Hard Alley's Retroville!

Hard Alley is coming to an end, forever, on Nov 16.

Hard Alley, one of SL's longest running sites, and the first, original dirty urban sex roleplay sim, is over after over 8 years.  There is no future for Hard Alley.

But it DOES have a PAST!

We are pleased to announce Hard Alley's RETROVILLE, a beautiful, modern city set in the 1950s.  This is Hard Alley before it BECAME Hard Alley.  Before all the corruption and decay set in.  There will be many familiar landmarks, although they will be mesh and look 100 times better than the old prim-based buildings.  Lynden Labs now stands towering above the entire city, offering hope of a fabulous future of scientific wonders!  The Hard Alley Social Club is a classy, upscale establishment for the cream of society, and not the sleazy strip club we all know today.  Retroville College is a modern seat of academia, and not the run-down Reform School of present day Hard Alley.

There are also many new places in Retroville, giving players plenty of opportunities to explore, play, and find a place to fit in.  There's a new bank, police station, museum, casino, and much, much more!

Yes, Retroville is a gleaming example of a city full of hopes and dreams!

But we know what happens... we know what the future holds for Retroville.  Underneath all the chrome and neon, a darkness is growing.  Behind the picture perfect suburban lawns and the nicely tailored suits of the offices lies a city of greed and lust and deceit.

This is where YOU come in.

Retroville offers a fun, new, and different roleplaying opportunity.  You've roleplayed pimps and hookers and sleazy bikers at Hard Alley and other sims, but can you roleplay a suburban housewife who's secretly cheating on her husband with the Chief of Police?  Can you roleplay the busy executive who's staying late at the office for some board room fun with his secretary?  Will you be the waitress at the diner who's just trying to make ends meet by offering "special service" out back?

It's up to you to make Retroville work.  It won't matter how pretty and well built the sim is if no one is there to enjoy it.  Start thinking of your roles now!

Notes:

Future blog articles will cover each of the four main districts in Retroville, and much more.

Retroville begins construction Nov 17, and will open to the public sometime in December.  The Hard Core Strip Club WILL REMAIN OPEN during the build.

Final thoughts...

We could have just rebuilt Hard Alley in mesh and called it a day.  It would have been fast and easy to plop down a bunch of cookie-cutter buildings off marketplace and said, "here's the new sim".

But that's not who we are.  We wanted to be different, and give you something better.  Two extremely talented builders, Jaimy Hancroft of Death Row Designs, and Tito DeVinna of Rule 34, have volunteered to build it for you from scratch, and it will be about 80% all-new, original mesh.  What they've done so far is amazing.

It's new.  It's different.  It's yours.  It's called Retroville, and we hope you will enjoy it.

It Begins!

This is it! The End of Hard Alley!  Starting this weekend, I have begun deleting large parts of the Alley.  Gone is the Reform School!  And the Biker Bar!  And the Beach... the Jail... the Porn Studio... the Parking Garage... the Frat House... the Boiler Room... the Hospital... the Motel... and the rubble that used to be City Hall.

From now until Nov 17, only the central core of Hard Alley will remain.  The Strip Club will remain open, as well as plenty of areas to roleplay and enjoy, such as the Diner, the Asylum, the Back Door Club, Lynden Labs (what's left of it), and more!

The Cemetery remains until we have had our Annual Halloween Party (always the BEST party in SL)!  THIS IS WHERE WE WILL DISCLOSE THE FULL PLAN FOR THE NEW HARD ALLEY!  DO NOT MISS THIS PARTY!

After the Halloween Party comes Erotigacha 3 - Amorous Autumn, our quarterly adult gacha fair! 

After that?  It's the end of everything!  It all gets deleted!  Every last prim of the original Hard Alley!

We will close the sim off to the public, except for a temporary Strip Club up in the sky while we rebuild below.

The Strip Club will actually be very important during this rebuild period, as we will use it to adjust people to the new Hard Alley!  It should be fun if we can pull it off.  lol.

Here are some pics of the old Hard Alley areas that are gone...

Hospital

Frat House

Boiler Room

Parking Garage

Beach

Porn Studio

Motel

Alleyway

Jail

Reform School

Reform School Gym

Biker Bar

Alleyway

While We Wait...

While we are all waiting for the new Hard Alley, Spirit, Jadelyn and I thought we would do some "teaser" pics.  Each of them has a meaning and a purpose.  Of course, I'm not going to tell you what that is, otherwise it wouldn't be teasing.

