We're starting off on the right foot, with the first week of Ale Abbey's development cranking up to its normal levels already.
In today's review, you'll read about our first homebrew for 2024, building storylines for Ale Abbey, new assets for Laymen, and of course some behind-the-scenes programming shenanigans.
Without further ado, 2024's first accomplishments ;)
-- Coding Adventures
With the team coming back from celebrating Xmas and NYs our programmers (Ed, Galandil, JeanBis, and Emiliano) went face first on the code behind our beloved Laymen and of - drum roll - the complex backside of Brewing.
In reality, there is a lot of work being done in refactoring ("rewriting" in cool programmers' lingo) the code behind Brewing which will - of course - also necessitate some further refactoring of the code of the Merchant, Laymen, and Bartering with the Markets - not necessarily in this order.
A quick reminder here, the harder we work on Brewing's complexity behind the scenes the more fluid the process will look to you, as a player, in the future! So fear not, Brewing might sound a bit high maintenance now, but it's not going to be difficult on you!
-- New Laymen assets
Working on their backend is not the only task we had in store for the Laymen. Although we made quite the progress with their visual assets before the end of last year, we still have a few more that need to be completed to wrap things up.
Please help the team out and brainstorm a name for this dashing young fellow now, will ya?
-- Building stories in Ale Abbey
A long time coming this one... after having shown you so many visual assets and trying very hard not to give away too much information about Ale Abbey's music (don't worry, that one's coming as well). So, let us take you through a few specifics about the stories in the Abbey.
Given that Ale Abbey is a tycoon game at heart, an overarching story revolving around the Monastery will derive from a pure gameplay-specific viewpoint: you need to make Ale Abbey a renowned brewing monastery in the area, help the community around you, and help progress and promote the craft of brewing. All of these will of course tightly knit in Ale Abbey's gameplay loops.
So we decided to use a combination of storytelling and narrative design in Ale Abbey. First and foremost because this will be a tycoon game, providing an extremely rich story would take away from the most technical part of its gameplay and goals for the player. However, given the historical significance of Ale Abbey's subject matter, aiming for replayability, and the fact that the playthroughs will be divided into 3 very distinct chapters (that will also be divided into smaller subchapters) we have the opportunity to make a narrative that follows a less traditional and linear route that is based on player choices. Taking all of the above into consideration, approaching Ale Abbey's storytelling with an embedded and procedural narrative made more sense.
You can expect the stories you will find in Ale Abbey to be heavily inspired by real events of the time (or around that time) and also touch upon subjects that are related to timeless societal issues. You can sneak a peek at Yannis' workspace shown below, with but a small example of the stories that are to fleshed out soon ;)
-- Hammer & Ravens' enjoy their first homebrew for '24
Ale Abbey's lead, Emiliano, cracked open the team's first homebrew for '24. Unfortunately, he brewed and enjoyed it alone as we are all practically spread around Europe...
Spending about 20 days in the bottle - my, oh my! - the aptly named Sister Pinta was cracked open and consumed with high praise by its creator. We're not afraid of any bias here, Emiliano is a certified beer connoisseur (no kidding) and usually extremely hard on himself, so if he liked it, it's good!
Sister Pinta is a 6% Witbier that is smooth, fruity, refreshing, spiced, and slightly acidic. During its tasting, Emiliano added that the flavors of yeast and phenolics are present without them feeling too invasive. With one small correction, calibrating the recipe to make the head more persistent, Emiliano expects this to be a staple in his cellar ;)
As always, enjoy your weekend responsibly, and join us next week for more Ale Abbey news!
-- Hammer & Ravens
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