Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #22

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On a second thought, let’s not go to Glitch City. ’tis a silly place.

So! Worldbuilding huh…

People seem to like what we did with that and I certainly have opinions on the matter so let’s talk about it.

I think the best advice I could give to anyone starting out (assuming not much proper field experience and by extension established style or workflow) would be to “start from the end”, by which I mean creating a setting with all the concepts you want and worrying about how those concepts are built into it later.

There’s two main reasons for this. 

The first one is to inform the storylines and characters. You can worry about not explaining details because, realistically, there’s a lot of absurdity in our world that we just take for granted. If you’re making a world where there’s a species of lizard people living alongside modern day humans, just make that a fact of life and worry about the hows and whys later. Not to mention that in good worldbuilding all elements should have an interplay between each other, so just having the general idea of a bunch of things might make them feed into each other.

Which leads me to the second reason: It’s all too easy to lose yourself on the granularity of details. In that earlier example you might want to make a story where lizard people living alongside humans is just an incidental thing, but then get sidetracked by tales about how that peace was achieved and when you get to that point, just… make THAT the story instead of backstory.

But let me use an example in VA-11 Hall-A: Cat Boomers.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past, Stella is one of the earliest characters we ever made. So early in fact that she makes a really tacked on cameo on the original Ren’Py version of Prologue (so tacked on that we removed it for the version in the full game and nothing of value was lost). So let me guide you through the motions of how the concept of Cat Boomers happened.

• Oh hey, catgirl design that’s cool. Sure, let’s just add them to the setting why not?
• She looks rich, like a Yakuza Princess type, doesn’t she?
• It’d be kinda lame if catgirls were just a human subspecies, what if they were catgirls from some sort of mutation? That would be metal.
• We mentioned “Nanomachine Rejection” in the Anna demo, what if the cat ears are from a mutation related to that?
• What if it’s connected to rich people? We do want to create a setting where everything’s possible but you’re limited by money, what if the mutation is from some treatment that only the rich could afford?
• Hm… that sounds like something that would become a fad, I can see rich people or people that wanna pretend to be rich making their kids go through the treatment just for the aesthetic, almost like a symbol of status

This line of reasoning led to things like asking why it became a fad to begin with, or how having the cat ear mutation would basically mark people as a target in a place as unsafe as Glitch City, or how the medicinal element has become secondary to the aesthetics to the point many forget it had a medicinal application. I also wanted to add a bit of real world detail by how “Cat Boomer” was originally a term used by the generation of parents that went crazy for the fad but when the fad vanished but the mutation remained the term Cat Boomer went to the ones carrying the mutation.

As you can see, we just started with the concept of having catgirls in the setting and by just asking questions and remembering other elements in the setting we ended up with a full concept that exists intimately tied to other elements of Glitch City specifically.

But there’s a kind of worldbuilding people never talk about. I call it “Invisible Worldbuilding”.

Invisible Worldbuilding isn’t so much “discreet worldbuilding you don’t notice” but rather “things you don’t say but you keep in mind for consistency or to inform character”. For example: We actually have notes for what happened inside the Apollo Trust bank while Sei was trapped in it. We don’t know if we’ll do something with it properly ever, but at the very least we do know what happened inside and that lets us give people very consistent glimpses onto what happened.

But there’s other elements that, even if unspoken, influence the final result. For example: Alma is the middle child of 5 siblings. She has a very small age gap between her oldest siblings but at least 10 years of difference with her younger siblings, and Alma was the only one still living with her parents when the younger two were born. So while Alma is an older sibling by huge margin to two other ones, she was also the baby of the family for a lot of her formative years, so when writing her, even if it’s not explicitly mentioned, I wanted to create that dichotomy of someone that was responsible, but was also babied by her extended family for a long time.

This can even slip into the more explicit worldbuilding in a way, or at least in the “working from the top” approach.

Sei is a name that TECHNICALLY means nothing. Her original character prompt was roughly “Knight Saber cop girl” so my brain went: 

• White Knight
• Knight Saber
• White Knight Saber
• Seibah
• Sei!!!

But then I noticed something interesting about that name (aside from the fact that doubles as a nod to Rei Ayanami with the eventual bandages and blue hair), something that it’s more fun to explain via its final result.

It’s both implied and mentioned many times how Glitch City is a “melting pot” of cultures, but the way I envisioned it was more akin to what happened with the European diaspora in Venezuela. As I was growing up it was extremely commonplace to know someone that came directly from Europe during WW2 (my own paternal grandpa emigrated to Venezuela from Spain when he was 13), and as I grew up it was even more common for the degrees of separation to cause situations where people with suddenly no direct Italian ascendancy had really italian names.

With Sei I imagined that but extrapolated into the future in 207X. The way I imagined it is that Sei’s maternal grandpa (she has her mom’s last name because if you didn’t catch the hint in the game, Sei’s dad was despicable) moved to Glitch City in his youth, but by the time he did he was a third generation immigrant in another different country.

The result is that Sei’s mom carried the Asagiri last name but was as disconnected from Japan as you could be in this world. But she wanted her daughter to have a good name that honored that past, and in looking for names she noticed how the word “Sei” was recurrent in many “nice” words, many readings of “Star” or “Holy” or “Life” and such. And so she named her “Sei” in order for her to embody all of this. Resulting in a name whose meaning is born from a loving mother wanting her daughter to be good and nice, and wanting to honor her heritage in a sincere but slightly disconnected way.

If it isn’t obvious by now, the last paragraph should make evident that I strongly believe in the power of names and the intent they carry with it… you know, in case the full game didn’t make that explicit enough with how learning some characters’ full names is meant to carry impact.

So, you see. We worked backwards from the name into justifying it, but the name then inspired a backstory that, even if you didn’t see in full in the final game, still seeped through.

And all of this might sound contrary to what I’ve been preaching all month about how unplanned things can be, but that’s the funny thing about writing. There’s as much lucky improvisation as there is careful premeditation, the best results lie somewhere in between both.

Alright! Only 3 more to go. I know exactly what two of them will be about, so let’s see what I come up with for tomorrow.