HaS-000: Have a sip, a game about life
Journey with a quiet robot who inherits a traveling coffee truck. Keep a cozy space for strangers and regulars. Master brewing and learn the rhythms of the business. In a city optimized for hustle, would you still serve with mindfulness and care?
After many revisions, the game I first envisioned in 2023: Have a sip (HS) now feels quite solid.
The trigger that sparked work on HS was my own mid-life crisis [@_@]. This was, after all, a time when I desperately needed a creative effort that I have full agency over. The project has also been sustained by the desire to create stories for myself and others (perhaps even for my son when he’s old enough). These are stories that are not preachy, more grown-up, yet can still channel hopefulness against the backdrop of cold, harsh reality.
Since then, the project has started to take on a life of its own. And it’s now at a point where I am comfortable sharing more details.
At its heart, “Have a sip” has a simple premise: serve drinks to patrons, then sit back as their stories unfold. While the part about drink-making is interesting itself, it’s the characters that ordered the drinks, their conversations and life that are the core identity of the game.
On that front, I do have specific stories to tell, for example:
A moment filled with child-like amazement, where a toddler attempts to show her parents the new flower she noticed on the sidewalk.
A wishful, melancholic evening when an aged worker thought about his past choices and how things could have turned out differently.
Minutes after a son sent off his elderly parents at the train station, with him noticing visible marks of time on their silhouette.
Break time after school, with excited teenagers swapping tips and theories on their latest (board) games.
A lazy Sunday morning where a tabby cat greets two strangers, rubbing his cheek at their legs and purring with satisfaction.
and other small, fleeting stories like these...
These moments are not epic adventure stories. In many cases, they aren’t particularly dramatic either. They are also not the sensational stories that seem to dominate my media feeds. Still, I deeply believe there’s something to be gained from stories like these, where we slow down and see the world through a more grounded, nuanced and personal lens. It’s relaxing and cleansing, in a spiritual way, too.
If you have ever read or watched Bartender, Gohan no Otomo or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, these stories about life should feel familiar. It’s because “Have a sip” draw a great deal of inspiration from Japanese works categorized as mono no aware (物の哀れ) or iyashikei (癒し系).
Going further, I want these stories told not just with words, but also accompanied with visuals, audio and interactivity. As a result, “Have a sip” is a game instead of a fiction series. Being ambitious, I also wanted to push the envelope so there’s actual gameplay: making drinks, running an F&B business, delivering to people. This will invite the “readers” to participate in the world, where people-watching goes beyond lines in the dialog box itself. Now as “players”, they will be able to interact with the stories’ characters, contemplate the events in the context of a larger world, and even draw their own meaning about the negative space between conversations.
I believe this is a goal worth striving for, even though it immediately raises the difficulty level by 1000x!
Surprisingly, rather than feeling dread and giving up, I found myself coming back to work on HS again and again, even as I drown in work deadlines, family responsibilities and health issues. Having produced some fictions in the past, this tells me that the idea has legs and will go places in the future. So it’s a responsibility of mine to see this through.
As the end of 2025 draws near, it’s almost 2 years of moonlighting on “Have a sip”. I’m pretty happy, actually, that there’s enough material to share about it publicly.
It’s probably not going to be finished anytime soon and there will be a lot of production hurdles, especially as I have very limited time as a solo dev on a hobby project.
However, if you have read this far, I believe that HS will be a project that you will enjoy. So please keep coming back to this blog from time to time for more updates :)
Finally, I wish you well and sincerely hope we can connect around HS in the future.
Cheers,
exklamationmark