especially in the ‘300’ films) for her look, and by the opera ‘Carmen’, for her story. In the opera, a beautiful gypsy woman is arrested and uses her charms and body to seduce the soldier to set her free. And actually Roman was based on Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh in the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age. A lot of my aesthetic planning is only really shown in small areas of the game, nonetheless I hope it shines through!

Hallows: We’re both fantasy buffs, and with the popularity of series like Game of Thrones I was just kind of drawn towards taking my own swing at the genre. I was also fan of choose your own adventure books when I was younger, and I enjoy DnD, so I wanted to tell a story where I can speak directly to the audience, and ask them what they want to do next. Real life is the best inspiration a lot of the time though, so a fair amount of our worldbuilding came from looking at real people and civilisations in the past and twisting them into something new.

Sexy_KG: What are some of your favorite games, they don’t have to be adult ones?

Duski: Weirdly I’m obsessed with Dance Dance Revolution, I played the Konami arcade versions as a kid and still love it as an adult. Other than that, I love Skyrim with all my heart.

Hallows: I’ve always enjoyed RPGs. Whether it was Final Fantasy or Fallout. New Vegas especially. For adult games, anything by Akabur is fun, and Con-Quest is hilarious. I’ve got a lot more I’ve been meaning to play properly, like Seeds of Chaos is great but I’ve barely scratched its surface. Ever since I started making a game it’s been so much harder to actually sit down and play them. I often start one and spend an hour just fawning at the UI instead of playing the damn thing.

Sexy_KG: How rough was it getting started until you finally had momentum for the project?

Duski: To say ‘very rough’ would be an understatement, hahaha! We made lots of mistakes, one of them being to spend a long time preparing things without posting online, then when we began posting we had already done so much but had to start at square one with advertising.

Hallows: What Duski said. We both didn’t have a lot of time to begin with, and it was our first time trying to make a project like this, so it was slow going. We didn’t really know how to get the message out and advertise, or how to maintain a base of support. The first time we posted to newgrounds was when things first started to pick up, but the game got too big for Flash so we switched to Renpy. I’d say it’s only recently we’ve been recapturing the kind of attention we had back then.

Sexy_KG: How did you come up with the first theme for your game?

Duski: The theme kind of sprang from the first character, Carmen. Power is the driving force of the story, giving up power, taking away power from someone else. While trying to sound as little like Dennis Reynolds as possible, it’s a fascinating topic, and fits well with the BDSM theme. Carmen is a bit too obsessed with power, we often joke about how sociopathic she is, lmao.

Hallows: Oscar Wilde said everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power. I think there’s a fair bit of truth to that. I’ve been fascinated for years about how people’s worldview influences their opinion on sex and vice versa. In a way, Sanguine Rose is an extension of that fascination. On the other hand, D/S is hot, and I liked the idea of blurring the lines between domination and submission.

Sexy_KG: On average how often do you get asked to make the boobs bigger ?

Duski: Rarely! We have a range of boobs in the game, personally though I believe flat is justice…

Hallows: I can’t remember ever being asked. I mean, any size is great, but I think Carmen would look silly if her tits were any bigger lol.

Sexy_KG: Did you experiment with other game ideas/prototypes before you committed to Sanguine Rose?

Duski: No, weirdly enough. We’ve designed various games and fantasy worlds before, but Sanguine Rose as a game idea kind of just formed very quickly out of things we were both interested in.

Hallows: What Duski said. Although some of our earlier plans of the game involved it going on for much, much longer. I think it’s fair to say some of our earliest ideas for Sanguine Rose would have been very different to what we ended up with.

Sexy_KG: What is the biggest challenge you’ve had so far?

Duski: Personally for me, just keeping going when you’re not receiving much, and you have nobody to point you in any direction. It sounds stupid, but not having a boss, while obviously preferable in the idealistic sense, I find really difficult. I’ve had to learn discipline and complete self motivation to keep going, not to mention all of the technical things about game creation which I have no education for!

