Many of you might’ve noticed that N1RV Ann-A had a projected release date of 2020 and that we’re at the end of 2020 with no announcement of any kind about that.
Well, the short of it is as follows: For the time being we’re changing N1RV Ann-A’s release date to an indefinite one and we’ll start shifting our public push towards other projects. N1RV Ann-A’s production won’t stop or slow down but it also won’t be our main promotional focus for a while.
Or for an even shorter version: N1RV Ann-A’s release date is now WID (When It’s Done) and we might have other projects to announce in the coming months that will come earlier than N1RV Ann-A.
Now, I could just leave it at this, but many of you might have questions. Why is this happening? Did the other projects cannibalize N1RV Ann-A? Is N1RV Ann-A being put on hold even though he just said production won’t stop?
4 years ago the game that changed our lives was released. We thought it was gonna sell a couple thousand copies and ended up becoming a smash hit with well over half a million units sold.
Over the years we’ve been pretty active, always finding a way to keep the game relevant; be with ports for different platforms, or the Daily Va11halla event every december and while I don’t think we’ll stop with this practice, I feel it’s time to “move on” – with this I mean we better start talking more about the future rather than just Valhalla.
The state of N1RV Ann-A
A lot has happened since the announcement of the new game in the franchise, but very few news. This was caused due to different circumstances, namely a continuation of a bad practice that began with Valhalla in which the programming relied solely on the shoulders of one person instead of a constant collaboration effort to build the game. The second is how life radically changed from one moment to the other. Something happened in Venezuela and we had to escape, making the team spread all over the world trying to start over on foreign soil – causing a dent in our mental health in the process. Development paused for a while due to these circumstances and only very recently picked up again with full steam. We are still trying to make the 2020 release window, but don’t be surprised if it gets pushed further into the future. The good news is that if it indeed gets delayed it won’t be by much, since our current workflow has never been so fast. We just ask for patience, this is the first time in years where we have a certain amount of stability in our lives to fully work on the stuff.
N1RV Ann-A is not the only thing coming soon
With a newfound way of working, knowledge, experience and an expanded team, we find ourselves in the perfect spot to handle more than one project and I’m happy to say more games will come from us – some might even release before N1rvanna, and I’m talking about full commercial projects too, from all kinds of genres.
I can’t offer solid information about what we are working on, but you can get a glimpse of the development of each of these projects in our daily devlog. It’s mostly me who writes these, but it’s a good way to gauge where we are at the moment.
Last but not least…
We are announcing that a sequel to VA-11 Hall-A: KIDS! is coming… In exactly a week, during Jill’s birthday! The name: VA-11 Hall-A SAISEI
A lot of people have clamored for a continuation of this joke spin-off we made for April Fool’s and we’ll be delivering soon on the 27th of this month, for free. We just hope there’s no weird files inside it this time. Well, this didn’t end up happening. Some extra time is needed to polish this, so please have some patience. Feel free to join discord and pester those involved with it about the release.
Before we go, please go check the folks doing a VA-11 Hall-A FanZine! it’s full of cool stuff and we can’t wait to get our grubby mitts on those goods.
That’d be for now, please stay tuned and sign up for our mail list!
Before starting, we want you to know that you’ve been heard! As such Fore has been honored with the Best Boy award to make up for the fact he wasn’t present in the poll in spite of unprecedented support for everyone’s favorite cat.
The VA-11 Hall-A x Girls Frontline collaboration is now online! There will be a time for sentimentality and how much the whole thing means to us, but today let’s talk about the game and dispel any doubts or concerns from the perspective of someone that started playing the game quite a while before the collab was even suggested. Am I biased writing this? Of fucking course I am. It’s a game I love crossing over with a game I made. It’d be worrying if I WASN’T biased.
So let’s get this question out of the way immediately: Could you get all the characters by the end of the event if you started just now? Yes, I’d say so.
It’s been a fairly long wait, but Valhalla is finally available on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch. It was made with the intention to be as close as possible to the original release on Steam, so don’t expect new content! The Switch version does have some motion controls included as an optional input. Try it out and let us know if you liked it.
The folks at Fangamer came up with a really cool tracksuit inspired by the game, you can buy it right here!
The glass and coaster set is also back in stock. Get it here.
The Future
I don’t know if the release for iOS is still happening, but with these ports I think we are done with Valhalla for a while. We would like to go full Skyrim with it though and release it in every new upcoming platform but time will tell. There’s Xbox One but we don’t call the shots on whether it gets released there, so I’m sorry to any Xbro reading this.
Writing about Sam is a bit tricky, as it is with every character we want to talk about during pre-release days (we really get a kick out of surprising you). I will however go into some brief, possibly interesting bits that went into her creation and what you can expect from her once your grubby mitts are all over the game.
