DAILY VA-11 HALL-A 2022 #2

After yesterday’s longer-than-intended-don’t-get-used-to-such-long-writeups tale about the origins of VA-11 Hall-A, we had our mission: to turn that prototype we made into a full product. 

However, it was quickly becoming evident that we needed some sort of buffer, something to tide people over while we finished the final product. And so we decided to make a short story set in whatever world we made for the prototype, a “Prologue” to the full game if you will. That will surely make do, how long can making the full game take afterwards?

Spoilers: It took almost 2 years of nonstop punching, and kicking, and crying, and screaming, and other things.

Prologue is a product of its time. It was written around April or May of 2014, and two notable movements were happening at around that time:

The first was the “no game” movement where people grew more pedantic than usual about “things without fail states” being labeled anything other than a “game”. It might become relevant later, but if nothing just try to imagine releasing a narrative game in that sort of environment.

The second one was a certain targeted harassment campaign that I won’t name so as to not poison this blog’s SEO. But if you know, you know.

Both should paint you a clear image of what sort of… time we were making games in.

It was a time of kids in their early 20s finally catching up to the civil rights movements around the world and of the internet being very VERY noisy.

I mean it still is, but I’m used to the noise now… or maybe the noise made me deaf? Anyway…!

So, in this social climate we wanted to explore that tendency we were seeing revealed in the Games Industry. Like japanese media being dismissed as retrograde and inferior despite often exploring themes that mainstream western media was only then daring to even think about.

Or all the cases of companies being staffed exclusively by pasty white dudes and one pasty white dude with a beanie hat as their diversity hire.

Or the noise The Gamers made for “Women Existing” being a political statement.

You get the idea. Nowadays we have the benefit of the word “chud” (kiri edit: I hate this word. It’s so fucking lame. What ever happened to calling people idiots?) existing to summarize those types all around. It hasn’t disappeared but God Damn if things aren’t better than compared to 8 years ago overall.

So we needed something to make a statement about the futility of systemic racism in an industry of entertainment products that nobody takes seriously despite their deep impact into society at large.

So what if we had a game comp-… NO! A toy company, and it’s manned by… hmmm… race… dogs! They’re all corgis, and they’re able to speak just like Ein in Cowboy Bebop, and they’re also racist, they only hire Pembroke Welsh Corgis specifically, taking issue even with other corgi breeds like Cardigan Welsh Corgis, just like how Americans got really racist against the Irish historically.

Oh yeah, I should probably clarify: In Spanish dog “breeds” are called dog “races” (“razas”), hence why that mental association happened.

Aside from this, I feel like Prologue was the point where we realized just how much freedom we were able to exercise with the genre. 

The prototype was us going against the grain by putting the spotlight on the “side characters” but in Prologue the story is about a toy company manned… err… dogged? By talking corgis and the other main characters are the company’s veterinarian and the company’s errand boy who just happens to be a Lilim.

That’s not “side characters”, not even “background characters”. That’s more like… if Prototype was The Book of Enoch, Prologue was The Book of Cain’s Great-Great-Great-Great Grandson That Became A Wheat Farmer Really Far Away And Never Heard About The Flood.

Even if Betty’s (said veterinarian) arc was her talking about her less than charitable opinion of augmentations, the story was mainly using the Cyberpunk setting as the framework to come up with anything that would facilitate a cool story, something that ended up really coming at the forefront of the main game I feel.

You can play Prologue in the final game by clicking the + symbol at the top left corner of the title screen. If you’re following Daily VA-11 Hall-A only the first day will do, the second one will be relevant tomorrow.

What about the 2014 original? The one the images in this post come from? It’s out there somewhere, I’m sure you can find it easily if you look for it, just like how it isn’t that hard to find a free copy of VA-11 Hall-A if you really want one.

Tomorrow: Expect more dogs, or someone involved with said dogs at the very least.