Hallows: Staying disciplined, either that or overcoming obstacles we weren’t expecting. Like Duski said, we went into Sanguine Rose without any real experience or education making games specifically. When we worked with Flash, I had to learn AS3, and when we switched to Renpy I had to get familiar with Python again. Both times I had to bugfix in an environment I was still new to. We’re also both perfectionists, which isn’t always great if you’re trying to meet deadlines.

Sexy_KG: How much time did it take you before launching the first release to the public?

Hallows: That’s a tricky one. We spent a long time in a sort of pre-development, where we discussed plans but we weren’t really working on the game yet. We posted some stuff online in August 2016 and posted a concept scene in October the same year, but it wasn’t until August 2017 that we released the first day in its entirety to Newgrounds. Before that though we had some pre-alpha releases so… Somewhere between two months and a year, depending on which one counts.

Sexy_KG: Were you flying solo or did you have a team when you started?

Duski: It’s just always been the two of us.

Sexy_KG: What is your impression of how frowned upon is adult content is in your country?

Hallows: It’s very mixed. There’s probably five different reality TV shows airing as I type this about rowdy youths going abroad and shagging, and most people under the age of 30 aren’t exactly shy about sex, but our government is really keen on trying to police what porn people can enjoy and how they should consume it. I don’t think people care all that much, but there’s a very vocal minority who want Britain to stay ‘proper’ and they’re in power somehow.

Sexy_KG: How many people of outside your team know you work on adult games?

Duski: My closest friends do, we joke about it and they’re very open towards it. My online friends also know, since lots of them are artists who help me improve my art, or work on adult content themselves.

Hallows: A few close friends, but most don’t know the name of our studio or the game we work on. It helps to keep my work and my social life separate.

Sexy_KG: How skeptical were people to the idea of the game, (there always are naysayers)?

Duski: There wasn’t really anyone to be skeptical of it! We didn’t have any friends in the adult games community in the beginning, we were just alone and working on what intuitively felt right.

Hallows: We’ve had some mixed feedback all the way through development, but overall I’d say most people have supported us. Some people online don’t like certain design decisions we made, but no game can appeal to everyone. The game is for people who like the game, which sounds silly when I say it like that but it’s true.

Sexy_KG: Do you have a scripted story you tell new people to hide that you are doing an adult game?

Duski: I just say I’m a freelance digital artist, which is also technically the truth, Hallows just says he’s a writer, which is also true. We’re always upfront about it online, but to random people we just don’t go into details.

Sexy_KG: If you had unlimited money, what game would you make?

Duski: For me, I’d turn SR into a huge RPG with a detailed and expansive world, it’d be dark, gritty, full of cool character designs and architecture, and the ability to have sex with pretty much anyone.

Hallows: I’d probably curl up into a ball because of the pressure. I like the idea of getting better at game design, and just honing my talents in general, before tackling a project of essentially infinite size. I think if we’re around long enough to have the opportunity though, what Duski said sounds like a project I could get behind.

Sexy_KG: What is the most absurd thing you’ve been told about your games?

Duski: That Carmen is too clever, and should just bend to the will of the player easily and without too much of a fight. That… completely misses the point. While we designed her personality we laughed over the idea that she would piss off anyone who hates powerful women, and well, it did in the end.

Hallows: People thinking that what they want to do outside of the game should determine what they can do in the game. It’s similar to what Duski touched on. Roman, who the player controls, has his own wants and desires, and the player’s choices are different ways he can try to get those desires fulfilled. It’s pretty close to how the Witcher series works: The player is invited to step into Geralt’s shoes and help him make choices, but you’re still Geralt. There’s no option to romance Ciri because Ciri is Geralt’s adopted daughter. Even if the player wants to fuck Ciri, Geralt doesn’t. Likewise, Roman knows Carmen is worth more alive than dead, but we still get players asking for an option to just kill Carmen immediately because she talks back. They’re getting personally insulted because of what one fictional character says to another. I don’t know where to begin. On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of my favourite reviews of the game came from VN’s Now, who said if you stripped a lot of the game away, the basic premise is the same as the film Alien. A small cast of people are confined with a monster, and bit by bit they are lured to their end by it. It’s also absurd, but in a way it’s right. We didn’t mean to make Sanguine Rose part horror, but there’s elements there for sure.

