Since everyone is doing these, might as well as join in. Here's a pretty thorough look at the original inspirations behind the project, what went wrong in hindsight and what I'm unhappy with, top 5 references to Finnish pop culture and politics explained, etc

Conception

Doing something with the Helsinki–Sipoo border conflict was a very old idea of mine – kind of an obvious thing to do, with the coat of arms of Sipoo being a wolf and all. Besides the theme fitting perfectly, the jam also felt like a good opportunity to do something as niche in subject matter, formally audacious, and "uncommercial" as possible.

Despite it being what everyone compared the finished product to, I have actually never seen Hetalia and wasn't thinking of any other classic "geographical areas personified" stories, either; it was really just several Finnish municipalities having official fursonas that prompted the conceit. There were some slightly more vague inspirations, though. Vera Drew's film The People's Joker, with its mix of autobiographical video essay-esque segments and heartfelt superhero parody, influenced how the game combines elements of fiction and non-fiction. Also, just video essays in general were an important inspiration – I wanted to have the opportunity to do direct exposition in cases where that felt like the most efficient way to explain something and tried to do my best to convey information visually where possible. All the maps in particular are a key to the whole thing working, IMO.

On the literary end, Ystävän muotokuva / Portrait of a Friend by Pentti Holappa influenced the final scene especially. Being about a fictionalized version of the author, it's something between novel and memoir in style. The story of either primary inspiration isn't really anywhere close to what happens in the game, but I wanted to replicate the kind of formal fluidity and playfulness you can observe in both of them.

Research

Even though I was able to start it soon after the theme was announced, research ended up taking a lot of time, which probably doesn't surprise if you have looked at my citations. Besides there being a lot of complicated legal documents to read, many sources were difficult to locate thanks to nearly 15 years of link rot. A specific speech of Matti Vanhanen I really wanted to find to understand his stupid city planning ideas, missing from archive.org, was still up on the parliament's official website but the url had changed like 3 times during the last decade. (In the end, I found it by googling a fragment someone had quoted on a public transportation & urban development forum in 2007.)

I didn't know a lot about the case in advance, so all the research ended up having a big impact on the finished game. There was no narrative outline beyond a vague idea of how the three dates would go; I built a timeline detailing how everything had happened in real life and proceeded from there, inserting expository breaks acting as setup or clarification whenever needed.

Narrativizing the whole thing – as in, presenting the causal chains of events and the motivations of all the involved parties in an interesting way – was a big focus. A lot of the material I read was dry just-the-facts news reporting; I wanted to go a little further than that and present my own analysis on why everything happened the way it did. This guy's master's thesis from 2008 was an especially crucial source, and some news articles written long after the annexation contained interesting retrospective musings that I tried to keep in mind.

Honestly, there's enough "original research" in the game that I'm curious if there are people who would disagree with how I chose to characterize the conflict and its causes. I'm not an actual historian or anything, and who knows, maybe this whole thing is just an exercise in spreading misinformation online & radicalizing gay people across the world against the former prime minister. Shaking and crying as Matti Vanhanen himself gives me a bad rating on Itch after feeling like I have misrepresented his thoughts...

Development

Writing went relatively smoothly. Even with being constantly distracted by new avenues of research, I was able to bang out the first draft in about 1.5 weeks, only making routine line edits and adding some gags after confirming I could implement the graphical aspects afterwards. Honestly, I'm really glad I scoped the project appropriately and could finish the story in around 10,000 words, as everything else but the writing took a lot of time.

Making a custom UI was sort of an obligation anyway, as I was working with my own engine and didn't have anything other than some horrifyingly genre-inappropriate stuff made for other VN projects ready. It was a good opportunity to flex my UI design muscles and communicate the period piece aspect visually, though; I feel like it does a lot to establish the vibe of the story. Besides really working out that poor gradient tool, I tried to implement fun touches of skeuomorphism like having the speaker labels look like road signs.

In addition to the last scene (more about that soon), custom photographs were used for a couple of locations; I tried my best to find older CC photos to make sure everything felt appropriately 2007. For Sipoo's and Dom's house, some friends grabbed photos of their place (thanks a lot, Keyrune & Katu), which is located in Espoo in real life. This is how Hollywood lies to you...

Anyway, the photo from outside of Cinema Orion is my own work. I had a better one showing the cinema itself, but I didn't notice that it had like five thousand electric scooters in it until it was too late, and had to settle for another shot they were easier to clone tool out of. The photo of the Three Smiths statue was furrified by me because I found it amusing to do that while also leaving in tons of images of humans. I think it's one of those jokes where it's not even possible to adequately explain why it's funny, at least to me.

Programming everything in was a lot of work as well. Godot's clunky but usable animation editor was a huge help, since I could preview all the animated scenes right in the editor without having to launch the game every time. The maps were created with vector graphics, making them look crisp with all the zooms and making it easy to turn various overlays on and off. As for some of the effects used in visual jokes, they were mostly shader magic. Figuring out the explosion, ultimately a free asset greenscreened in kdenlive and then shadered to make the green parts transparent, was so much work I ended up using it three times just to not waste all that effort on a one-second gag.

A lot of people commented that the game does things that wouldn't be technically possible in Ren'py. I'm not sure if that is quite true – it's all just a lot easier, which makes a big difference when you're constrained by a game jam's time limit.

Final Scene

The final scene is the centerpiece of the whole game in a lot of ways. It's a tonal shift to higher emotional stakes, abandoning the deadpan absurdity coloring the rest of the game. It concludes the story on a quite ambiguous note, which I wanted to do to reflect the real-life complexity of all the different feelings people have about the conflict and its result.

