Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #6

日本語版

There’s a saying I heard the other day that I’ve been slightly obsessed with: “The tree remembers, the axe forgets”.

It’s such a flexible and succinct way to express the effects the actions of others have on you. For example I was able to tell a friend about how they moved on while someone from their past still seethed about them that “Trees can always grow back and heal, but a chipped axe will be a blunt tool unless reforged”.

And today while working on this post I thought of yet another variation: “The tree remembers the cut but forgets which axe caused it”.

This is because I just remembered this one video essay that posited that the screen you see upon starting a new game, the one telling you to get some snacks and get comfortable, was us telling any new players that “we’re a really small and humble team, please don’t be too hard on us” or something to that effect.

I can’t remember who the hell said that, but to this day it still makes me chuckle.

I mean, critics are entitled to their opinions just like I am entitled to my opinion of certain criticisms being dumb or irrelevant to our own goals.

For the record, though: we don’t expect nor want people to “go easy” on us because of whatever condition, we didn’t plaster “WE’RE VENEZUELANS, SUPPORT THIRD-WORLD TEAMS” as part of our advertising for a reason, we just never denied where we come from

But anyways… right after that screen, you see another relic of how things were while we were making the game. More specifically: The scale of expectations that we had.

When we were making VA-11 Hall-A, we had an informed but ambitious sales forecast of 10.000 copies total in its lifetime. It recoups the production costs and gives us some money to move onto the next project.

We, uh… sold over 10.000 on its first day on sale on Steam alone.

But this is after the final release, the reason I explain this is to illustrate the mindset we had when we released the game. In our heads the only people that would be interested in our silly Cyberpunk Bartender game were the people that already followed the game from its inception, people that would know who Anna was by the time they saw her on the introduction upon pressing New Game.

The thing that helped us was that the game already had an in medias res (“in the midst of things”) framing, so a random ghost girl was not unlike bar regulars that already knew Jill by the time they first showed up.

You see, we didn’t port the Anna Demo and Prologue days until a year later because we were fixing some of the code to allow for Japanese and Chinese translations, so might as well add that old content that was already written and referenced in the final product while at it. As such, for about a year after release, about 90% of people didn’t have any context as to what the talk about corgis was, or who this anna girl was either.

And I wince upon the mere mention of ports and translations because (at least as of writing this) I can hear people from all corners of the world ready to take the chance and ask for where their translations are, or where the ports for the new OSX are, or where’s the content warning right before Anna jumpscares them showing up in the TV on the back.

VA-11 Hall-A came out in 2016, and as these posts should illustrate, just barely released while at it. Before we think about any extra translations there’s a more pressing matter of turning the game into not-abandonware.

Just for starters, any fix to the OSX problem would require first to port the game to GMS2, where a lot of the functions that make the game tick are obsolete and unusable (chief among them: reading the dialog from txt files), which itself would require a lot of testing to make sure that nothing breaks in the process of merely updating to the new version of the engine.

In fact, that problem arises if you try to open the source code with the last release of GMS 1.4.9 that came out in 2017. It’s THAT annoying.

Also, here’s something that not everyone might know: Porting to OSX requires you to have a Mac. This is because due to the way that OSX works, to port from any non-open source engine (eg: Unity, GMS, Unreal, etc), if you’re not already working on a Mac you need a Mac on the local network to basically compile the game through it. Which is itself a tough investment to make on a whim.

And at that point with so many issues you might as well port to a new engine altogether to be able to make things easier for you in the long run, which obviously takes time, and contrary to what people might think: We HAVE been working on other projects constantly and after all this time asking us to be stuck with more VA-11 Hall-A housekeeping is a tough ask.

Not to mention that also involves the logistics of those changes passing the approval of at least 5 different distributors each with their own requisites and waiting period. And that’s not even counting how we leave the console porting to a porting house which means THEY would need to be up to speed with any new code and major changes.

We love the game to death, but we have other ideas we’re excited about. It isn’t to say that we haven’t thought constantly about the topic or have discussed solutions, just to say that one has to set their priorities.

Long story short: If we’re going to put the effort into updating the game, we’re gonna need to put priorities in places that none of the vocal hecklers will like long before we get to their demands.

This last section of today’s post isn’t aimed at those constantly begging for ports, or translations, or sequels, because they won’t care and keep asking, ignoring any number of posts made on the matter and being just… Not pleasant all around, like that one dude that screamed in my Twitter mentions demanding answers about folders in the source code of the Nintendo Switch version as if the reply is anything other than “why are you telling me you hacked your Switch?”. 

It also isn’t aimed at those that innocently ask because hey, they just saw a post from us for the first time in forever and were curious. If my shoulder hurts and you come pat me on the back to say hi, I might be angry but won’t hold you to any fault for it.

Rather, this is for anyone that comes to these posts because they want insight into the development or characters.

There will hopefully be a time where this last section of the post will have aged like milk and be irrelevant, but as of now the reality of every technical issue with porting given the pace at which technology advances IS a real part of Game Development that isn’t often spoken about, especially when you’re a smaller team.

Uh… yeah, in case somebody didn’t get the memo, we’re not a brand or a big corpo. To this day we’re still a small team and “just hire new people” isn’t quite the solution some startups make it sound like.

And no, that’s not an excuse, it’s just the plain reality of the scale we’re working at.

There’s so much more I could talk about the obsolescence problem, or about the first day of the game, but there’s… at least 18 more posts ahead and I need to pace myself.

If you’re playing along, today is the start of the main game, don’t let Donovan and Ingram gatekeep the rest of the experience off you.

Tomorrow is the second day of the main game and the dynamic entry of a girl nobody expects.