Sexy_KG: How long did your most elusive bug take to fix?

Hallows: There might be one that’s troubled me more from back when we worked with Flash, but I’d have to say it was either converting the game from Flash to Renpy, or fixing bugs with how Renpy builds APKs. For the former I whipped something up in AS3 that would read the scenes I’d written and convert them to something Renpy could handle, but there was still lots of outliers which didn’t convert right, so for the first few Renpy builds there was a lot of bugs. It was probably months before I refactored everything enough to avoid any issues. The APK thing was quite recent, and I’m still not sure if my approach is the best one, but for some reason all the different builds were coming out assigned to the same version number, which was sometimes but not always causing installations to fail. It took me about a week to get to the bottom of that one.

Sexy_KG: How you think adult games belong in the larger game industry?

Duski: I think it’s due to our own societal taboo around sex that it features so little in games, even though it’s a normal aspect of life. Hopefully in the future, the lines will blur between normal video games (ones for adults, not necessarily porn games) and sexy games. Generally though it’s quite obvious that adult games are getting more and more popular, but still existing in this weird spot between the games industry and the porn industry. I personally foresee a branching off of more simple games designed as just porn, and games with longer narratives, larger teams and more complex gameplay will vy for a place as a legitimate category of their own on gaming platforms.

Hallows: I’m pretty much with Duski on this one. The demand is clearly there. I don’t know if we’ll see any AAA porn games, but at the same time I don’t know if that would be a good thing even if we did. The indie element of porn games is part of the draw, I think. In my opinion, the future of porn games is going to be more of what we’re already seeing, but higher production values. A whole lot of games fulfilling their own niches and kinks, and a handful with a broader audience.

Sexy_KG: How much hope do you have that other large platforms like Steam would consider publishing adult games in the foreseeable future?

Hallows: That’s a tricky one. There’s a lot to dissect when it comes to large platforms and the influence they can wield. Netflix was amazing, and then competition led to streaming exclusives which did more to harm each other than make any one service much different. We’re seeing the same thing with Steam and Epic now. If the future is a lot of platforms fighting for exclusivity, then that’s not much better than only having Steam. I’d like to be able to put Sanguine Rose, or any of our future projects, on as many platforms as possible. I don’t know how hopeful I am that will happen, but I’m cautiously optimistic.

Sexy_KG: Did you have any big hassle with technology?

Duski: Personally learning how to animate in Adobe After Effects was a challenge, but I’m getting better. I’m just so familiar with Photoshop and comfortable in it, stepping out my comfort zone can be stressful.

Hallows: Learning Flash, then Renpy, now Unity. I like to dive in and get my hands dirty rather than spend hours watching guides. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it can be frustrating.

Sexy_KG: If you could erase one game from the world, which one would it be?

Hallows: I’m of the opinion that pretty much any work of art deserves to exist, in one way or another. That said, if Runescape had never existed then twelve year old me might have seen the sun once in a while, which would have been nice.

Sexy_KG: (Whatever comes to mind, you don’t have to analyze) – What is the most essential thing about making video games?

Duski: Persistence, I think. And resilience.

Hallows: I think when you’re making anything, it’s to finish. I’ve been stuck for ages before because I couldn’t perfect a scene, or I wasn’t totally happy with one small detail, and the lesson I’ve learned is just to publish and move on. Everybody is improving their craft over time, but if you don’t finish something and put it out there then it’s easy to stagnate.

Sexy_KG: What would you say is the least expected thing that happened to you while doing Sanguine Rose?

Duski: For me, just that I’d learn to have the confidence in running my own little business and operation. Just how much I learned through experience. And also that I’d draw twice as much art as I’ve ever drawn in my life for one project!

