I'll say this once: Whenever there's radio silence, it means we are crunching to get shit done, and I'm happy to announce that VA-11 HALL-A: Prologue is AVAILABLE RIGHT NOW!

Go and get it.

Note: Remember this is a work in progress. Visuals, gameplay and everything else can change based on feedback!

About VA-11 HALL-A: Prologue

"On a slow night you're informed that the bar you work at was booked, an uncommon event by itself... but not more uncommon than the actual "people" who booked the place. Gladly, there's a very special couple there to keep you sane with the most interesting stories about a city that never sleeps, all with different perspectives about how life in a cyberpunk post-dystopia is all about."

It's just $4.99, if you already purchased the game you can claim it at your itch.io's downloads page, if you happened to give $7.99 or more you'll get the soundtrack as well, sorry for not telling you that until now! but the idea came up very recently, if you want the soundtrack separately you can get it on Garoad's BandCamp, just $4.99.

Get VA-11 PROLOGUE OST - SOUNDS FROM THE FUTURE from Bandcamp.

What now? Well, we are working hard on porting all the assets and code to another engine. Somehow, Ren'Py ended up being more of an obstacle for us because we wanted to add more animations, effects, and all kinds of fancy things but the nasty, poor performance and frustrating limitations we found while using this popular tool for Visual Novel developers made us jump ship to Game Maker. We are aiming to lauch the final product by December.

What can you expect in Prologue?

Around an hour and a half of gameplay.

Two full-fledged customers you can talk and interact with.

No several endings because the game ends where the main game begins.

And remember, the purchase of this Prologue version gets you access to the final game. If you can't claim your Prologue copy on itch.io, PLEASE send me a mail at [email protected]

Is this your first time hearing about VA-11 HALL-A? Then head over to http://waifubartending.com for all the information you need! You can even freely download the first prototype we made for the Cyberpunk Jam.

Purchase: VA-11 HALL-A Prologue

Purchase: VA-11 HALL-A Prologue OST Sounds from the Future

(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.

The great Garoad made this fine tune for VA-11 HALL-A and can't help but think it sounds so... so PSX/Policenauts, which is amazing because it's the kind of style we're aiming for.

No colour yet because I want to change some stuff but he's pretty much designed, not that it was hard considering his origin.

Wait, A MALE CHARACTER!? THE NERVE!

Intrepid, witty, courageous, handsome... are all adjectives that do not describe Mr. DeLay at all. Equal parts glory hound and loser, this detective likes to think he lives as the main character of some sort of futuristic Noir film, only for reality to crash at his doorstep every single time. However, as easy as it is to dismiss him as just a loser, his skills at gathering information are nothing to make fun of, he keeps his job for a reason.

Well it seems that Mr. DeLay is a perfect fit for our crazy bar, stay tuned for more characters in the following days.

After three days, the additional systems are finally done. There's still polishing to do of course, but now we can focus on the new content!

To explain things a bit, you'll now be able to serve two clients at the same time in "Dual" mode and also prepare drinks with double ingredients in "Double" mode, for those clients who like big-ass drinks.

We'll keep doing daily updates like before now that the difficult part is already sorted, stay tuned! next character will be revealed tomorrow.

New character! this time... a law enforcer!?

A member of the White Knights' Valkyrie corps, Sei is both a cop and a doctor who's main duty lies in rescuing civilians. However, this grim line of duty does not faze her at all, on the contrary, Sei is cheerful and idealistic to a fault. She's not very good with words, but she's able to communicate effectively even if she has to use made-up words along the way.

Sounds like the perfect customer for our weird and peaceful bar, will she get along with the hackers and gun for hire that roam around here? We'll see!

New character, Stella.

Hailing from a powerful family (Although no one's really sure which one), Stella is used to a really high quality of life and expects no less wherever she goes. She might be pampered, snobbish and a hard client; but once you get past all that, she's actually a really intelligent lady that likes to bring up interesting conversation topics.

We are increasing the visual quality overall for the sprites as you can see, her design is special because it was made with the input from /agdg/ goers.

Some animation for the shaker. We like the drag and drop + icons more because it makes simple to remember complex drink combinations. In the first build player had to press buttons and had to often rollback to remember which ingredient is correct, this time, colour coded ingredients enable to make drinks faster, so fast we are thinking about a  timer, so it has more challenge, the faster you prepare it, the more score you have.