Robc’s Blog

Announcing the long awaited grand opening of thatBreweryGame.com is upon us on February 24th! Let the beer drinking begin!

Yup, That’s right, thatBreweryGame is back! And we think it is better than ever. If you played during our beta test then you should come back and check out all the new stuff. If you’ve never tried it, well now is the time to get in on the ground floor since everyone will be starting with shiny brand new equipment. No experience is necessary and you can create one label and play completely for free.

The game now has custom brewing recipes with hundreds of unlockable ingredients to make your perfect and unique beer, it also has upgradeable breweries including the option to brew more than one beer at a time in multiple fermentation tanks. Lots of other stuff is changed too and all of it works better.

Never brewed beer before? Want to know more about it? Then this is the ultimate way to learn, online, no mess, no expense, no fuss. Check out what steps you need to take to make the perfect home brew. The steps are laid out for you and it is (almost) impossible to fail. In time your skill and knowledge about brewing will grow and your beer quality (and alcohol content!) will rise. Ask more experienced brewers for help in the pub, you’ll have access to some of the best and most experienced brewers on the planet!

An experienced brewer? Well here is your chance to prove it. Apply your real world knowledge of beer by creating any one of our 32 beer styles in your own online brewery. Your beer quality score rises based on how close you can match your ingredients and your skill in the brewery to the style. There are no random number generators in the brewing game, the decisions you make directly affect the quality of your beer, test yourself against other brewers and create the perfect stout, or lager, or ale, or… you get the picture. Sell your beer in the pub to show the world that you are in fact the best all around brewer on the planet!

As in the original game you can create your own custom labels and brewery by uploading images of your own beer labels and brewery. If you want more exposure for your real world products then this is the game for you. Create a virtual beer that matches your real products and sell your virtual beer in our pub. The more you sell the more often your label will be prominently displayed on our game pages. Free advertising!

Still not interested? Just want something simple to play after a hard day? You don’t have to brew beer at all. Just join the pub, sample (virtual) beer from our brewers, play the pub games, drive fast cars, meet famous (loose?) women (men too!), and collect cool stuff including beer caps from around the world, or just chat it up with new friends. Spend a little time farming barley and hops to help out the brewers’ and you can earn yourself enough beer money to buy everyone a round! Or get your friends to buy you one of the delicacies from the pub menu. C’mon, try it, I mean really now, going to a pub… how hard is that? And don’t tell me you have no experience at that… pah-leeeease…
Robc.

ThatBreweryGame.com has been in development for well over a year now which is quite a bit longer than originally planned. The game is stabilizing at least at the brew kit and garage brewery levels. I am once again reopening the servers to full public access and I have also reopened the registration server for new players. In addition to the usual bug squashing my attention will now be focused on the micro-brewery and higher level gameplay.

Although to many of you the game may feel simple compared to other games on the internet, rest assured that the feature set is quite significant for a lone wolf developer. This one game has the framework of an entire social networking site including chat, forums, friends list, achievements, collections, statistics tracking, image uploading, etc. All of these features are of my own design and can now be improved upon and more easily incorporated into future games.

Although I might say that I am a lone wolf, I am of course never completely alone since I have a very dedicated volunteer testing team as well as contract artists and other helpers to whom I am in debt. The support of my family, friends, and development team keeps me afloat even on the worst days (like those days when the bug list seems to double and triple in size overnight).

One of my goals was to keep ThatBreweryGame.com accesible in as many modern browsers as possible without any download requirement whatsever, that is you don’t have to have flash player or other plugins (except perhaps for sound in browsers other than MSIE). Learning to create and manage these features myself will prove invaluable in future development efforts. And while I may in future incorporate some of the more common plug-ins and code packages (for other games), I am quite sure that I will never regret that I will always have the ability to fall back and build these algorithms myself from only the most basic language components.