We're set aside today's Something's Brewing for a chance to quickly review this year's development progress for Ale Abbey, our upcoming Monastery Brewery tycoon.
A hectic year for everyone here at the studio, with a lot of progress on multiple fronts, but we still managed to put a few highlights together, for your eyes only! We will be reminiscing about the work on the Exterior and Interior of the Monastery and its surroundings, Ale Abbey's diverse set of Characters, and of course UI and Coding!
-- Environs (Interior & Exterior)
We started the year by completing some much-needed work on Ale Abbey's environs. Although this work started with the magnificent iconic exteriors of Ale Abbey's locale
with more details created to adorn the world far beyond its premises...
it also included certain parts of the Monstery itself (i.e. the roof tiling).
Not stopping with these assets, we went on to work on the Monastery's interior. We started by striking out a very significant milestone where the team had to decide on a floor tiling that would not create issues with the perspective while panning the game's camera. The resulting solution saved us from both aesthetic (3D feeling in a 2D world) and gameplay issues (unrealistic perspectives that could potentially break immersion).
Adding to that we also focused quite heavily on the interiors of the Monastery on a per-room basis. This came from our very early decision to uphold a diegetic approach for the sake of aesthetics and gameplay realism; the rooms had to look the part and also "turn into" practical UI scenes in a way that the player could always feel as if they were in said room, with non-obstructive UI, and without being overwhelmed by too much information.
No room makes this more obvious than the Monastery's Pantry which completely transformed from looking like this:
to something we felt a lot more "comfortable" with:
-- Characters
Of course, we have to mention finishing the design of all the characters that are related to the Monastery (either living/working in it or somehow related to it), as well as working on their animations. Two major goals that we had to always keep in mind, keep them diverse and true to their time and make sure they are as charismatic and quirky as possible to make them memorable and distinct.
-- UI and Coding
Finally, regardless of how much we say we worked on Ale Abbey's UI, it would still be an understatement. Very closely tied to the Monastery's Interiors, specifically due to our insistence on keeping certain tasks and processes realistic and diegetic, the Monastery's UI is minimal if barely noticeable or completely part of the scene a player is playing through.
The best example would of course come from the Library room, where the player can spend as much or as little time as they wish, to craft their recipes. The Library's UI was initially designed to look something like this:
And ended up looking a lot easier to navigate and "digest," like this:
Other really important UI elements that we managed to complete this year would be a mini-map to help locate available rooms to choose from for a task, a very comprehensive calendar, and some amazing work that will save us from a lot of trouble in the future when we need to combine an array of different beers (coming from player choices) with glasses and foams ;)
Behind the scenes, our programmers worked on character pathing, recipe crafting and brewing, and lately have been focused on perfecting the Laymen's task loops. A lot to show there, lines and lines of it actually, but none of it... remotely "interesting," but you didn't hear that from me :p
But, this is already approaching tl;dr territory so we'll leave you at that!
We have had an amazing time developing Ale Abbey so far and we are more than thankful for your continuing support. Wishing you all the best for the year to come :D
What applies to weekends also applies to celebrations 10-fold, so... enjoy responsibly, and make sure you join us next week (and year) for more Ale Abbey news!
-- Hammer & Ravens
Looking for more Ale Abbey? Or maybe you want to chat with the team and our community? Find us on:
