Category: Sukeban Games

Announcing Cyberpunk Bartender Action N1RV Ann-A

Posted on by kiririn51

It is with great pleasure that we announce that a new game in the Cyberpunk Bartender Action series is in the works! featuring a whole new cast and new ways to play and see the story unfold.

The story this time around is about Sam, a bartender living in Saint Alicia; an artificial island that, just like Glitch City, was developed as a playground for corporations that have been forming city states of their own around the globe in order to circumvent regulations. Sam is at odds with her romantic partner, Leon, who is the head of a small Yakuza family that operates at the redlight district. Their relationship is in the rocks, as they deal with the conflicts arising from their very different lives while taking care of their 8 year-old boy, Tony, who’s growing up in a increasingly harsher society.

The game has been in development for about nine months and we decided it was in a good enough state to be shown. It will be a stand-alone game, meaning that you don’t have to play VA-11 Hall-A in order to enjoy it (but it will certainly give you insight into existing lore).  It will also feature big improvements over VA-11 Hall-A in many aspects, but you’ll have to wait a bit more to find out.

A lot of work has gone into this reveal so I want to thank to everyone involved in this project. It’s been a huge pleasure to go back to the world we started with Valhalla and it certainly won’t be the last title to do so!

Now go ahead and check out the website at nirvana.bar to get some juicy screenshots!

Regarding Next Game

It’s not cancelled, it doesn’t have a lower priority, it wasn’t made as a red herring. We expanded the staff (just one extra programmer) to be able to handle more than one project at a time and this one is going just fine, we just decided to reveal N1RV Ann-A first because it was the most polished one at the moment. Next Game is our biggest project to date and as such it needs more time to get pretty before we can show you gameplay. Hopefully there’s as much excitement for it as N1RV Ann-A going forward.

 

Smol Q&A: What’s next for Sukeban, and more!

Posted on by kiririn51

Hello everyone, long time no see! It’s been a while since we wrote an update.

Two years ago VA-11 Hall-A was released and we wanted to do something cool for the anniversary (June 21st), but it was simply impossible to plan something cool amidst the chaos of developing new games and looking for more peaceful grounds. We did promise to answer some of your questions though, so without further ado, let’s take a couple minutes to go through a few select ones, and then some more in a future post.

Continue reading “Smol Q&A: What’s next for Sukeban, and more!” →

Cut Feature: Secret Properties

Posted on by Fernando Damas

日本語版

We’ve seen people theorize if VA-11 Hall-A had content cut at some point, how the ending feels like it’s missing something. The only thing I can comment on that topic is that we’re guilty of many things… except cutting stuff out.

VA-11 Hall-A’s development was a constant rush. From learning how to make a full-fledged game, to dealing with people that claim they’ve been waiting two years for a game that wasn’t even half a year in development, to figuring out what the hell we want to do and where we want the game to go. When you’re in that kind of mentality you calculate every move. Cutting content requires time, effort, and resources you can barely muster as it is. When you add something you make god damn sure it’s there to stay.

For graphical depiction of how it felt to make VA-11 Hall-A, here’s this GIF of Gromit.

There’s a fun story on that topic. Originally the game was planned to have 20 days… but that’s because I can’t do math to save my life and swore the game would end on December 31st with that amount.

Said day was more breather before the ending. It had Alma’s day 17 dialog, Kim’s day 14 dialog, and a brief stint with the dogs that was added to their dialog on day 11. As you can deduce, it wasn’t so much “cut” as it was “relocated everywhere else”. Even the dialog between sets of clients was merged into other days.

That’s not to say there isn’t any stuff we dropped deep into the dev cycle, there’s one such thing in plain sight, actually.

You’ll notice while navigating the recipe book that there’s three properties.

A good ol’ Bad Touch.

The first is the flavor of the drink, the second is the kind of drink it is, and the third… is a “secret property”. Every drink would have this third property marked as “???” at the beginning, only revealing itself if you served it to the right person at the right time.

Someone asked for something to wake them up? Serve them a Bleeding Jane and suddenly the drink would have “Sobering” unlocked in the recipe book, making it easier to know that drink was meant to wake drunkards. A client asked for a strong drink? Pick the right manly drink and you’ll unlock the “Strong” property and a bonus tip! This idea also branched off from an earlier one of manipulating the mood of the clients through the drinks (which is why one of the properties is “happy”).

Why did we cut it? We just didn’t deem it necessary. Development moved on and we just felt like all we needed was “flavor” and “kind”. The closest thing to dialog reflecting this early idea is *Kira* Miki asking for a “soft” drink. We also left the secret properties there because they weren’t hurting anybody and it was easier than fixing all the entries of the recipe book.

The bottled drinks almost followed suit, but we weren’t gonna waste a good Simpsons reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_wnkp38UrA