Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 is upon us

Daily VA-11 Hall-A, more commonly known by its tag #DailyVA11HallA is a tradition that has been going on… for a while now.

To put simply, you play each VA-11 Hall-A day in chronological order. The full game starts on December 13th and goes through to December 31st, with the Anna Epilogue taking up January 1st. In addition to this, the Anna Demo takes place on the 12th, and the Prologue days take place from the 9th to the 11th. But as a bonus we reserve December 8th for revisiting the original prototype and the April Fool’s spin-off.

And this year, the date and day of the week will align with its in-game counterpart, meaning if you follow #DailyVa11HallA you will start on Tuesday 13th just like in the game. Something that hasn’t happened since the year the game was released, in 2016.

Yes, the game is 6 years old, 8 if you count when it started production. And no, it was not planned that way from the get-go, the content was actually done by the end of 2015 but took extra time in testing and proofreading.

Moreover the original reasoning was that I wanted to have the game start on Tuesday the 13th because it was gonna be a rough month for Jill and where we come from, like with many cultures influenced at some point directly by the Romans, Tuesday the 13th is the unlucky day instead of Friday the 13th.

And this last paragraph should illustrate what #DailyVA11HallA is to us. While it’s a fun thing to do with the people that still hold our silly little game near and dear to their hearts, it’s also a chance to share development stories.

If you asked us for development stories or inspirations about VA-11 Hall-A any given day we’d talk your ear out for hours, and if you asked again the next day we’d still have stories to tell. This game and the support we’ve gotten from it have changed our lives in ways that I could write on and on about for way too long and with way too much information for anyone’s comfort.

More importantly though, I feel like those stories go a long way into demystifying the creative process.

My favorite stories aren’t the big statements like the tale of Disney being inspired by talking to a mouse on a long night of work (which is by all accounts just a fable he told to build up his image), but tales like how Akira Toriyama made Frieza change to his final form so fast because his second form was such a hassle to draw. The development stories that show to the world that creative types aren’t some super breed of people that do the impossible and the exalted, but assholes that don’t know what they’re doing but learn to not show it too much in the final product.

The creative process is messy and chaotic. One of the reasons people keep quiet about it is because if one comes clean about how much was planned and how much was a happy accident then, believe you me, anyone to ever hold a pen in human history would look awfully irresponsible.

But that’s why I love talking about it so much. Not to enforce a singular reading of the final product but because I’m the only loser I know that has endured Girls Bravo and I made a whole character as a nod to it that only I know is there and affects nothing but the moment I tell people about it they all give me the same look as if they’re talking to a madman.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So Daily VA-11 Hall-A has been, for a few years now, a fun tradition that lets me share that side of things with you all, which made it all the more frustrating the last two years when I wasn’t able to follow through with it all as I would’ve wanted.

But thankfully I’m in a good enough mental spot where I can go back to this tradition this year, just in time for the calendar to align.

But what can I do to make it special that doesn’t take too much time?

Well, I could talk about that in blog post form, away from the risks of Twitter collapsing one day out of nowhere, I’d be repeating myself probably, but it’d be archived in a safer place, let’s just ignore the period where all our websites went only from a server-side snafu.

But then I thought about how the access to a longer form format might make it easier to explain some points that 280 characters might make difficult.

We’ll see.

If you wanna participate, keep an eye out for this blog on the 8th and we’ll tell you where to start, how to start, and some trivia related to whatever is going to be played that day.

So let’s have some fun!