VA-11 Hall-A, one year later

VA-11 Hall-A is one year old today, which also means Sukeban Games is on its third anniversary, though me and Lark have been making games for way longer than that.

Anyway, we are people of few words here at this company, despite the type of games we are known for. I don’t think we are exactly transparent either, even if we did unveil a game as soon as we finished its prototype.

Good thing we are not going to do that again.

We like to keep things for ourselves it seems, but one thing we can’t keep to ourselves is our huge gratitude towards each and every single one of you reading this. The success of VA-11 Hall-A is something that was beyond our wildest projections. To give you some perspective, my initial sales target for the game was something like 6000 copies.

The game has sold more than 150k copies since.

 

We didn’t even think we would get much fanart or anything of the sort, yet all our social networks are filled to the brim with wonderful fan work from all over the world, including cosplay and even a small doujinshi. That’s something I just can’t describe; it’s an otherworldly feeling. We are used to be the fans, not the creators getting all sorts of homages to their work.

And well, I don’t need to say that these sales numbers pretty much sealed our destiny. We’ll keep making games for a long time, so if you loved Valhalla, you’re in luck, or something like that.

God, actually, there’s a lot of stuff in my head I want to write about but I don’t even know where to begin. I feel like writing a big, thick and sweaty post-mortem about the game’s development, but at the same time I just want to go back to work and shitpost at the Valhalla Discord, which is like 1 year old too.

I guess the less I can do is talk about the future.

We have three games currently in production

Plus whatever quick stuff we come up with. We can’t say much about them because… well, it’s too fucking early. Valhalla was unveiled at day 0, so when it took like two years to be finished people were already lumping us with the likes of Wolf Girl With You, which came out around the same time as Valhalla funnily enough.

 

What I want to say is that we’ll properly announce our new projects once we feel we have enough to show them, and are closer to their respective release dates. That way we won’t disappoint anyone with delays and all that jazz. We’ve learned a lot about the process of making games, and it would be silly to repeat the same mistakes that dragged down Valhalla’s progress, which existence is already a damn miracle considering we didn’t know shit about Game Maker (the program we used) back when we started, much less about finishing a full-length commercial videogame.

I just want to make sure everyone’s expectations are on check.

Oh, and before anyone says three projects are too much for two people; don’t worry about it. Just like Valhalla, we’ll adapt the scope of the games to whatever we can make at the moment, and being a company of two people doesn’t really mean we can’t get some extra help from cool freelancers. We are OK, seriously, we can handle it. We released a commercial videogame without leaving Venezuela in the progress, so nothing is impossible for us.

Our next big project will certainly surprise everyone, maybe due to its unusual genre, or maybe its graphical fidelity, we don’t know! We just like to experiment a lot with what videogames can do as we (hopefully) demonstrated with VA-11 Hall-A, so we hope you’re as excited as us, even if you have no idea what the heck we’re talking about.

I guess that would be all. I swear I had more in my head rather than just a bunch of THANK  YOU’s to give, but I guess this will do for now.

Nos vemos en Tres Alicias, and let’s hope the header picture makes sense in less than a year for all of you.

 

PS: I haven’t forgotten about my promise of official lewds if we sold 100k copies, I’m just practicing some more to do it justice. SERIOUSLY, STOP THE BULLYING.

PS 2: Valhalla will keep seeing some more updates in the future, mostly to add additional languages, but don’t expect new content.