If there isn’t anything that suits your needs, you better build it yourself: that’s probably a good summary for A.E.S.. It was the year 2020 and we were pretty unsatisfied with how the gaming industry was proceeding. I was a pixel artist at the time (Zughy), and I was trying to understand whether pixel art and game dev was what I wanted to do for a living. Philosophical questions aside, I came to the conclusion that - work or not - creating videogames made me feel good, so no matter what the future might have held, I wanted to keep making them - one way or another. That way, in the end, was A.E.S.
The first version of A.E.S. was called FOSSa delle Papere and every content was pretty amateur level.
All that content was made by us and took a lot of time. Time was the price to pay for our utopias to rise: back then, toll was 5 months and the quality was… well, we were trying 😄. With the passing of time, A.E.S. grew bigger and bigger, with many minigames, new systems, a website, a presence on social networks, and those 5 months soon became but a far away memory. It’s funny because we’ve always thought we were “almost there”, until that almost turned into years.
In these years, with our lives going through changes, time has slowly shown us how our dreams were getting farther and farther from the expectations we entertained. For years we’ve spent at least one night per week planning what the next thing should have been and we’ve filled boards with suggestions to understand what was actually within reach. And there are so many things we’d like to add or change, from new Fantasy Brawl classes to xp systems and new minigames, that listing them here wouldn’t be enough to give you an idea of the worlds we’ve built in our heads.
However, here is the catch: time is finite; and when you work, live with another person or… I don’t know, do adult things, time becomes more and more scarce. It’s something we’ve experienced firsthand lately. If you hadn’t been under the impression we’ve slowed down it’s only because we’ve become very good at planning and developing. But we can’t make miracles, and we won’t ever be able to convert those dreams into reality if we only rely on our free time. And we’d like not to renounce it. So… How to fix this? Well, buckle up!
The power of pinky swear
Donations don’t work. Better said, the donation system we’ve featured so far surely doesn’t work. People want something in return, because it’s what they’d get from all the other games out there: a skin, a weapon variant, cool effects. However, giving people something means turning a donation into a transaction. So you’d buy the new weapon, the new skin etc., super cool; but then the Italian state would buy our skin and bones: because in our country traders have to pay a yearly tax of ~€4.500, no matter the income. Haha, sure 🫠
What we can give to people though, is an indicative roadmap of what we may be able to do if they decide to support our little happy sanctuary. We can’t of course guarantee these items (only pinky swear!), nor will contributors receive any special rights or entitlement to specific features or timelines - A.E.S. is for everyone no matter what. However, displaying such a roadmap should give people an overall idea of what we might be able to deliver - possibly leading to more donations.
This doesn’t mean of course that A.E.S. will stop seeing new updates unless money is received. We’ve been working on this project for 6 years and we’ll likely keep working on it for another 6. The difference is that, what would have required us from 6 months to 2 years to be made, it could be delivered in a month or two. It’s, well, an accelerator, that’s all.
Without further ado, you can find our donation plan below and… well, we hope it’ll work!