Summary

• Emiliano Pastorelli's journey combines his love for beer and game development, resulting in the creation of Ale Abbey.
• Pastorelli's transition from hardcore games to a cosier pixel-art aesthetic is driven by the need to make profitable games.
• Ale Abbey's simplified brewing process and fun gameplay mechanics aim to create an enjoyable gaming experience for players.

Everything in Emiliano Pastorelli’s life has led to the creation of Ale 🍰Abbey. He’s been brewing beer and making games for years, and his two passions have come together as game director at Hammer & Ravens. While he, like myself and every other middle-aged bloke the world over, has always liked beer, it took a trip to northern France, on the border with Belgium, for him to discover the world of craft🐠 beer.

“I discovered Belgian beer there,” he explains to me ovꦬer a Discord call. “And that was a moment of epiphany.” From that point, he s⛎ampled fresh pints and dived deep into his own journey of homebrewing, buying all the equipment, reading books about coaxing flavours out of various hops, and spending his free time tinkering with recipes.

At the same time, he was making games like Empires in Ruins, which he admits was probably a bit too hardcore. “It was a really grim game,” Pastorelli tells me. “Really punishin𒀰g towards the player, but not fancy𒁏 enough to be Dark Souls punishing. It was just punishing. So a lot of people really hated it.”

He realised that, if Hammer & Ravens was to start making money, it needed to start making games t🔯hat people actually wanted to play. Empires in Ruins has a small, hardcore fanbase, but Pastorell🦩i has to think about his team’s livelihoods: “If we want to make a living out of this, we need to think about what sells nowadays.”

He admits that, when he was younger, he didn’t care about commercial feasibility and just went “full creative&🐬rdquo;. He didn’t want to sell ꧟out. That’s why he turned to drink.

“I didn't want to work on something only because it would sell,” he says. “That would be depressing – I’d find a job in an office and that's it. If I have to do it for the money, I wanted it to be fun and I wanted it to be interesting, but I wanted it to be something that, has a chance to make some money so that we can make a living.”

It’s a difficult time for indies right now, as my colleague Meg Pelliccio found🦩 at WASD independent games expo earlier this year. Like many things, Pastorelli compꦬromised, turning to a popular genre and a cosy pixel-art aesthetic to avoid the studio “just hanging project by project”, but combining it with his love of a💦ll things alcoholic.

As well as brewing his own craft beer, Pastorelli samples local beers on his travels, has taken a beer sommelie▨r course, and plans holidays around trips to breweries and monasteries.

But making a cosier game isn’t a shortcut to the Forbes rich list. “It's so easy to make a sh*tty tycoon game,” he laughs. The mechanics have to be solid, and in tycoon games the interplay between them has to be perfect as there’s generally little narrative to carry players through (although Pastorelli hints that a story may come post-launch). Therefore, Pastorelli has simplified the brewing process to ensure that the game is fun.

“[Brewing] can get super heavy,” he explains, detailing the chemistry and perfectionism that goes into creating the perfect pint. “We chose such a visual style that would have clashed with something too complex, so let's say [the brewing] is correct. I try to never put anything that is wrong in real life, but it's maybe ten percent of the real thing, maximum. It’s extremely simplified.”

Aside from the brewing, he’s been keen to fill the game with fun. From giving low-alcohol bre♑ws to the poor around town to make your monk brewers happier as they&r🎀squo;re doing good deeds, to bribing bandits and authorities with a good barrel of bitter, Ale Abbey hints at a lot of gameplay outside of the careful brewing.

After enlisting his dad to play the bagpipes on Empires in Ruins’ medieval folk-punk soundtrack, Pastorelli has again turned to a figure from his youth for Ale Abbey. Monkey Island 2 and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis composer Clint Bajakian is on board. It turns out the man who soundtrack💜ed the games of Pastorelli’s youth has a strange connection to Ale Abbey, as if everything was fated to be.

“It turned out he was a homebrewer when he was young,” Pastorelli laughs. “He made some sh*tty experimenꦦts, as he called them, trying to put licorice in some stouts or whatever. But he enjoyed it and he likes beer.”

The fun concept of Ale Abbey pulled Bajakian on board, and Pastorelli has loved every minute of working with the creative genius (talking with him is like “having taken a hallucinogen” sometimes, Pastorelli explains). And he hopes that the fun at the heart of Ale Abbey will pull players in when it aims to reꦫlease later this year, too.

A passion for beer has brought together a game that promises great pints and great fun. All roads have led to a group of monks and nuns perfecting their brews in a medieval monastery. But has all of Pastorelli’s rigorous research had an adverse effect on his healt🎐h?

“[I drink] a couple of real beers per week,” he explains. “But whenever the sun is shining and I want a beer, just grab an alcohol-free one and it's okay. I mean, it's not the real thing, but it's close enough.” Let’s hope Ale Abbey is the same.