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Game Info
Name:	Virtual Vacation Zone
Year:	2021
Made in:	Adagio2/Pixi.js + React
Play Game on itch.io

Some time after the release of Extreme Tax Masters, I finally got a full time job after a hellish job search. Which was great! But also meant that I suddenly had less free time to work on video games. After a few months of working though, I thought it was time for a vacation, especially from working in the... less than stellar Angular codebase I had inherited for this job.

Fortunately, Nicole He was hosting another themed game stream and it happened to be vacation themed on top of that! I wanted to finally make another game and, like last time, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give myself a low-stakes deadline.

My initial ideas for Virtual Vacation Zone were a bit different from the final result. I knew from the beginning I wanted the game to focus on memories from vacations and the "liminal" experiences that often come with them, especially during childhood. My original concept for this would have been in the form of a Bitsy game, where you walk around various vacation areas and experience vacationy memories. In addition, I wanted other people who've played the game to show up in the game world to give the feeling of tourists slowly crowding up a vacation spot as more people played.

Somehow, a few days before the stream, the game idea morphed into something else entirely: A board game that tied all the liminal vacation experiences together. I still don't fully understand where that came from, though after I decided on it I went to Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival for inspiration. Seriously. The idea of other players appearing in the game was kept in, making other people's memories appear when you landed on a "friend space".

This is the first game I've worked on with an original soundtrack since the games I worked on with The Subject from like 2009. I've always had a soft spot for the piano music in The Subject's games, but as I grew older it became harder to channel that specific innocent energy. While I'm happy with the entire game soundtrack, I am particularly pleased with the song "Song 11" from the soundtrack. It sounds like it could have been used in one of The Subject's classic games and I'm so happy to finally have another song like this to use in a game. The title of the song refers to the fact that most of the songs used in The Subject's games were just given numbered titles, so this is the next one in the sequence.

Virtual Vacation Zone was made with the Adagio2 engine I used for Extreme Tax Masters, but also features an introductory 90's style website developed in React. I chose to use React for this part for a few reasons: I've been interested in the idea of using both React and WebGL for a possible future game project and wanted to experiment with integrating them into the same project, I wanted the player registration screen to be better than the entry screen on Extreme Tax Masters and using HTML input components controlled by React would provide both a better user experience and developer experience, and I wanted to make working on this game itself a kind of "vacation" from the Angular codebase I was dealing with during working hours.

Telemetry & Jeff

Telemetry & Jeff is a subgame added to Virtual Vacation Zone two months after its release as part of the Plus update. The game follows the story of Telemetry trying to enjoy her lunch break in the middle of a work day.

This subgame was inspired by an incident that happened about a month after the release of the original game, when my computer's hard drive had a connection issue that rendered my computer unusable for a week. Not being able to use my computer for a week was pretty maddening, not just because I'm extremely online, but because all of my art and sheet music was on my computer and I had nowhere to divert my creative energy into. When picking up my hard drive from the repair shop, I snapped several picture of the office courtyard the shop was in, as I'm fascinated by these kinds of office areas and thought I could use the pictures in an upcoming game.

As soon as my computer was working again, I immediately drew up the sprites for usage in the game, and then started writing up the game. I worked in a frenzy, trying to use up all my bottled up creative energy, unsure of what I was even creating.

Fun fact about this game is that the title graphic was actually made in the Borgus Shop Pro grame from Super Bogus World 2. I consider it my 2½th game on Itch. It also has new music written just for the scenario.

Game Description:

This game is... a weird memoir documenting various memories I have relating to vacations and trips I've gone on throughout my life. With gameplay inspired by Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival (seriously). You are encouraged to share your own memories as well for other players to see (if you choose to submit anything, that is). Virtual Vacation Zone was made for Nicole He's VACATION-themed stream from July of 2021.

Credits:

Features music by π鬼, 姫方, The Cormorants, and The Subject. Borrows some riffs from The Residents. Feel free to support the soundtrack here.

Images:

Links:

You can play the game on itch.io here