Please enjoy.

Good Things Come...

Yes, the new Hard Alley is being delayed.  The builders are taking great care to create a really awesome place for you to play, and that takes time.

This rebuild is not going to be easy.  We're not taking a bunch of mesh buildings off Marketplace and slapping them down and calling it a rebuild.  The new Hard Alley will be nearly 90% original mesh buildings, created specifically for Hard Alley.

Some of these new buildings are easier than others and take less time.  But the iconic buildings... the Club... Lynden Labs... City Hall... the Burlesque Hall... those are more complex and require more thought and planning and modeling and texturing.

I hope you will bear with us as we progress.  Our builders, Jaimy Hancroft of Death Row Designs and Tito DeVinna of Rule 34, are doing an incredible job and it is obvious from the work they have done that this is a labor of love for them.

I wish I could share more with you.  I wish I could show you what they have accomplished so far, because it's amazing and I can't wait to see it all finished.

I can tease you with one shot... one glimpse at the new Hard Alley.  I hope it makes you go "Wow!" like it did me when I first saw it.

Good things come to those who wait.

The Destruction of Hard Alley

During the War with the Faction, many parts of Hard Alley were burned down or destroyed.  Spirit Eleonara did a series of pictures showcasing the destruction...

First Strike:  City Hall

The Burning of the Brothel

Random Destruction

Jailbreak!

Attack on the Strip Club

The Fall of Lynden Labs 

The end of Hard Alley brings with it many questions... What will happen next?  How will Hard Alley recover?  Is there a future for Hard Alley?

The answers to these questions is coming... soon.

Why Do Things Have to Change?

Big changes are coming to Hard Alley.

But why?

I've been getting that question a lot lately.  That, and things like, "Why do things have to change?  Why can't you just leave things as they are?  What's going to happen to my favorite spot?"

The basic answer is that we have to change or close, and I'd prefer not to close.

Hard Alley just celebrated its 8th Anniversary in July.  What began as something new and different and original in SL is now looking very old and common.  When we started, Hard Alley was the first and only dirty urban RP sex sim.  Now, you can't swing a dead meeroo without hitting one.

The basic answer is that Hard Alley is not exciting anymore and no one comes to play.

So I had a choice.  I could close the sim.  After all, 8 years is something to be proud of, right?  Very few places in SL have lasted that long.  I could close the sim and relax for the first time in 8 years and no longer have the stress of running a sim and trying to keep people entertained.

Or I could change the Alley and try to make it fun and interesting again and give people something they can enjoy.

Honestly... closing was looking like the best option.  After all, rebuilding the sim in all-mesh might make it look as good as some other sims, but it wouldn't change the fact that it would just be one of dozens of dirty urban sex sims.  I was very much less than enthused about that idea.

I had been thinking about ways I could change things to make it fun and different again, but it was just too much effort and would have been too difficult to make it work.

Then Jaimy Hancroft of Death Row Designs had an idea.

Her suggestion was very similar to what I had in mind, but her idea would work.  It wouldn't be as hard to do, and more importantly, she was volunteering to do all the mesh building herself!

I was excited again!  For the first time in years, I was excited about the potential that Hard Alley had to offer.  If we are able to pull this off, it will bring something new and different and fun back to Second Life and offer people a new reason to come enjoy Hard Alley again.

Of course, there are detractors.  The people who don't like change.  The ones who don't want me to change one thing or another.

I'm sorry, but things are changing.  They have to.  It's still going to be Hard Alley, but not like you know it.  Not every thing you love about Hard Alley will survive the change.

I will be brutally honest here.  The people coming around now and telling me not to change haven't come to play in Hard Alley in years.  Maybe if they HAD been here, we wouldn't have to change, but they haven't, and an empty sim doesn't pay the $295 a month in tier that the Linden's extort from me.

The people I am listening to are the ones who have been faithful and stuck with me through thick and thin.  The ones who have really shown their love for Hard Alley even in the bad times.

It will still be Hard Alley... kind of.  Just changed.

Announcing Erotigacha 2 - Sinful Summer!

Have I really not posted ANYTHING since the Spring Erotigacha opened?  Damn... I am slacking!

Hard Alley is pleased to announce Erotigacha 2 - Sinful Summer, an Adult Gacha Fair!  Read more about it on my Erotigacha blog.

