Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #11

We’ll be back into using shitposts for covers later but this piece from our threateningly amazing @merenge_doll from when we got Jury Selection from the 23rd Japan Media Arts Festival was too fitting not to use

So things got heavy yesterday, and they’re not gonna get any lighter anytime soon. As such let me lighten the mood for now the best way I know how: Bitching about trends in content creation that will eventually, hopefully, coalesce into a concise point  related to our topic at hand.

No promises, though.

So there’s this thing I’ve noticed specifically in video channels dedicated to unused content or beta builds of games (not naming names because… can’t remember and looking through my history for them is not worth the hassle) where they see some unused asset, or discarded element, or idea left on the cutting room floor, and say something to the effect of:

“Probably teasing future DLC?”

Or

“Here’s hoping more developers release beta versions of their games.”

Now, you can infer before I say anything else that I’m about to say that this trend annoys me to kingdom come. And it does, deeply, for reasons I’ll get into briefly. But while you read the rest of this blog post, please remember that you’re reading part 11 (of this specific batch) of a detailed breakdown of the game development process. I don’t hate behind-the-scenes things just because, nor am I against them on principle.

But I’d like to personally ask anyone that says that sort of thing: Why don’t they release the uncut and unedited version of their videos? It’s effectively the same, the only difference is that you can’t decompress a video file to peer through each individual file it had during editing.

More importantly, it might create this impression on the younger minds that an “idea”, a “concept”, a “draft”, is something that’s solid and immutable. That an unused idea, or an unused asset, or an unused concept, is something “wasted”. And it really concerns me about how that might distort what the creative process is like on those starting.

Am I exaggerating? No! I was 20 years old once upon a time, I was the exact kind of piece of shit that parroted whatever reactionary critics were saying without thinking by myself. There’s also that one thing where screenwriters were supposedly unironically making “Cinemasins-proof writing” but I cannot verify that one as much as I can verify being an annoying college kid.

I mean, at least the bullshit I spout nowadays is MY bullshit.

But kids that watch SuperNintendoSteve talk about findings in TCRF of an unused test texture in the files of the latest Pokemon and deciding it must be teaser for a new unused Pokemon that FOR SURE has to be an official Missingno might foster this notion that, “ideas” are a solid thing that is either used as is or wasted. Born from the ether in its final shape.

Lemme tell you a story.

Stella was the second character we ever came up with after we finished Prototype and we headed for Prologue, but before even thinking about it as a concept. In fact, the reason she and Sei are joined by the hip is that for a while they were the only new two sprites we had and when making a test we were like “oh, they look cute together, they’re besties now”.

But that’s not the story, just the setup to let you know Stella came really early in production.

You see, Stella is named Stella after a character I had during high school. Her name was Stella Selene, she constantly had brief flashes of murdering people or doing heinous stuff for seemingly no reason. 

In the story she had a buddy called Vega Luna that was actually able to travel back in time, which she did whenever Stella had one of those episodes, so what Stella saw was glimpses of those alternate timelines before Vega made sure she kept herself in check subtly.

In the real world I had trouble dealing with intrusive thoughts, which had become a big issue since I turned 13… also I was really into Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni.

So at some point of the story in my head (I never wrote things down much back then because nobody I knew liked to read and only accepted the drafts I printed out of politeness), Stella goes too far in her habit of scratching herself to snap back from increasingly stronger “delusions” (scratching my arm to ground myself was a habit I had) and scratches her face so hard she ends up with scars and a messed up eye.

She also had powers where she was able to see the relationships between people as colored ribbons tied between each other and after the scarring incident learns to use it to create weapons and armor.

Did I mention I was 13?

Also no, projecting so much into a girl would not become relevant later in life, no sir.

What’s the point of this story aside from causing psychic damage? Well, when Kiririn showed me Stella’s design for the first time, the whole idea with the messed up eye immediately brought to mind the old Stella and I thought it’d be fun if that portion of 13 year old Fer lived on explicitly through a character.

And I say “explicitly” because Stella Selene didn’t go away, in fact, I’d argue you all saw bits and pieces of her in the final product still.

But it’s tricky for me to tell you how because it’s not straightforward. I didn’t stop thinking about stories from age 13 to age 21. From Stella Selene, from Vega, and from a bunch of other characters came many others from many other stories. Stella Selene herself was an iteration of even older characters from when I was in elementary school.

