Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #1

I’m going to begin this with a very weird starting point but: Did you know Venezuela has complete control on incoming foreign currency?

Like, if you were from the United States, and wanted to buy something from say… a European website, upon purchase your bank would be able to go “well, at the time you purchased it the Euro was worth this much USD, so we’re gonna debit that plus an extra fee.”

Or if you were traveling to Japan, not only can you take out cash on 90% of ATMs (the 10% outlier being all the small banks where currency exchange is a premium service), there’s even stations that let you exchange cash into Yen at basically any high-transit spot.

This sounds obvious to many of you. Insultingly so, even. But to me it’s something that still amazes me.

I’m not gonna go deep into the details because this roundabout intro to effectively illustrate a point is already a big enough detour out of nowhere, but bear with me.

When it comes to Venezuela you have to abandon “common sense” or “sensible reasons”. If you go to another country no local bank will allow you to just convert currencies. Moreover, if you had an incoming transfer in foreign currency; the bank would instead convert it into Bs. (That’s the abbreviation of Bolivares, fitting, I know).

That last point doesn’t sound too bad… until you learn that the government never really acknowledged the proper rate of USD to Bs. because, like many other things, if they properly updated the rate then it would become evident that things weren’t under control.

In practical terms what this means is that at a hypothetical point of ultra-volatile inflation, through the “official” channels, 100 USD would net you 40.000 Bs. at a time where a 2 liter bottle of Coca Cola was around 400.000 (for the sake of scale, not actual historic numbers).

So of course, if you wanna make a living making video games on the international stage you’re stuck not being able to do anything, since most marketplaces require you to submit a bank account to which they’ll send your earnings.

Now, Venezuelans had access to USD… kinda… sorta…

Basically every adult would have access to an “allowance”, a set amount of USD you could “convert”. After a silly amount of annoying paperwork clearly there to filter everyone but those REALLY set on getting access to it, you’d be able to use a certain amount of USD.

In short, instead of being able to just convert currency you’d have the “right” to convert a specific allotted amount of USD per year. I have unreliable memories of my parents having access to either 300 or 500 USD each, while I clearly remember my cousin speaking in awe about the time when the allowance was 1000.

Through one such allowance I was able to verify a PayPal account, through which I was able to purchase the odd Steam game here and there after pestering my parents for a long while. And as you might imagine, when you had at most like 400 USD per year per household total, spending 5 on Terraria was like foregoing your christmas present for that.

Thank God I’m still playing Terraria to this day, then.

So with that stage set, imagine this: You and the buddy you met in college finally graduated from that god forsaken Graphic Design course. You now have time to make games; a decent amount before it starts to feel to you like you’re leeching off your parents (since they didn’t seem to mind). However, whenever you looked into how to monetize it, you ran into the same problem: Needing a foreign bank account. A PayPal account wouldn’t suffice (this was also in 2014 so outside of Payoneer, common currently used alternatives like Zelle weren’t available).

So of course you go find some peeps that you know are also Venezuelans and have made a living off of games or similar stuff and ask them how they managed to do it – only for them to reply that they just had family in Miami that opened a bank account for them.

Well fuck us, I guess.

But you get nowhere sulking so we decided to keep making games. We’ll get some experience and hey, some chance will arise.

At that point in time we were kinda burnt out with another project that was too big, too bloated, too… goalless, and we noticed that by making shorter games we learned more, so we were always in the lookout for game jams. We imposed one on ourselves right after graduating and we liked the result. We felt like we were improving by leaps and bounds.

So, looking for the next game jam to participate in, we found one called “Cyberpunk Jam” on a website called itch.io and OH SHIT you can get paid with PayPal?! Moreover, you can just hold the earnings and send the payment later, so even if we didn’t have one we could just… hold the earnings until then?

So we entered the Cyberpunk Jam and there were already many games ready. In all of them you were a hacker, or a rebel hero, or whatnot. And this is the part of the story where I explain a key element from Kiririn and I, something that’s been our bane and our boon… our baboon if you will.

You see, we’re compulsive contrarians. We don’t like to do what others do, like what others like, we’re never gonna raise a ruckus about it but we ARE gonna have “if everyone’s going left let’s go right” as our initial instinct.

And so, when we saw everyone making games where you’re Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, our instinct was to think “what if you were the lowly dude that’s trying to have a peaceful day and some asshole’s car crashes through your wall and he leaves and now you’re left with a destroyed wall that nobody will fix for you?”.

The idea of a bar immediately came to mind. Thinking about stories set in a bar I immediately thought back to the manga Bartender by Araki Joh (a reference that WILL come back to be relevant in a later day, so look forward to that). In that one the bar was called Eden Hall, so I started thinking about other mythical paradises and the obvious one was Valhalla with the alcohol association.

