Game starts on Tuesday 13th and the 13th day of this event is a Tuesday too! nice!
A while ago I made a joke about “The no game movement” and today let’s talk about that whole thing and how it affected us.
For those that weren’t there, let me explain.
Starting around 2014 and even quite deep into 2018 I noticed this trend where certain crowds online would get really pedantic about the classification of something as a “game” as some sort of honor that not everyone was worthy of.
You know, “game”, the term that others usually disparaged on the grounds that it infantilized their work by likening it to disposable entertainment.
This crowd had a really silly elitist streak where they’d see something where all you do is explore a story while you walk around and declare it wasn’t a game because you couldn’t get a game over from getting shot in the head. Or see a text-heavy game where all you do is make choices and talk to others, and declare it wasn’t a game unlike this other game where all you do is make choices and talk to others but you could get a game over from getting shot in the head.
No they wouldn’t count Visual Novels with Bad Ends and death flags as games. That would make too much sense!
It was silly, and like any silly movement in niche spaces it got even sillier once those crowds started using it as just a poorly disguised insult they could throw at the “lesser games”.
After VA-11 Hall-A was released I saw oh so many people doing olympic level mental gymnastics to justify that VA-11 Hall-A was “an experience” or “a powerpoint slide” instead of “a game”.
Shout outs to a big website I won’t name where one of their chief complaints with the game was “clicking too much”.
And yeah, in case you haven’t caught the hint, I’m kind of a petty person. Kind of.
Nowadays I can afford to be petty. I have the experience and tangible results to stand behind my choices and inform them. But back then?
So imagine you’re making your first game, it’s not just you but also others financially invested in it, and there’s a very vocal crowd telling you that what you think is good is actually not even a game.
You might think it’s silly, but what name or voice do you have to fight against it?
At this stage we didn’t know what to do. We thought maybe jumping between clients would be an alternative, there was an iteration of Prologue where how much story you could see was dependent on your score, there was even the nagging feeling of making the whole screen shake when you add ingredients and that the mixer let out pixel-y smoke after finishing a drink.
There is a version of VA-11 Hall-A out there in the multiverse with the most bog standard early 2010s indie game explosion sounds when you press serve and I wonder what that world looks like.
The other problem was also that, at its time, there was nothing like VA-11 Hall-A in the market.
And no, I’m not bragging, I’m still annoyed by that.
If you wanna make a platformer you have a million games you can use as a model. RPGs, FPSs, action games, walking sims. Normally if you wanted to make a game you’d have decades of history to follow.
But us? It’s not that there weren’t other bartending games, in fact we were constantly pointed in the direction of Bar Oasis, but in those games, the mixing of drinks was different and for different goals. In those it was all about being swift and clean, about mixing the right ingredients in a timely manner. And the more we thought about maybe having that approach the more it felt like we were betraying the core ideal of relaxation we wanted to have with the game to begin with.
Not to mention that our goal was to have something where mixing was an expression of the player, and there’s a logical contradiction between “want the player to serve anything” and “fail states”.
Like I said, silly thing all around.
“But Fer, you guys had it figured out by the Prototype!” Yeah, but it was that: A Prototype, and as such it was easier to chalk it off as just a stepping stone for something bigger and better. WHAT that bigger and better looked like though? Well… in that position many would’ve come to completely different conclusions.
What nobody tells you about “trailblazing” is that you live in constant fear from not knowing what lies ahead. And when it’s your first proper product? Your debut to the larger world? Something you don’t have a frame of reference of it others might like it or a precedent that reassures you that you’re on the right track design-wise?
…yeah, kinda stressful. Kinda.
The fight against this stigma did actually inform some of the more beloved choices in the game. But that’s a story for another day.
If you’re playing along today’s the 8th day of the full game.
There’s a bit more to the gameplay as suggested, but after tomorrow I need something lighthearted in my pocket to balance the mood.
Lying in bed wondering how you feel about people who mod games. Does it add or subtract from the experience? There are some who’d say that modding someone’s work is denigrating it while others claim it’s enriching the experience by adding your own thoughts and ideas.
Would you be happy or upset? I ask this because some of the more popular mods like Stanley Parable were able to become full titles in their own right, and if VA-11 HALL-A were a launching point for some other developer, if they got their start by making mods for your game, how would you respond to that?
(I’m not much for programming or art design myself but I do get curious sometimes and the existence of fan fiction is a similar vein. Some writers are fine and some would rather their work went unaltered.)
“there’s still nothing like Va-11-Hall-a in the market’
The closest would be Coffee Talk. Though the main difference is that the identidy of the barista is a lot more secretive, but everything else is kinda similar in terms of gameplay