hello people! hello girl has been out for a little while, and i've been thinking a lot about making the game, what i learned from it, and what it meant to me. this was the first vn i worked on! and it was really fun! i think i've been bitten by the vn bug, especially after playing some of the other vncup entries (your wings, my wings and nothing somewhere in particular). this is a really cool medium and i'm really excited to do more with it..
not only was the first vn that i've worked on, but it was also the first thing i've ever done music for besides just my own releases. at first i was really nervous about this. i'd previously had friends want to collaborate with me on projects, and i'd never been able to come through. i always felt like i wasn't a good enough musician to handle either the workload or the creative task of bringing any unique value. previous attempts ended in either abortion or failure or dissatisfaction.
but winter 2022-2023 had gone pretty well musically for me. 2021 and 2022 i almost exclusively played guitar (and now i can do my little improv fingerpicking blues thing that you'll hear pretty often in the game's soundtrack) but had composed few tracks for the instrument. i had spent the winter back in fl studio mode, and i ended up making some stuff that i'm really happy with (the yuri moment ep and the song ♡). i was really alone while living in seattle over the winter, which was very lonely, but also quite conducive to improving as a producer.
so when merilynn asked me to help out with music for the game shortly after i moved to slc, i jumped at the chance. early on i made a lot of demos, often before we even knew what the scenes for these would be. we didnt yet have an audio interface or even a field recorder, so i was just recording guitar into voice memos and making little sketches in fl. but as meri wrote more and more, and the game became more and more real, the sound palette started to crystallize. i primarily used solo acoustic guitar improvisations (even just a few weeks out, i already have forgotten how to play many of my tracks from the game :P), or ambient-leaning electronic compositions based on a set of phone sound samples that meri and i tracked down. there were also a few tracks that i thought of just as "vn music" (i say this lovingly). maillard's theme and the twins theme that plays in the depot scene were examples of this.
a lot of the way i think about making art is in the sense of being a 'vessel' for a concept or lineage that i think is important. i always see what i make as being in conversation with things external to me, usually taking the form of a style i like, or of some thing in the world that i want to highlight.
with this project, i became a vessel in a totally different way. my music for this game contains meri and mentha's ideas and spirits just as much as it contains mine - i couldn't have made any tracks without their sustaining spirit, and at times, more concrete guidance. sometimes working on my own stuff can be a little paralyzing, because i don't really have a notion of how i want it to sound.. occasionally i'll have little sound design details or melodies/rhythms in my head when i do solo tracks, but ususally i just play until i get somewhere. and i love that process, but turning the lines of "constraint" into lines of flight was really beautiful in a totally new way to me. i can think of two tracks (the phone call theme from early parts of the game and the music that plays when ana meets the twins for the first time) that i was totally stuck on for weeks and only finished after some helpful comments from mentha and meri.
also, it was really cool to not be the only music maker on the project. soapdrip and kali made some really awesome tracks, and there was more than one time i thought "damn, that fits so much better than anything i would have made!" in particular, soap's title screen theme and kali's music for the intro screens were totally perfect in ways i never could have dreamt up. i learned that i couldn't do it all myself, and that that was ok! it was fun to hear how they represented certain scenes, and how trying out different tracks in certain places could give the same writing a totally different perspective. this made me realize the power that music has to guide a scene - you can inflect so much meaning onto words with sound, just as deciding what to show on screen influences the way the reader reads the game.
in all there's 24 songs in the game, i made 16 of them, and i'm really really happy with all of them. i can't think of the last time i made 16 tracks that i liked within a 3 month period... i also did most of the sfx for the game too! makes me wanna learn how to do foley :P
beyond music, i also got to write a bit of the script! creative writing has never been my strong suit - i typically prefer to write non-fiction, or just the sort of rambling conversationalism like what we have here. i've always struggled taking ideas in my head and putting them into concrete words; though i think of settings, characters, dynamics, themes a lot, i can never really translate them into concrete lines, much less a script. reading meri and mentha's writing, and talking with them so much about the game every day, i became more and more accustomed to living in ana + courier's world, and gradually found a voice that i could use from time to time. this was the first experience where characters became "real" in my head. being able to think like "oh, courier would say this here" or "ana wouldn't think like that, she'd say- ", and have it feel kinda fluid was really amazing. i wanna write more in the future, both in future imo team productions but also maybe my own projects one day.
but really, my biggest fingerprint on the game besides the music and sound was just being someone in the room, so to speak. having meri and mentha and i in the same room for like.. 16 hours a day was such a good environment to hash things out in, and i really don't think the game would have been made in the same way if we all three hadn't been together. so many casual convos or offhand ideas ended up finding their way into the game. at times it felt like the words were becoming real as we spoke them. like the game was living through our conversations, and the task at hand was to transcribe it as authentically as possible. we got to a point where i think we all shared the story, its spirit, in our heads. this is at the core of what hello girl means to me - it's a spirit that we all gave birth to collectively, becoming much closer to each other in the process.
i've thought a lot about what hello girl is about to me. what it says. its funny, because its saying something to me that... i had a part in saying? what does that mean? it's like a weird conversation with myself. meri and i would always talk about how we found it difficult to tell our friends and other ppl what the game was about. a lonely rabbit with a telephone?
i think a level 1 accurate way to explain it is that hello girl is a story about loss, connection, and dis-connection. connection and disconnection with the world, the people we love, ourselves, and our notions about what we're doing here. i also think the game, for me, is about exorcism. meri and i took a walk late one night, after the vncup submission but before we released the game, where we spoke about the final dream scene. we spoke about the "curse" that rabbit zero feels - the desire to be recognized, to be loved, to be regarded as someone valuable and worthwhile of existence - and about how this desire collapses in on itself in a way that dooms her. in a way, ana feels the same curse, albeit perhaps not as strongly. she yearns for her sister, for a place in the world, for a sense of value and purpose. but ana is able to take steps towards healing her curse via connection. to courier, to maillard, to the memory of clara, even.
i talked a bit about this earlier, but this process was also about connection for me. i got a lot closer with meri over the course of the game. we went from friends to girlfriends, and i became really good friends with mentha too! we went from "some people" to being the imo team! i'm really really excited to make more wonderful things alongside them :)
hello girl also connected me to my sense of purpose. this game gave me a direction to live in for a while, and i'm forever grateful for that. i've long struggled with feeling like a lazy and inept person, and longed for the chance to pour myself into something, to get so excited about a project that it consumed all my thoughts and every moment of my time. especially for the 10 days when mentha was here, it was nearly exactly that. i loved every second of it, and i want to make my life about doing things like this as much as i can. i want my life to be about making things with the people i love, and i will forever owe a debt to this game and the imo team for helping me realize that. this game gave me the confidence that given the right project, i can be a non-lazy, capable, and even valuable person. my own little june doubt-exorcism.
i think that's all. i covered a lot. if you made it here, thanks for reading!! i'm not too good at website yet, but i'd like to have a way where people could post thoughts below and we could talk. because connection is the most important thing i think - i dont want the spirit of hello girl to end just because the game is finished. feel free to hit me up on twitter, email, discord, or any other way you know how to contact me. i'd love to chat!
thank you for reading ♡
june meridian harmony
july 27, 2023