If I tried I could probably draw a whole genealogy of old OCs that ended up contributing to VA-11 Hall-A characters, but I have already laid my soul bare enough to last me a decade, so instead let me bring up the most recent example I can think of:

Did you know Jill and Dana are split parts of another character?

Did you know that they both come from… Dana?

Confused? Don’t be.

Sometimes I forget that not everyone knows this (again that “we started really small” mindset at play), but Dana predates Sukeban Games. In fact, she kinda predates ME in the sense that she’s actually Kiririn’s character.

He had an anime blog called Zandatsu. For it he created a mascot character called “Zane” after it.

Then after he met me (though he had been working on it beforehand) he started a new blog called Dangeru (name should sound familiar if you’ve played the game), the same mascot character remained but now she had a first name: She was now Dana (after this new page) Zane.

With the passing of years, and the wish to turn Dana into more than just a mascot adorning banners, we developed her into effectively an amalgamation of what we both stood for and thought cool. So Zane (let’s call her that to differentiate this specific iteration) was strong, a rebel, a huge nerd, someone that looked down on The Casuals, and also someone that wouldn’t admit that she liked cute things a lot.

No, you’re not reading wrong. At one point Dana Zane was coy about liking cute things.

When we started making games obviously Zane had to be there. We forgot to add her to the Prototype of VA-11 Hall-A but there was a faceless supervisor she could fit into, so we made her a cameo for Prologue.

Obviously when we started working on the full version of the game she had to be there, we had to expand her role.

And then it happened.

We already had one loser main character, if Zane was her old self it would be kinda redundant… so every self-conscious trait of Zane was taken in by Jill. Jill was the one that (seemingly) looked down on people, Jill was the one that had a hard time expressing what she liked, Jill was the one that was mean, Jill was the one that felt like she didn’t belong anywhere.

And with those traits taken by someone else, Zane was now Best Boss Dana.

It obviously wasn’t THAT linear of a process. Dana’s characterization was already shifting before this, and Jill didn’t spawn directly from her because as we mentioned before the original concept came from other things.

But you get the idea… the idea that no idea is fully discarded or ignored. Don’t let FOMO make you think that the potential perfection of what could’ve been can ever be better than the imperfect certainty of what is.

When you think like that you don’t release anything. VA-11 Hall-A isn’t perfect but it’s our beloved piece of imperfection, dang it.

This post is way longer than it should be, but fuck it, the stage is set and it’s gonna be a while before I have a chance to talk about this.

So, everyone loves the balcony scene in the game, right? I mean, everyone except that one dude that said that a red button with “DRINK!” upset them because of experiences with alcoholics and like… something something tree and axe something.

No, I’m not making that up, I wish I was making that up. When you release a product you see the dumbest shit that I wish I had the power to imagine.

Anyway, for me that whole scene had a personal meaning that I don’t think people had the context for, because that context is the one I just explained here.

There’s the whole part where Dana gets a red and white hoodie from Jill, and the next day Jill is wearing it even though she offered it to Dana as a gift, with Dana commenting that she should keep it.

Red and white hoodie is a clothing piece that Dana uses whenever she’s a non Sukeban mascot. You can see it in the game in Danger/u/, or in one of the Steam trading cards where it’s labeled as “an old photo”.

Writing the balcony scene was an odd feeling for me because, here they were. The old main character we had been working on, and the newer main character that had to hold this new game on her shoulders.

While obviously written in-character, the whole scene to me is a passing of the torch. The old and the new having a heart to heart for the first time without interruptions, Dana handing the reins of Main Character to Jill like in the old Showa Kamen Rider shows where a character only got the title of Kamen Rider after their predecessor deemed them worthy.

While Jill’s infatuation with Dana was more of an organic thing than one we tried to push from the get-go, I think I instinctively wrote Dana more protective of Jill than she would’ve naturally been (eg: “A LOT” instead of “very”) because she’s just looking after the new generation.

There’s more going on in that scene that I won’t detail because this is ALMOST as long as Day 1’s post and I still have like 13 to go or something. 

But needless to say that every day when I see people gush over Dana, I can only feel pride that our girl has outgrown us and is out there in the world breaking the backs of jabronis.

In fact, when we had to make a company for all the logistics and paperwork involved, our first instinct was to, just like the blog before, make the company something that reflected our dear Dana. And that’s how we ended up with Team Siscon Alice Sukeban Games.

If you’re playing along, today is day 6 of the main game.

Tomorrow… well… let’s hope I don’t go as long because it’s a long week ahead.