EROTIGACHA IS OPEN!

EROTIGACHA IS OPEN!  SL's first Adult Gacha Fair!  60 Designers!  Nearly 100 Gacha Machines! 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Hard%20Alley/113/140/21

Be sure to remove as many attachments as you can!  Scripts will be limited to reduce lag!

Check out some of the awesome gachas available on the Erotigacha Blog!

Erotigacha!

Erotigacha is an adult gacha fair sponsored by Hard Alley, running from April 18 to May 3, 2014.

For more information, check out the official Erotigacha blog.

If you are addicted to gachas like I am, you'll want to follow the blog.  We hope to make Erotigacha a regular event running 3-4 times a year.

Click to see the list of participants

A New Year, A New Direction...

The year 2013 ended badly.  I had a costly series of repairs (washing machine, hot water heater, heater, new tires, new battery, etc) that burned up nearly $2,500 that I didn't have.  My wife was let go from her job just 4 days before Christmas.  Our son's cat was diagnosed with cancer (luckily he made it through Christmas, although he passed just last week).  And that was just Real Life stuff.  Shit happened in Second Life, too.

But 2014 is a new year and things are changing (at least in SL)!

I have more people helping out in the Alley, to take some of the load off me and to help give me some fresh ideas.  Jadelyn McAuley and Ryann Hendrassen are now Co-Managers of the Hard Core Sex and Strip Club.  Jackson Greycloak is their DJ Manager.  They've hired several new DJs and Strippers and are filling the schedule up and keeping the parties going.  They all have a lot of great things planned and it's going to be a lot of fun for everyone so I hope you all come out and party with us!

Jadelyn, Ryann, and Jackson

Hard Core also has a new look and a sex lounge area.  Everything is warmer and more inviting and, as always... anything goes!  Hard Core also has, courtesy of Spirit Eleonara, the newest Intan version 3 Couples Dance ball, full of hot dances and even hotter sex!

Hard Core Sex & Strip Club

There are major changes coming to the rest of Hard Alley as well!

The old Gang Bang Clubhouse is gone!  It's been bulldozed and replaced by a Seedy Motel, an underground Boiler Room, and a brand new Frat House.  You can rest assured that the horny guys of Delta Iota Kappa (DIK) will be partying hard with the girls of the Reform School (and any other girls that happen to wander too close).

DIK Frat House and the Hard Luck Motel

Thanks to some generous donations from some of SL's best designers, there are a lot of other brand new mesh sex items replacing the old prim ones.  New sex bleachers in the Reform School Gym, new Office Cubicles in Lynden Labs, and a new Meth Lab in the Boiler Room.  These are just a few of the changes that have been made already, and we have much more planned for 2014.

As always, if it's in Hard Alley, you can probably fuck on it.

Roleplaying is getting a boost as well.  We'll be continuing the Hard Alley vs Faction war and NOTHING is scripted or pre-planned, so ANYTHING can happen and I'm excited to see how it all unfolds.  We'll be working to get RP started in several other areas of the Alley as well.

Hard Alley Roleplaying

The Hard Alley website will be getting a whole new look to it as well!  A professional web designer has volunteered her services to re-do the site completely and bring it up to date!  It will be THE place to go to get the latest schedule of Hard Alley events and RP information.  Look for more on this major change very soon!

There have been some personal changes for me as well in this new year.  Some of you have already noticed that after 2 years Naiya and I broke up just before Christmas.  While all break ups are rough, Naiya has found new happiness and I wish her the best.  Nai and I remain good friends, and she will still be coming around the Alley occasionally.

And that brings me to the biggest change in my SL...  Spirit Eleonara.  Many of you already know Spirit from Hard Alley where she DJs and runs the Brothel and the popular Seams and Dreams Burlesque Show.  Some of you may know her from her amazing photography work on Flickr and on her own blog "Images from... the Spirit World".  Spirit has been of invaluable help to me around the Alley over the last few years, and for the last year she was also a beloved Pet to Naiya and I.

With all the changes that have occurred in the last month, Spirit and I have grown even closer and have realized just how much we care for each other.  I love Spirit, and she loves me... despite that fact that I'm a completely rotten bastard.  *grins*  I am hers and she is mine.

Spirit and Hard

2014 is going to be a great year at Hard Alley.  I hope you are all there with us.

(Pictures by Spirit Eleonara, Jadelyn McAuley, and Hard Rust)