I put a lot of thought into the audiovisual presentation, particularly in terms of how the timeskip would feel and how the present day status quo would be revealed to the reader. Both the visuals and the sound design are all my own work, recorded when I visited Östersundom. It was nice to make something where photos play such a pivotal role, given my ongoing crusade to convince FVN readers & authors that photography is a legitimate medium of art and that photo backgrounds aren't just no-budget replacements for illustrations. A detail I myself particularly like is forgoing the filter used for every other photo in the game in the cutscene to add an extra punch of grounded realism.

There's one huge missed opportunity, though: I really wanted to use the ending song of Salatut elämät, the soap opera referenced in the game, in the credits. (Here it is:)

Unfortunately, local licensing law made it basically impossible. Even with permission from everyone involved, I would have needed to notice the relevant rights organization 30 days in advance, which was just unlikely to happen with the game jam's schedule. The fade to blue – a visual the show uses in the end of its episodes – was essentially a copyright-free replacement, but the reference was too obscure for non-Finnish audiences, and in hindsight I should have foreshadowed it somewhere. This reference changes the tone of the ending a little, I think!

While we're on the topic...

Easter Eggs / Cultural References Ending EXPLAINED (red circle in video thumbnail)

There's  a lot of cultural humor that doesn't translate well in the game. Explaining jokes rarely makes them work, generally speaking, but I guess this is the spot to throw in some hot IMDB trivia.

Salatut elämät (or Salkkarit for short) is a ridiculously long-running soap opera known for tackling controversial and transgressive subject matter (like GAY PEOPLE! and there's incest, suicide, a child falls down an elevator shaft, etc), spawning internet memes, and being kind of bad. I think I haven't watched a full episode in like a decade, if ever; would have been nice to reference something that specifically happened in it around 2006–2007, but alas. Uhhh, dunno what else to say about it. One season famously ended with a restaurant basically the whole cast was in fucking exploding:

When is that going to happen in a furry visual novel?

Also, famous internet videos the show instigated include this LEGO stopmotion using voice clips from it:

And these alternate lyrics to L'amour toujours declaring a central character to be bisexual:

I guess this is enough lore about a TV show most of you, I suspect, will never think about again.

The cinema date is pretty dense with its references. First of all, the film the characters see is Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Syndromes and a Century. I picked it mostly for the subject matter, since the urban/rural juxtaposition is an important thematic element. It's really good – though, hot take incoming, not even close to Weerasethakul's best work; I'm myself partial to Memoria, Tropical Malady, and Cemetery of Splendor. The later joke with the cinephiles humorously comparing it to far less prestigious films is stolen from Aki Kaurismäki's Fallen Leaves, which used the same cinema as a location. I think there's some mildly Kaurismäki-esque humor in the game, so it was nice to reference a big creative inspiration.

There's some less important stuff I'm probably forgetting here... the Matti Vanhanen scandal where he allegedly received planks from a company employed by a foundation he previously worked at is referenced a couple of times. There's a brief nod towards by far the biggest political controversy in Helsinki's recent history: the other lane of Esplanadi, a road in the city center, being temporarily converted to a pedestrian street. If you can think of something else that probably feels like an obscure reference, feel free to request an explaination in the comments.

Various other regrets / mistakes / post-jam changes

In hindsight, not recruiting a beta reader to look over the English script and point out places where additional elaboration would help was a mistake. By the time I started translating and realized further adjustments could be made, the jam's deadline was already pretty close and I didn't want to bother anyone with such a strict schedule. While the rules generously allow submitting translations during the voting period, I felt like it was better to get the English version out immediately. It's definitely something to keep in mind for future projects, though. As for what kinds of clarifications could be added, repeating information like the various titles of the real-life people involved was suggested; thanks, Loudo, I'll look into it.

Also, I tried translate all the legal jargon as accurately as possible, preferring official terms, but there might be an argument for going for maximum clarity and simplifying things instead. For instance, the distinction between "municipality", "city", and "town" is probably not obvious or necessary – could just skip over the nuances there. (For reference, the municipalities of Finland can choose to self-identify as "cities" or "towns", which signifies or changes absolutely nothing. For extra confusion, the words "municipality" and "town" are the same in Finnish, but not in English! Who invented this ludicrous piece of worldbuilding?)

While I didn't see a lot of complaints about the quality of the prose, a relief considering I speedran the translation in like two or three days, a couple of iffy lines were pointed out when Unagi & co streamed the game (thanks). They should be easy enough to adjust. There are also some places where the translation is imperfect but I have no idea how to improve it; the final line in particular is a big one.

There was one big bug I didn't notice until a friend pointed it out shortly after release: the screenshot button is broken on Windows because it doesn't like file names containing a colon. Trivial to fix, will be in the post-jam release unless I forget. Some other potential engine improvements were also noted (slider for skip speed & mouse wheel to advance/go back), but I think those will have to wait for my future games, as they touch engine internals and I don't want to introduce new bugs. What else... there was supposed to be a camera movement showing the full sprites of the characters in the park date, but as the background remains stationary, it looks a little weird. Maybe I'll adjust it.

That's it, really – I feel kind of reluctant to make major content changes to preserve the version people judged in the jam for future generations. Please let me know if you have other easily fixable nitpicks in mind, though! Further feedback regarding the engine is also very welcome, since I plan to continue using it for other projects.

Anyway, that's it for this postmortem! The jam's voting period is ending imminently as I type this, but the games will continue to exist, and it will interesting to see how all the unfinished projects develop. If you haven't played a ton of them, feel free to peruse my reviews & recommendations on my website.

As for the author's further exploits in VN-making, I just published a progress report on my big project; read it here. (We're doing character reveals!) This is the end for My Municipality, though, unless some kind of startling development in local politics prompts a continuation. Stay tuned for the legacy sequel when Östersundom starts its campaign to become an independent city-state consisting of probably like 100 people and a single restaurant...