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?

She’s an idol. Why is she drinking at Valhalla instead of a more fancy place? guess you’ll have to find out when the full release arrives.

Purchase VA-11 HALL-A: Prologue

Waifus just keep increasing in number, isn’t she cute?

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

Adjusting the new mixer

Bottom is not yet functional, just a mockup for the time being but it shows that I want things more streamlined, so drinks can be hard to do without having frustrating or difficult controls. Things will get a bit cryptic and puzzle-like towards the end of the game so the more comfortable the mixer the better. Added two more icons for aging drinks and adding ice, also did some cute buttons for Mix and Reset, changed the pixel density for the ingredient icons and the frame to get rid of some annoying mixed pixel sizes.

The thing I like the most is the new location of the ingredients. Before, you had to drag the ingredients for longer distances but this is no longer the case since they are now closer to the shaker, this will be specially comfortable for touch screen versions of the game, although the PC version already supports any kind of touch-ready monitors.

I want to change the shaker graphic since we’ve been using the same one we had in the prototype but it’s not a priority right now. Other things we are currently doing is getting a new dialogue system ready to produce content faster, Game Maker is great but because it doesn’t have any kind of integrated solutions for dialogue we had to get our hands dirty.

Hopefully next update will be the new mixer in some .gif action, and would like to mention that the mixing now works in seconds, meaning: If a drink requires you to mix for two seconds, you have to mix for two seconds, one second more and your drink will be ruined, or at least not as tasty as it can be. Mixing for more than five seconds will trigger the “blending” condition just like before.