So with Valhalla, Jill (main character) was this girl with the resting bitch face trying to get by in a harsh environment, what with the rampant crime and civil unrest going on outside of the bar limits. Her storyline was a bit divisive, with some people wanting to listen to the bar patrons rather than hear to Jill’s plight, while many others felt she was the most relatable video game character ever witnessed – and we are very happy with these reactions as making divisive aspects is a sign that we are doing something right.
When the idea for Nirvana first surfaced, the idea of a bartender who was a mother was kind of an instant thought, something along the lines of writing someone who was the polar opposite to the previous main character, and that’s how Sam was born.
Jill uses mostly dark colours, Sam has bright pink hair. Jill is a single 27 year old woman living alone in a tiny apartment, Sam is a 32 year-old mother in a (rocky) relationship, not to mention that Saint Alicia, the place where Nirvana takes place, is pretty much heaven compared to Glitch City, and so on.
The biggest difference however… is that Sam smiles a lot!
First ever sketch I did of Sam. Not a whole lot changed except for the way I draw the hair (had to modify it in order to do the anime bits you saw in the trailer).
Many people have also pointed out that she has a cute accent going on. That one’s a work in progress but her way of talking is also very important in this quest to differentiate her from Jill. And it’s not like her whole deal is being the opposite to Jill, but rather that all the good ideas that occurred to us happened to be very different from her, so took the ball and ran with it as they say. We also refuse to make Valhalla again, as it was made in a very specific moment in time and its magic is impossible to replicate, and the sooner we stop chasing that lighting the better as we wouldn’t want to taint the memories you have of it.
One fun fact is that some folks already hate Sam because I was too horny last year and gave her a big bosom, which is understandable but you should know enough about us to trust our judgement in this kinda thing. We’ll just let the game speak for itself when the time comes, as we always do.
So what can you expect from Sam? We really don’t wanna spoil anything, but you should look forward to a more cheerful person crafting the cocktails this time around, someone who is still coming to terms with motherhood, a troubled past and a relationship she’s not really feeling anymore. Probably less relatable to the average Sukeban Games fan, but I think her story goes beyond these superficial aspects and we have no doubt you’ll end up loving her, and being reminded of yourself or somebody else while playing. Relationships are a universal thing after all.
Here are some non-spoilerific facts about her:
She’s Sam!
She’s cute!
She has pink hair!
CUTE!!!
She loves a good beer and tries too hard to be a good mom, to her own detriment.
By the way, we have some cool news to share later, but let me say right now that we are currently working on a public demo – that’s right, just like the one we made featuring Anna way back in 2015. Using all the feedback we got from the trade show demos we managed to improve the game a lot, so we are pretty excited about it.
We don’t have a solid timeline for this, but we are doing our best to make it a thing.
For now, please wish list Nirvana if you haven’t already, it really helps with visibility on Steam!
During this date we would be revealing an April Fools joke like the Switch port that ended up being real, and VA11HALLA kids that also ended up being real.
Today, we would like to get real about our current situation since we feel it would be a disservice to our audience to keep pretending we are in a healthy situation.
On August 2014 VA-11 Hall-A gave its first baby steps into a full-on release. Prologue, a side story meant to tide people over while we finished the full product, was finally out in the wild. During this release I was on vacation with my family in Margarita, an island north of Venezuela. I took with me the laptop I bought with our first advance payment from Ysbryd and decided to work whenever we were back into the residence we rented.
At this time we just jumped ship from Ren’Py to GameMaker Studio. Tided over by the idea of easier console porting (Vita in particular) and a couple of technical ceilings that we encountered with Ren’Py (Specifically that the pixels didn’t look crisp unless you were in full screen and freezes whenever we tried to use drag-and-drop). At this point we were asked if we could have a playable build in Game Maker, and I complied, confident by how I was able to port over the mixing mechanics from Ren’Py into GameMaker.
Like these stories usually go, my confidence got trampled upon time and time again.
There’s a saying in Venezuela that goes “Flojo trabaja doble” which roughly means “Lazy people end up working twice as much” (in one of the rare instances where the english version is longer than the spanish one), this saying usually goes to those situations where not thinking ahead ends up causing you to work more in the long run.
And while “lazy” is not the right word in this context, it is the right general idea, since for the first devlog we want to describe our focus moving forward, the lessons learned in VA-11 Hall-A that are already showing up in N1RV Ann-A and NEXT GAME.
We still receive this question a lot, so I feel it’s worth to publish a friendly reminder that VA-11 Hall-A is indeed coming to Nintendo Switch (and PlayStation 4) in early 2019.
