Blog

We haven’t posted on the blog much this year, so in celebration of a quite successful year at AeLa, we wanted to recap what we’ve been up to!

Back in January...

This time last year we introduced AeLa Anticapitalist Aid, a program designed to help our neighbors and organizations that share or support our anticapitalist values by donating 75% of our Unity Asset Store revenue from our product Easy Feedback. In our...

After a long time of wanting to have merch, both for the team and for the lovely folks who support us, we’ve done it! Today we launched the AeLa merch store via Cotton Bureau!

Available currently are t-shirts, tank tops, and sweatshirts in all sorts of colors and with 2 designs: Angular and Echo. We hope to have even more products and designs available in the future. Just in time for the holidays, get your AeLa merch...

The only AAA we're interested in

As individuals we strongly believe that the forces of capitalism incentivize exploitation and an inherently inequitable society. We formed AeLa as a cooperative in an effort to avoid the usual cycle of labor exploitation for the enrichment of business owners and instead give every member an equal stake and say at the table, establish sustainable and compassionate labor practices, and ideally inspire others to do the same. As a cooperative, our business...

In game jams like Ludum Dare, your project is subjected to the harsh rating of other participants in the jam. As a participant, your goal is to create a player experience that will be well-rated by your fellow jam participants. If you’re like me, you...

Squire for Hire is an innovative 18 card tile placement inventory management game designed by Jon Merchant and published by Letiman Games. Playing as one of many squires, players compete to collect the highest scoring bag of items for their...

Introduction

One of my favorite things about game jams is the creative outlet they provide. The projects we work on at Aesthetician Labs are all fulfilling in their own way, but are also tuned to meet the demands of the market. This is important if you’re trying to run a business, but it can be very satisfying to break away from those demands and make whatever you feel would be coolest. Often game jams give you the...

Because we started AeLa when we were students, networking was almost automatic when we started out. Being in university afforded us lots of opportunities to meet new folks, whether it be by serendipity, events, or leveraging the grapevine.

We’re no longer students, though, so the nature of many of our network connections has changed. COVID has also changed networking for everyone, everywhere. And to top it off, our business model and company goals have changed. As we’ve evolved, our network has...

AeLa has always believed that quality work, even in quantity, doesn’t need to come at the price of personal wellbeing. Within the games industry, this is often referred to as crunch; as a three person team doing our best to avoid crunch, we’ve still managed to make 60+ hyper casual prototypes in roughly a year and a half, complete client projects, and start internal projects.

I want to cover some of the high-level aspects of our scheduling system as a team in this post, including how we handle...

In the first-ever ROC Game Fest Online Show, Aesthetician Labs shows off Squire for Hire: Digital Edition, a client project in collaboration with Letiman Games and Dan Merchant from summer 2020.

Based on their time as Producer at Aesthetician Labs, Sam provides a beginner-friendly talk about some foundations of games production. The talk covers the basics of managing your indie games, including balancing the forces of scope, time, and price, among other things.

The...

Shaders might seem impenetrable, but some familiarity with programming concepts and the Unity game engine is all you need to get started. Aesthetician Labs's lead technical artist Aidan Markham will cover the basics of writing shaders, how to modify the pre-existing shaders that...

In the past year, Aesthetician Labs has developed over 40 mobile game prototypes. To keep up this rapid pace, AeLa developed a lens--based on spatial thinking--through which to generate, analyze, and develop their ideas. This talk from Noah, the team's lead developer, introduces...

Whether you've never used git before or you've been using it for years, this talk is for you! Noah covers the basics of how git works as well as share workflow tips they've learned over years of use.

June 2019 marked one year since Aesthetician Labs had been in business. Sam, the team's producer, discusses what they think has gone well throughout that year, the challenges they've dealt with, and offer thoughts on how others can improve their project management skills.

Crazy Platez is inspired by Rochester, NY, where the “Garbage Plate” is a local delicacy. Crazy Platez is a high-octane, casual arcade mobile game, inspired by games like Grand Theft Auto 1 and Crazy Taxi. Racing against the clock (or in this case, your...

Noah, on behalf of the Aesthetician Labs team, presented An Argument for Local Games at the Breaking Boundaries in Video Games convention in 2018.