Today’s the in-game day where Gaby shows up and Jill’s world is thrown for a loop. An obviously impactful event we internally called “The Gaby Bomb”.
But did you know that Gaby was the last addition to the game?
In the opening post for this year’s Daily VA-11 Hall-A I mentioned how if people knew what goes into the process of creating things, then every author in existence would look mighty irresponsible. And while obviously the remark is just a joke, it is also a fact that just because of how the creative process works you need to throw away “conventional logic”.
For example, “conventional logic” would dictate the scenes of a movie to be made in order because that’s how you see them, but in truth between the logistics of filming permits, actor schedules and many other elements none of it is shot in any “sensible” order, with a lot of different staff being tasked with keeping tabs on the consistency of the set and actors.
Likewise, when you make a game, you don’t design things in the order you see them. In fact, many times the first level is done last because by that point you can pace the rate at which information is let out much better (we actually made the first day first… but that’s a story for another day).
And making a story is no different.
When we started VA-11 Hall-A we didn’t have much of a plot in mind. We had some cool characters, we knew we had a neat cyberpunk setting, and we knew we wanted something… big to happen at the end of the first week.
So initially, for the first week we just wrote things as they came. We wanted a client on the first day to loop back to the beginning of it, then we wanted Lilim to enter the picture in the second one, for Alma to debut in the third one and so on.
By the time we came with the idea of a balcony scene and the spotlight was put on Jill we had to start thinking properly about her past. Based on the personality she had by that point we felt she’d be the kind to be coy about her past. I think at this stage the only mention of a past romantic partner was something to the effect of “I had a girlfriend in college, she wanted an open relationship, things fell off”.
When the second week started, we realized that the game didn’t have much of a connective tissue on its own. Moreover it was evident that the connective tissue was gonna be Jill. Kiririn suggested someone from her past, maybe family or a mentor or something, and that in combination with the offhand mention of an old girlfriend started to set the ideas in motion.
We actually had the first pass of the scene where Jill and Alma switch places by this time because it tied to Alma’s own character arc. We knew Jill was running from her past, we knew it was important for her to be bitten by that past, but things needed some trigger. Why does she go from her state at the start of the game to her state by the end of the second week?
The idea of getting news of a dead ex felt like the right call. But those on its own needed… more. If she just got the news plainly then yeah, she’d be sad but it would, realistically end quickly or make a sort of impact that wouldn’t cause that much outward drama.
So what if someone… Maybe the girlfriend’s sister came in, demanding something from Jill? But if an adult did that it would feel really forced, why would a fully grown woman track her sister’s ex of all people after they’ve been separated for years demanding… something?
And then Kiririn suggested (you might be noticing a pattern here) “what if it was a little girl, though?”
It fits.
Not only does it fit, it fits scarily well, almost tailor-made.
A little kid wouldn’t have the same notion of relationships as an adult, to this girl (Gaby we called her) Jill would be like an older sister that she grew up with in her most important formative years, not knowing why she suddenly left when everything seemed fine to her, holding whatever mean words she said before leaving close to her heart.
Then her sister, a sister that was like a mother figure to her, dies and by chance she sees an online post that reminds her of her other sister, and she does something really dumb while grieving and oh shit, there she is, Jill! But… she doesn’t recognize her?
In fact, she’s having a blast? Why doesn’t she know who Gaby is? How dare she be having fun and laughing when Lenore just died? How dare she have left in the first place?! Why is she treating her like some random kid that wandered in instead of the little sister dearest that Gaby thought she was for her?!! She snuck out of home and prowled the very unsafe streets for her and this is what she gets?!!!! HOW DARE SHE?!!!!!
We had our trigger, we had our bomb. We had an event that not only would make Jill’s past come back to bite her, it would rub the guilt that she had been avoiding for years right in her face in a way that she could no longer avoid.
Of course Gaby has a point, but so does Jill. In any other circumstance they would’ve solved things in a more peaceful way, but as it turns out Jill and Gaby aren’t that different deep inside and that caused a clash that people still talk about to this day.
So you see, “Gaby was a late addition” doesn’t necessarily mean “she was a slapdash last minute thing”, it just means “we made a character that fit every story need we had to make things more interesting and then built off from it”.
There’s more to say about Gaby, and pacing, and how the plot developed, but I feel like this post is LOADED as is, so let’s leave it here for now.
In case you weren’t aware, today is Day 9 of the full game, the middle portion, the Gaby Bomb.
Tomorrow I wanna take from where we left off yesterday to wind down for a bit.
I played Vallhalla years ago, I still think about this scene. The characters are so effective, and to get a peek behind the curtain to see how they were made to be so is fun and inspiring.
Interesting, I always thought the change of tone was due to something bad happening in your lives, but now it turns out the game was rigged from the start…
I guess I mainly thought this way because, uh, the writing in first few days is pretty cringe and it really feels like an anime fan fiction. And I don’t say it to be mean, I just saw it during the first playtrough and I still see it now. BUT then the writing was becoming better each day. And this… this scene with Gaby was so well put and sharp that it turned all the game upside down and then more serious stuff was presented later during the playtrough. So at that moment I thought change was brought up by personal experience. But now, well, I guess this is a fine example of a good plot management?
although clearly there was enough of different personal experience in the base of development process
Gaby genuinely gripped me, which is kind of a big deal given how much personal experience I have with protests and how effective the immediately preceding days were, to have someone pop up and feel exactly as they should and disrupt your whole world.
It’s interesting how the cornerstones of a work are often the ones that come to you in a flash all at once.