Welcome to our first blog post about Ale Abbey and us, the team behind it, Hammer & Ravens!
We will be releasing a series of weekly blog posts (every Friday), with questions and answers about Ale Abbey, game dev, and brewing beer! If you have any questions that you would like to ask, comment to this post or find us anywhere online and we will try to include it in one of our next blog posts!
Without further ado...
-- Is this your studio's first game? What other games did your studio develop?
Nope! We wouldn't necessarily call us veterans, but this is our 4th game, with a 5th also underway. So far we developed Razerwire: Nanowars (2018), Headbangers in Holiday Hell (2020), and Empires in Ruins (2021). In addition to working on Ale Abbey, we are also developing an educational game called Learn German with Otto, that we aim to release soon on mobile! Considering the development time behind those titles, it's safe to say we've been doing this for a few years now!
-- Ale Abbey looks very different from your previous games. Why is that?
Oh well... times change, we had to change too!
In all seriousness though, Ale Abbey was born thanks to a mix of reasons. Emiliano's passion for home brewing and tycoon games merged with the desire to make a relaxing game with a strong positive vibe to it. It certainly draws from the experience we accrued developing our previous games, but it has an entirely different approach on both design and development. Ale Abbey focuses on reward, whereas our previous games mainly focused on punishment (sorry guys!). This might sound like a cliché, but this detail alone took the design and development towards a completely different direction. Besides offering some challenge, all aspects of Ale Abbey are aiming towards appeasing, satisfying and relaxing the player.
-- If you were to give one genre label to Ale Abbey, what would it be?
Well, this one's easy. Product-centered Tycoon describes it best. Think about old school The Movies or the more recent Gamedev Tycoon.
-- What are the teams favorite brews? Honest answers only and try to limit it to one!
Ah, our favorite subject! Well, it's as good a way to introduce the team as any:
- Emiliano, our lead developer, loves two types of beers above all others (he knows we were supposed to limit it to one, but...) Belgian Ales (most of them; the darker, the better) and Bavarian Helles
- Gavin, our programmer, good old British chap that he is, likes his English Ales with less than half a centimeter of foam and almost no carbonation
- Francesco, our artist, would pick dark lagers and ales, better if high in ABV
- Yannis, our marketing & comms, trusting the RNG a bit too much, adores wild yeast brews (lambics), but will often choose finely carbonated pilsners for longer sessions
And that was all for today! Thanks for your time and see you all next Friday!
-- Hammer & Ravens
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