But just “Valhalla” would be awful for Search Engine Optimization. We had been writing an anime blog together for 3 years at that point and while in college we treated it like a serious attempt at something we could make a living out of, and SEO was one of the things we always keep in mind to this day.

So the -halla part immediately looped back to Eden Hall. Perhaps Hall A is the first Hall of a thing. Perhaps VA-1 can be like a license plate number… but VA-1 sounds too much like VH1 so let’s go with VA-11 instead; that’ll differentiate it further.

I originally had in mind some sort of bar in a futuristic war zone, and the clients you’d get would be like… some really cheery soldier that truly believes their cause, then some sort of mercenary that sells his services to the highest bidder, and finally some accountant that’s had a rough day balancing books – maybe frustrated at how expensive a single grenade is in a micro scale.

To fit the more urban setting usually associated with Cyberpunk Kiririn pushed instead for a small bar in a city. With this change the soldier became Dorothy, fitting the role of sex worker (though the soldier concept would later evolve into Sei). The mercenary… yeah, he could stay and he became Jamie. And then the accountant became a hacker and thus Alma happened (the character remained the same, only the profession changed).

Turns out we had something special in our hands. This jam game had gathered more traction than anything else we had done combined (except in the official Ren’Py forums where a thread I made about it remained barren for YEARS). People were even PAYING for it!

Words cannot describe the visceral feeling still echoing inside of me when we saw that someone paid a whole ass 25 USD for this thing we made in like a week when the game was, for all intents and purposes, free with the choice to tip us.

People gave us money for this. We COULD make money making games! I always joke that when we saw the first 5 bucks someone paid for the game, that was the moment we “tasted blood”.

So what originally started as a plan of making a lot of small games until we had money to fund a bigger one quickly morphed into a project worth exploring on a bigger scale. We even got messages from people interested in financing us to start the production proper; a publisher sort of thing.

Life has the weirdest turns sometimes.

So some of you might be wondering, after all those opening paragraphs, how did we manage to make a living off of games?

By putting a lot of trust in one of the few publisher on God’s green earth that wouldn’t have run away with the money and actually wanted to see us succeed.

It’s wasn’t as simple as blind trust, mind you. Ysbryd had already put forth an offer that worked as a sign of good faith, and as you can tell from this whole saga the worst case scenario was “get no money at all” vs “someone runs away with the money we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise”.

Which is… a frustrating turn of irony. We can’t offer practical advice to anyone in a similar situation to us, it makes us no different from the people that told us “just have family in the US bro, anyone can do it.”

Words cannot express how grateful I am every single day that I wake up on how, despite all the strife and pains everything aligned in the best way possible… and words also cannot express the weird looming pressure that the crudest answer to “how we made it” was “we got insanely lucky in a situation where everything was literally against us like holy shit how are we still alive.”

Wanna see what the fuss was about on that fateful early 2014? You can still download the original prototype here. You can tell it’s OLD because the credits say Dangemu, the name we used for game making before we settled on “Team Siscon Alice” “Sukeban Games”.

The history behind KIDS is honestly less complicated but I feel like it shows the sort of people that we are.

It’s a short one. Around early 2018 we were preparing to promote one of the new ports of the game and since it was near April 1st I figured “hey, what if we promote it via April Fool’s”. The idea was shot down, but the drive to make SOMETHING for April Fools was intense enough that I was able to code and write the game in about a week just in time for April 1st. We really wanted to shitpost THAT MUCH.

KIDS is a game I hold near and dear to me because while VA-11 Hall-A’s development was long and eventful, KIDS was just such a spur of the moment thing that for years I wondered ”Where did that Fer go?”. Where was the Fer that wanted to shitpost for April Fool’s so hard that he made a whole ass game that’s still quite enjoyable in just a week.

In truth? That same year that Fer moved to Japan, learning the ropes of living alone in a land where he didn’t speak the language, and got a bad case of The Burnouts while  working on a sequel that I still see people demanding like they paid in advance for it and we owe it to them as if the first person to whom its lack of release stings isn’t the person they’re complaining to.

All in all, taking about 4 years to get to a point where I’ve healed just enough to both enjoy the fruits of our hard work without guilt, and where that itch to make things is strong enough to push me to actually make them is a good enough milestone. I think.

KIDS is a fun read, if I do say so myself; especially side to side with the prototype because you can compare my writing in early 2014 with my writing in early 2018. You can even compare it to these posts if you wanna keep the 4 year checkup going.

You can get it here by the way.

Tomorrow we start with the game proper, more specifically with the first day of “Prologue” and that one’s another interesting story.