Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #19

日本語版

Wanna know what fucks me up? The fact that this year New Year’s eve falls on a Saturday.

My brain keeps jumping to the assumption that “End of week, end of year”. Yeah, I know Friday was the 30th but Sunday surely is the 31st! It makes sense! More sense than whatever December 30 and a halfth is in between even.

And the best part? It’s not the first time this has happened!

So the third week of the game is a full beast unto itself. We could only start working on it proper after the game had a semblance of a proper connected plot, and as such you can actually tell the leap in experience the moment week 3 starts compared to the other ones.

One problem I’ll probably elaborate on down the line is the issue of scraping for ideas for week 3, feeling like we blew all of our load on week 2 but knowing week 3 was necessary still.

Which sure as hell made it all the funnier when we ended up with a whole leftover day.

That brain cross wiring I described above? Yeah, that happened at that time. I wrote 6 full in-game days, then we wrote the ending (which is a saga unto itself I will get into when the time comes), we finish the ending, I’m polishing things for testing and… wait… what’s this? Why isn’t the last day on the 31st?

It doesn’t make sense! It’s the last week of the year, why isn’t Sunday New Years Eve?!

You might think I’m joking or exaggerating for effect, but no, what makes the whole story so amusing to me is that I spent a whole hour or so going back and forth not realizing why the math didn’t add up. It’s extra funny because as of writing this I’m planning a New Year’s trip and I made all the reservations for the 31st and it wasn’t until someone pointed to me that I kept saying “Sunday” that I realized I fell into the same trap AGAIN!

Of course many of you might be more alarmed at the idea of a whole day that was discarded. Uh… don’t be. It wasn’t.

After my idea of excusing it all by claiming in this future “December has 32 days because leap year was added to December” was vetoed (game was released in 2016 which was a leap year, no I’m not telling you what the X in 207X is), I just… took every client interaction and spread it through the week.

For those that don’t know, one of the more notable cross promotions in VA-11 Hall-A is one with Read Only Memories. If you play ROM you might find Dana, she tells you some ratios of ingredients and if you make that in VA-11 Hall-A it results in a Flaming Moai. Serve it to specific clients at certain times and in the 3rd week the bar will be visited by ROM characters.

Originally the day would just end earlier than usual, but having needed to chop up the day, I just took the clients and made them the defaults you see unless you’ve unlocked the ROM cameos.

So not only did it fill places where the days would’ve just gone faster, but because of it the last thing the player sees before the Grand Finale is the scene with Streaming-chan and Dorothy hanging out.

It is the very definition of a blessing in disguise.

Honestly, it also didn’t help that on top of everything else I’ve mentioned, the game ends on day 19, so my brain just assumed there was a day 20.

If you’re playing along, today’s the first day of the third week.

Tomorrow… hm… ever wondered why you can’t save anywhere?