Feast your eyes on these brand new VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action screenshots!

We’ve been crunching and pulling all-nighters almost every day since Prologue was finished and we’ll keep doing so until the main game is pretty much done. We need to take a break once in a while to share with you what we’ve been doing though, and here’s a small but nice batch of screenshots and art from the full release!

Oh and this is some the stuff you can expect from this version:

  • New and improved visuals: The screenshots speak for themselves! there are new character sprites, more colors, more details, and best of all, more animations! in Prologue we managed to get some blinking in but the engine we were using is not very good at handling both animations and active drag n’ drop for whatever reason, so Game Maker Studio has been really awesome in that regard because we can now get crazier! just look at those fluffy cat ears…
  • A truckload of content with 20+ clients, each with unique, lenghty storylines with their own endings/routes. We did a new format where you don’t have to wait until the end of the game to see a character ending, I’ll explain everything later and how Pawn Stars helped with its creation (weird I know). There’s also really cool side content I can’t talk about yet…
  • Expanded bartending: Is not really a change in mechanics but rather a new way to unlock scenes, characters, and endings. Doing certain “hidden” tasks will give you secret ingredients and recipes to change the course of the stories, there are some new ways to prepare drinks as well depending on the platform you’re playing on, but more info on that later.

There’s another bunch of stuff I really want to talk about but this is not the devlog entry for that, hopefully I’ll be able to write about that next week.

What I can say right now is… Don’t go thinking this is just shallow drag and drop. Knowing your clients’ inner wishes will be the main key to advance through the story and can’t stress how important that part is. This is a game made to be simple to play to let your brain think about what’s unfolding in front of you, but I won’t write about that any further, I’ll just let the game speak for itself once it’s out.

Say, what do you think of the looks so far?

(Press people! you can download the screenshots following this link right here)

This game will be more expensive once it’s out, so if you want to get it for dirt cheap go now to itch.io and pre-order for just $4.99! your pre-order includes the Prologue version and for $7.99 you will get the soundtrack.

will leav this to enable answers?

VA-11 HALL-A: Prologue on The Humble Store

Hey there, if by any chance you haven’t bought the Prologue version because you hate PayPal, here’s your chance to grab it now and get the full release when it’s out, now through the Humble Store.

(itch.io gives us more monies per sale though, so if you really want to support us, go there right now!)

Both itch.io and Humble will let you redeem Steam keys when the time comes, by the way. And to update things a bit, we’ve been crunching on getting more content done but we’ll publish some nice-ass screenshots of the new version alongside a brand new trailer very soon, so get hype.

(And our artist is accepting comissions during this weekend, starting at $25 you can get a nice bust of your oc, mail him to kurishi51@gmail.com)

See you next week!

So, we iterate a huge fucking lot it seems.

Which is good! this is the evolution of the user interface, last one is how the full-release currently looks and sporting new stuff like:

An interactive background: Have you played Hearthstone? is something like that, in the sense that you can click the objects and they will have cute reactions.

A streamlined mixer: You no longer have to switch between modes since the slots are available all the time, and when you go over ten ingredients it automatically switches to “big” mode, ain’t that cool?

We also made Dorothy’s sprite a tad more cute. Tried to re-design her but a lot of her charm was lost, so we simply cleaned up the original prototype sprite and called it a day, it was the best decision… trust me.

For now, the plan is to see if we can replace the shaker for a nicer one, as well as better looking drinks… among other suprises.

What do you think of the new look?

Grinding art for the upcoming VA-11’s full release. This one took quite a bit of time because I find “Christmas Cake Hacker” Alma the hardest character to draw. I’m glad with the results though! she looks a lot better now.

I start with some rough sketches to get the feel of the character, then I go ahead and make a detailed “render” specifically made for the PC-98 filter™. This effect takes quite a bit of time to get right, I even make some changes on the fly like the shoulder and hair bits you see there. The end result is some retro-futuristic waifu ready to get drunk! Overall, this process takes around two days with the pixel thing being the most hardest part… you can tell because it’s not even finished, this is still a work in progress!

Below is a comparison, the old Prototype concept I did in a rush versus the newest one made for the full release. The old one was just me using posterize in Photoshop. Anyway, gotta keep drawing, Kiririn51 out!

I think next update will be the new mixer in action, look forward to it!

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Have you bought the Prologue version yet? It’s on sale right now at itch.io for $4.99, get it now and you will have the upcoming full version when it’s out! seriously, the full game will be more expensive, get it while it’s cheap.

Buy VA-11 HALL-A Prologue