(Work in progress, visuals are not final)

Let’s get our shit together, shall we?

We’ve been prepping for the last month a surprise that’s not going to be a surprise anymore, if anything just to keep posting daily progress. Let me introduce VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action - Prologue (working title).

This prologue will introduce two new characters: Deal and Beatrice, they both work for a… I guess I’ll keep the story in secret, is a thing you must see with your own augmented eyes. As for the corgis, that one’s a surprise as well.

Don’t worry, not everything is top secret. This prologue will show you some of the new stuff for the commercial release, such as unique dialogue and scenes that can only be seen if you have either good, average or bad performance in your job. It will also sport quite a few number of randomized clients with unique dialogue, this means you would have to play it several times just to get all the possible clients and story bits. There’s no extra endings though, since the main game starts where Prologue ends.

To make things short, this is what you will be able to do things like making your clients drunk to get alt dialogue and weird moments of fun, randomized fun clients and a glimpse of what’s coming.

As for a date, we’re hoping to get it done by this week, the reason behind the slow-down is because we’re changing engines. So far we’ve been working with Ren'Py, and while that’s an awesome tool for this kind of games… it fell short on the platforms we can port the game to (only Windows, Mac, Linux and Android), so we jumped ship to Game Maker.

Prologue’s made on Ren'Py, but it will be the first and last build for the commercial release made with it. Why change to Game Maker though? Are we going to release it on more platforms? Answer is yes, but will talk about that in a couple of days but expect the return of daily updates from now on, see you gals around.

This might give you a clue about the complexity of this game.

When we made the prototype, the idea was (and still is) making a relaxing game where you serve people and depending on how you serve them they would tell you different stories. For the new release, we increased the scenarios where things can change, they range from serving bad drinks to being absolutely accurate. This involves lots of planning to avoid bad plot holes and inconsistencies, and they are usually written on paper first so we can get an idea of how much we can do to offer a reaction for each action, you can get a glimpse if you take the time to understand how the flow in these notes work, if you’re a coder or know how programming works it will make sense… sort of. It’s not too complicated, it’s very crude and basic programming but exploited in order to get more results depending on player intput, the idea being that anything you do makes a difference, even if it’s too tiny to notice, like when the stories from Jamie, Alma and Dorothy intersected if you took the time to get all of their stories in the prototype.

Nice stuff, huh? We did took the time to think about HOW much of a difference makes every single action so this can be done faster than our other game sporting humoungus amounts of content based on player action, so don’t worry, it looks ambicious but it’s actually a neatly planned tree of content with realistic goals, so we can just worry about making a good story, gameplay and improve the look and feel while not spending two years on the god damn thing.

Today’s update is about a new character based on the God’s gift that is Jim Sterling, named after his alter-ego Virgilio Armarndio… which is some sort of pretentious art critic, and I love him.

An art critic and self-proclaimed genius, Virgilio is the kind of guy that can only see value in something if it’s artistic and pretentious, and even then he might see this value on stuff that doesn’t have it at all. His mannerisms are way too overblown, he almost seems like a poorly disguised caricature. Is he just being himself or is he just someone hiding his true self?

As always, his personality does seem to fit perfectly with the rest of the cast! the other pic is an experiment we are running with more moody colors and some pattern dithering to reach that PC-98 vibe we want to emulate. It’s a WIP of course but we are getting there!

Tomorrow we’ll have a look at the process of designing a game like this, you wouldn’t want to miss that one, and if everything goes well we might even have some AWESOME news you wouldn’t even believe.

Want to support development? Pre-Purchase now for just 5$ or simply play the Cyberpunk Jam build, which we’ll update as soon as we can with the new stuff.

Pre-purchase at itch.io

Well, this is how it looks now! there’s stuff that needs adjustment, like some of the images depicting the drinks (that’s a placeholder for the Sugar Rush) among other things (like some of the buttons) but this is the look we’re gonna use for the commercial release, subject to changes of course. By the way, clients can have an influence on what’s showing in the upper banner, but we’ll explain that in another post.

Want to support this game? pre-purchase now for 5$ at Itch.io, you will get the game when it’s done.

Not a big update today, other than some cool message animations. In this version, clients will ask for service while you’re chatting with someone, and you can choose whether or not you’ll attend.

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Pre-purchase VA-11 HALL-A and get the game when it’s done, just 5$ at itch.io