Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #5

There’s an island to the north of Venezuela called Margarita, and when Prologue finally released I was… basically stuck there on family vacation.

Right before the vacation I was asked to make some sort of demo for a small event, and I took the laptop that had become my work station with me to the island because hey, first big game, I had big boots to fill and I felt like maybe I could make the jump to Gamemaker Studio while I was on the trip.

In short: I was too cocky.

Nowadays you can get a really versatile and powerful text framework for free engines like Godot and paid engines like Unity, ones made for “Visual Novels” instead of just for the upteenth Secret of Mana tribute game.

But in 2014 the idea of providing comprehensive text frameworks (by which I mean, ones made with large volumes of text in mind) wasn’t as widespread. 

And even when I managed to find a couple that I was able to sorta kinda make cooperate, I still had to face my lack of proper experience programming. After all, up until then I had been making games in Ren’Py, an engine that provided everything needed from the text framework to the saving system.

And so I found myself often staying back at the residence we were at instead of going out, just to try and have things done by the deadline, while learning a whole engine basically from scratch. And while all this happened I was stuck with very limited cellular data that only seemed to work at late hours of the night, a frame of time where I could only use it to send or receive fixes to this demo instead of enjoying any of the joys of the Prologue that we had just released.

Everyone seemed so happy, and excited, and I was stuck in a rented apartment, only allowing myself to play Terraria for a bit so as to not go mad while I was stuck inside instead of going to the beach.

But regardless of how many years of my life were burned in that week or so (and it’s honestly a surprise I didn’t burn out earlier during production), this demo still needed a story of some sort, so we came up with the idea of a girl that visits the bar and then turns out the bartender (now called Jill since we had decided that we needed a main character set in stone) was talking to herself all along.

A simple twist, predictable even, but I liked the idea that we were crafting a world that was already primed before release for talking dogs AND ghosts.

The girl needed a name though, perhaps a name that was an anagram for something?

…what if her name WAS anagram? Anna… Graem maybe?

It brought to mind Johnny Mnemonic so hey, we might be onto something.

This whole episode would, honest to god, be one of the few regrets I have in life. The stress, the pressure, the angst, the weight put onto me, the days of family vacation and memories that I’ll never get back, the deep annoyance at how the demo was botched once I had sent it.

Would be… if not for the fact that Anna happened because of it.

I can’t say I have favorite characters, because even the smallest one scene characters I’ve made had or did something that I’m very proud of. But Anna has a very specific distinction.

To put simply: Anna is a character that, if I saw anywhere else, I’d be mad that I didn’t come up with the idea.

In fact, I know this to be a fact. Because when Sakamoto Ryoma came out for Fate/Grand Order and I saw that he had Oryu, a girl in a black school uniform that he was basically married to and was always floating near him, I got really upset and jealous because I thought the idea was so cool… until I remembered I had already made a dark-haired girl in a black school uniform that never stopped pestering a stony-faced character.

Actually, the girl I made was gay, and never shut the fuck up, and painted the fourth wall with her comments constantly, and the character she always stalked wasn’t too pleased with her presence, so not only I had already come up with the idea but I had already made the idea the way I would’ve done it if I had seen it elsewhere and decided to copy it.

The thing that you need to understand is that I’m actually more of a fan of fantasy than I am of Sci-Fi; more specifically, a fan of Urban Fantasy (or what more scholarly types would call “magic realism”). So I’ve always approached VA-11 Hall-A like a place where technology is its own sort of mundane magic, not unlike how MegaMan Battle Network and Corrector Yui treated the internet.

So knowing this, the idea of a technological sort of ghost is already something that appeals strongly to that side of things… but then you add to that a personality that’s in-between the more out there ones like Streaming-chan and the more down-to-earth ones like Jill and you have a character that’s always a blast to write, especially when bouncing off Jill (anna edit: She WISH she had anything I could bounce off of).

While we’re at it, Anna has a really fun reference in her character design that isn’t that obvious.

The idea that she’s missing an arm was mainly inspired by Kuukaku Shiba from Bleach. She always made a strong impression on my young teen brain not only because Kubo did his magic on her design, but because the mere visual of a fireworks expert that was missing an arm told a story unto itself, and the fact that Kuukaku was a badass on top of it really opens some really obvious doors about inclusivity for the disabled in the mind of a teenage boy.

And then the anime staff had to be full of COWARDS that gave her a mechanical arm.

And so Anna mentions that she once had a mechanical replacement but no more, because I fight really petty battles with the media I consume and it’s not the first time this has come up, nor will it be the last.

You can play Anna’s episode by clicking on the + button on the title screen, clicking on ANNA and then on DEMO. It’s called the “Anna Demo” because for the longest time it was limited to event show floors and windows users that bought the game at itch.io, in both of those it was called “Anna Special Demo”.

Tomorrow we say goodbye to the + button for a while as we start with day 1 of the full game.