Hallows: This kind of ties into the last point, but I grew a lot as a writer. Sanguine Rose is easily the longest thing either of us have ever worked on. I didn’t think I’d ever write 100,000 words for a single story, most of it smut, but here I am and people like it so… That’s an interesting feeling.

Sexy_KG: Do you have a favorite character in your project, (it doesn’t have to be a protagonist)?

Duski: Maybe Glasha, she’s such a laugh. Crow is my favourite for scenes, I love to see her tormented. But really, it’s probably just Carmen.

Hallows: Glasha is my favourite to write for, but really I guess she’s just the easiest to write for. Carmen is the hardest, but she’s my favourite to go back and read what I wrote. I guess I love all of them in different ways.

Sexy_KG: What is your favorite fetish?

Duski: Butt stuff.

Hallows: I like the DS in BDSM most. Seduction too, although I’m not really sure that’s a fetish. I like a slow building tension. Some teasing before the main event.

Sexy_KG: If you made a collectors edition what would one physical item ideally be?

Duski: Dakimakura of Glasha (fully dressed, just holding some ale, lmfao) is the obvious answer, but I would love figures of all the characters in their most cool outfits.

Hallows: I’m torn between a Glasha Dakimakura, a Crow Dakimakura, and a pillow that’s just Carmen’s thighs. There’s a joke in the game about Orc spit making an excellent lube, so a bottle of ‘Orc Saliva’ lubricant might also be handy.

Sexy_KG: Given everything you know now. If you had to start developing Sanguine Rose today, what would you do differently?

Duski: God, lots of things. I think the biggest one is not do the art in that exact format. I spend too much time detailing things which are unimportant and even repetitive, but I have to keep it up or the highly rendered style appears to be lacking. I don’t mean I want to make worse art, just that I should have started with a more simple style, and saved the billions of details for the most important parts. Kind of like, I started the project at a dead sprint, and now, years down the line I just wish I could jog or walk, because sprinting doesn’t actually get me anywhere important. More simplistic styles can look elegant and sexy too, I was just too eager to overcompensate for my lack of experience at the beginning.

Hallows: I’d want to start in Unity from the get go. Since switching over to Flash cost us time, and Renpy couldn’t be uploaded to places like Newgrounds. I’d want to have more mechanics than just making choices, and like Duski said, I’d want us to make something that’s better paced. We overdeveloped some scenes, especially early on, and it set the bar way too high for us to reasonably maintain. We did get better and learn to work faster, but more planning could have saved us a lot of headaches.

Sexy_KG: How happy are you with your exploits as an indie dev in the wilderness of sexy games?

Duski: Very happy! I’m optimistic for the next project, I’ve learned so much.

Hallows: Pretty thrilled, and determined to do better as we go on.

Sexy_KG: Would you trade what you do for another job in the world (and which one if so)?

Duski: Honestly, in an ideal world I’d just do whatever art I felt like doing, and wouldn’t have to worry about money. This job affords me a huge amount of freedom, and is probably one of the closest avenues I’ll reasonably come towards that dream.

Hallows: I don’t think I’d want to do anything else specifically, but I’d like to write something which isn’t porn and have it be as well received as Sanguine Rose.

Sexy_KG: Do your parents know about any of it 🙂 ?

Duski: Yup! For me, I’m honest about things. I helps me have a good peace of mind. But I recognise I’m lucky that I can be honest about it and not receive any judgement.

Hallows: Nope. I don’t think they’d get it really. Some of my family knows I’m writing something with adult themes, but they don’t know how adult it is.

This was fun to answer, thank you KinkyGaming for the interview!

(Sexy_KG: Even though Duski a.k.a. Dusky appears to have an identity crisis in picking vowel, you can still enjoy their sexy works)

You can find the DuskyHallows creative duo and their sexy Sanguine Rose adventure over at:

“We’re down to chat about anything and answer any questions.”