Everyday 

You’re a Louse, anon.

They’re a bunch of really crafty bastards.

We actually answered something a bit similar a while ago, but the lack of motivation’s always a bitch. We’ve been there, we’ve faced the “Is this even worth the time?” beast to the face, and let me tell you, it’s worth every second.

Try and locate why you feel your project isn’t getting anywhere. Maybe you want to do a different game? Perhaps you feel the plot is stuck and you can’t get it to work? Try something smaller, reduce the scale of your game to something more manageable or at your current skill level (VA-11 Hall-A actually came to be when we wanted to do something smaller than our first big project… which in turn came to be when we wanted something even smaller than our first idea).

There’s no shame in putting aside one idea to explore a different one, sometimes you need a change of pace to refresh your view and find the flaws that are holding you back. Hell, sometimes you might come up with an addition that turns out to be the missing piece the whole thing lacked. If you look at this blog from its beginnings you’ll notice that we ourselves have scrapped, reworked and changed lots of things over the course of development (And let’s not start with the revamps that other project we put aside in favor of VA-11 Hall-A has gone through).

Always remember…

That’s the kind of thing that should be a surprise.

The amount of work involved in letting the player choose gender was never the problem, when we were considering that scenario (The “Hello [playername]” scenario) we were actually thinking about leaving it ambiguous, helped by the fact that interactions are always face to face so a bare minimum of pronouns (That could be replaced by the client referring to the player as “Bartender” or using the player’s name) would be used.

Instead, we decided to make the Bartender a girl named Jill because there’s a limit to how engaging a story can be with a player self-insert. We felt more comfortable crafting a full-fledged character for the player to control. The interactions with clients would grow more meaningfully because they would be based on a person with well-defined characteristics instead of a nebulous mass of points and flags (The bartending can change Jill’s relationship with some clients, but even then we’d have a stronger base to build those changes upon). The idea of the players getting to know the main character the same way they’d be discovering things about the clients and the world anyways sounded really appealing too.

When you purchase a game from Itch.io you receive a mail with the link to download your files. And because you bought this early you’ll have access to any test build we need feedback on, if you sign up for it that is.

We’ll look into it but I have no idea how that works on PSN.

Yes, we changed the way the game counts the ingredients.

Fun fact, there are ways to break the game in the prototype and Prologue versions due to some programming spaghetti and we’re very surprised nobody has figured out how to do that yet.