Another week is close to its end and another Something's Brewing is ready to welcome your hopfully (pun very much intended), ale-infused weekend!
This week we're using our post as a small development checkpoint. We wanted to give you an inside scoop of what has been happening under the hood, what porting pains we'll have to deal with to bring Ale Abbey to as many of you as possible, and discuss some changes in the format of Something's Brewing to make it more consistently tasty for you!
As always, we've reserved a few lines for our favorite subject, brewing!
Read on!
-- Upcoming Changes in Something's Brewing
We wanted to use today's post as a small heads up on the way Something's Brewing will change over the course of the following weeks.
Something's Brewing will remain a weekly blog post, but we will slowly leave the Q&A format behind. We expect that giving it a more "open" feel to it, will allow us to bring you fresher development news in the form of weekly dev reviews. We also believe that this will boost the viability of Something's Brewing as a communication tool. All in all, expect Something's Brewing to be more diverse in subject matter, fresh, and easy to consume!
Coming next week, Something's Brewing will either be an overview of that week's development, or a small introduction of the team working on Ale Abbey (we can't wait to do these too!).
-- What is the team working on right now?
So, the programmers are predominantly working on remaking the architecture that was used for an internal demo we created a few months ago. Rudimentary as it was, that internal demo was used to get an overall understanding of where Ale Abbey's idea stands and was also used to showcase its potential to interested publishers. What we'll be using is a pub-sub pattern (designed by our Alessandro) that will allow for great maintainability and separation of frontend and backend.
The artists have been producing a ton of art. All the animated monks, the first iterations of the player's advisor portraits, the exteriors and backgrounds of the monastery, and a lot more. They are also not idle in creating some wickedly meme-worthy content!
On the community side of things, we're experimenting with features we want to add to our Discord server, looking for new spaces to share our content and generate discussions around Ale Abbey, and we're slowly building a more streamlined way of delivering our development news to you!
Through a powerful collaboration of our marketing and programming team, we are also working on a new website for our studio, Hammer & Ravens.
-- Any changes on the release date front? Any thoughts about a physical version? Which platforms can we expect to see Ale Abbey on? What do you see as the biggest issue with porting Ale Abbey?
We still stand with launching on PC (incl. Linux of course) and Mac to start with. Past that point, we will have to hold on to our horses. We really want to see Ale Abbey run on Switch, but we can't make any promises yet. The major issue for a clean port of a managerial game is definitely the controls. It's a genre born and made for mouse controls, therefore adapting it to a controller/gamepad will take quite a bit of working around and re-thinking.
Unfortunately, as it always happens with release dates, we can't talk about a release date yet. And as for a physical release, it sounds good and we like to brainstorm about it, but that's as far as we can currently go.
-- BIAB (brew-in-a-bag) or Traditional All-grain?
That's definitely a matter of choice and available resources.
Emiliano chooses BIAB, because it takes a lot less space and time, and from his own research the end result is basically the same. He doesn't know if traditional brings any kind of benefits, but for his 15-liter batches, BIAB works like a charm. All he needs is a single pot, a single mash bag, and he can complete a brew in the confines of a small kitchen in about 3 to 4 hours.
Yannis still cries over the brews he had to spend 8 hours on (sometimes more...). Done the traditional way takes quite a lot longer, and requires a lot more space to work the brew. In order to further cut down on time, he would almost always need an extra pair of hands. He believes it helps a lot in understanding the process but is extremely taxing on both time and willpower.
tl;dr: Yannis' next brew will be BIAB. What about yours?
Thanks for your time and see you all next Friday!
-- Hammer & Ravens
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