If We Could Be Serious For A Minute

Sukeban Games is not fine.

During this date we would be revealing an April Fools joke like the Switch port that ended up being real, and VA11HALLA kids that also ended up being real.

Today, we would like to get real about our current situation since we feel it would be a disservice to our audience to keep pretending we are in a healthy situation.

Don’t worry, it’s nothing apocalyptic like having enough differences to disband, but rather how the environment in which we make games has become nigh unbearable for everyone involved. Without going into much detail, the current Sukeban Games staff is about 4 people: Chris is still doing art, I’m still writing and coding. On top of that we now have June who is making music and Miguel who’s extra hands programming makes life way easier.

3/4ths of the team are in Venezuela right now and 1/4th is in greener pastures. So you’ve got a choice between a really dire national situation made even worse by way of constant non-scheduled blackouts at the time of this writing (lord knows what plague will haunt us whenever you read this in the future), or the emotional toll of complete physical isolation from friends and family in a strange land. Regardless it is a situation that’s taking a big toll on all of us.

And as much as I would love to detail how bad the situation is, let’s just say that I’d rather not due to safety concerns, and not being able to detail specific out of fear should be telling enough. In fact this is originally a draft Chris made and that I decided to edit slightly because he can’t post anything right now and even a single update blog post is an outright act of defiance against all difficulties. This means this post might see stealth edits later or I’ll get my ear talked off, we’ll see.

This is not a cry for help, we just want you to know why we are not in the mood (or had the chance) to deliver an elaborated april’s fools joke this year or even engage with all of you like we normally would. In fact, we would like to go over some things we couldn’t do due to this situation:

A new N1RVANNA demo for PAX: Six months have passed since TGS and the game improved a lot, and we wanted to show these improvements in a brand new demo for PAX East, specially considering it was the first time western audiences get to play it. Sadly, shit hit the fan during the polishing phase and the aforementioned situation made it impossible to send assets in time.

A new game featuring characters from NEXT GAME, N1RV Ann-A and VA11 Hall-A for April’s Fools: This one really hurts too because we were brimming with ideas for it, but sadly it also didn’t make the cut due to our current challenges to actually sit down and work. Merenge’s art is always lovely and I’d hate for this to go to waste, so we will make it happen eventually, possibly as soon as this month providing we actually have some basic necessities covered.

More NEXT GAME content: With all systems in place we could be posting more about this one, but… yeah.

The usual question is always “If it’s so bad, then why don’t you guys leave?” and boy if only it was so easy. We have some personal reasons to remain here for a while longer, and when the time comes we might be able to share it. This is also one of the many reasons we haven’t been able to update VA11HALLA with more languages, not that those that keep straight up insulting us for that care a whole lot about our situation.

We are all broken right now, and trying to pick up the pieces of ourselves so we can keep the dream alive. We are not taking any vacation or hiatus from game development, we WILL work as long as we have the very basics, but we need time to recover – We need to become stronger and keep fighting to maybe someday go back to having normal lives, because making games is our passion and there’s nothing that can stop us, except maybe death.

And that’s a big maybe.