Celebrating 24 Years of content creation

Today we’re celebrating our 24th anniversary as content creators: yay!
Of course we arrived at the date in a rush as usual and just managed this very blog post in terms of celebration (it is a long post though).

The truth is, this is usually our busiest period of the year. As the Autumn starts we feel renewed and ready to tackle any project. We’re also working very steadily to release another set before the end of the year (so stay tuned!) and these days are filled with work hours.

A year of Firsts

The past year has especially been one of rebirth for us creatively.
It was also a year of Firsts.

Our website launched on 20th Dec 2024 and even though it wasn’t our first website, it had been a long time since we had an online place to call our home sweet home. We finally created a logotype for Aeon Soul, that includes our lifelong logo, and that’s right in the middle of it.
We launched our first ever Newsletter and are quite happy with the reception (thanks for the interest!).
We re-started offering freebies (our initial gateway to becoming vendors) and although we had planned to be more productive on that front, we shared a couple of very nice things already and more are in the pipeline!

And, of course, for the first time we started publishing independently.
Out first indie product released on 31st Oct, but the decision was taken back in June and we have been building ever since: website, newsletter, (exclusive) freebies, blog.
Going indie has made us fall in love with our job again we’ve been working hard to build Aeon Soul and want to keep going strong.

The last 12 months of releases

Looking back at the past year we are proud of our releases and look forward to the next year of content that we plan to be as varied as possible, with projects big and small:
Last year, on December 18th no less, we released our Urban Noise Hz, Urban Noise FM and Customize for Urban Noise … it was a huge accomplishment for us as this particolar set of products had gone through a lot of phases and had cost us a lot of time to finish. Following those, we had: Artful poses, Astratech Outfit, Walking with Attitude, Skin Effects: Wasteland (our biggest and longest project in the last few years), A’Nhys Harmony (can’t wait to release more in this series),
Post-apocalyptic City Vibes (we are still not finished with our Post-apocalyptic mini-world)
Mon Flair Poses, Man of Poses (some overdue love for the guys), Urban Noise dB, Decibel Hoodie, hood up Style and Tough Styles for Urban Noise (our first indie release!) and Metro Straps.

Products Highs and Lows
The Urban Noise releases are the ones we’re most proud of, because of what they represent for us (we wrote a blog post about this :). It is one of our ongoing series, something we have established in the last few years and Urban Noise in particular well represents the Aeon Soul spirit in terms of urban fashion: stylish and dynamic and with something to say.
We also loved releasing Metro Straps, we hadn’t released something a bit more edgy in a long while and this is a very cool set for mix and matches, which is something near and dear to us.
Harmony in the A’Nhys series was another high point as we like this super-sexy series of fantasy outfits composed of the same ring + fabric strip mesh.

On the lower side, while we love Skin Effects: Wasteland, it was the most draining series of products of the last few years. When we decided to release them we thought it wouldn’t take long since they were 95% complete: wrong. The last stages of content production were neverending and it took weeks just for fine-tuning, packing, testing, fixing.
Never create a product with hundreds of options for 4 different characters, it’s madness and I’m just glad we managed to keep our sanity.
It is, however, a super-cool set of post-apocalyptic skin effects, so there’s that at least and we use it all the time :).
We still have a few unreleased options, but I’m not sure we’ll find the bravery to work on them.

We offered a good variety in terms of poses, we like to range from handy, everyday ones, to stylish to super-stylish. Admittedly this year we did not have anything particularly dynamic, but some intriguing fighting poses will be coming soon.

We’re going to be more productive in the coming year as we do not have time-consuming projects to release (well, there is one… but we’ll see) and we can focus on new concepts. We’d like to offer a wider range of styles and, hopefully, finally, perhaps get back into doing character work.

What about Art?
Well, since expanding our presence to DeviantArt and RenderHub we have had a full schedule for Art creation and posting as well, but in truth, it’s very hard to find the time.
We planned to post at least twice a week, especially right after a release, but are just not managing it. We want to create high-quality, meaningful art and it takes time.
We have had some very time-consuming releases in the past year, so hopefully the next months we will have a better pace.

24 years, eh?

Is quite a long time! At the beginning, we constantly wondered how long this kind of business could last. Fortunately, it’s been lasting longer than we expected even though the last few years have been challenging, to put it mildly.

In all these years, however, what had kept us going is the ability to infuse our creativity into our products and promo and the quest for the highest possibile quality to offer.
We are grateful to everyone who supports us and feel an obligation to offer value for the money spent on our creations. That’s also why we always try to make our product as accessible as possible, even when they have many different features and try to push the boundaries of what can be done with the tools.

Non-digital creativity

As everyone comes to realize sooner or later, time waits for no one. That’s why even with the added workload of going indie, we decided to take a couple of projects outside the dream drawer and turn them into reality.

The first Aeon Soul Merch!
We created a couple of embroidered baseball hats with our logo and logotype that we proudly donned this summer. We set them up and ordered through Printful and they are really high quality and great looking.
We also designed and printed a couple of all-over-print t-shirts based on our Customize designs, and these are amazing too. We’ll share some pics asap.

More extensively we also created a series of pins (and stickers) based on our designs. This is a small side business that we intend to be expanding bit by bit (time permitting), but we already took the first few steps and just a few days ago finally uploaded everything on our Etsy store (we’ll share about this soon!).
That’s right, we have always wanted an Etsy of some sort (given the plethora of hobbies we have) and we finally made it happen.
Both our Etsy store and related Instagram account aren’t as polished as we’d like, but given the time we can spend on them they are good enough and we DO love the pins and stickers we made so far (and that we wear all the time!).

Nerding out a bit

Games
We have always shared our passion for Games, since the early 2000s. The latest posts on our DeviantArt blog (before we abandoned the site for a few years) were reports from our days at E3 and it’s always been interesting and stimulating to exhange ideas with other Daz Studio users passionate about Games.
Looking back we’re really happy that we could manage to attend E3 twice before everything moved online. We also went twice at Gamescom in Cologne and those were great experiences too if more chaotic as we attended as general public (attendance is huge).

As gaming has become a huge business, Big Gaming has tried hard to maximize profits rathern than create the most enjoyable games possible. Larger companies have been trying to profit from players since the middle 2010s, but fortunately the indie scene has been growing just as much if not more. While the Covid period took a toll on the industry, Larian still managed to deliver the amazing Baldur’s Gate 3 and more recently Sandfall interactive earned acclaim and awards for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. On the other hand, we definitely stopped playing Destiny 2 (our most played game ever) as the grind was too much and the enjoyment too little. Such a pity, it’s still one of our favourite games gameplay wise.

Gaming-wise we’ve been playing Marvel Rivals since release and are still having fun. It’s a solid game and the quantity and quality of content released it’s staggering. I wish we could be as productive as the team behind the game, then again, I think there’s more than two of them working on it :).
We play a good Vanguard+Strategist & Vanguard+Duelist, so we can usually manage good comps when playing together (indeed we are playing Gambit and Rogue :)).
Yes, we are splurging a bit on costumes… but so much stuff can be obtained through playing, it’s definitely the most fair and generous game of this kind we have played and given that it’s free, it seems fair to support such steady and high-quality development.

We also loved Robocop Rogue City and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle although Steam points out that my most played game is Substance Painter! We also played lots of smaller games we love, such as Escape Rooms and Mystery Games.

We also have a our own gaming projects (in that famous drawer), but who knows, now that we can better gauge and manage our time perhaps we can start with something small and go from there.
There as never been as many accessible tools as there are now, so we may want to start taking a look at some of those Makers out there.

Hardware
And talking about computers (as we are only playing on PC at this point), we were hoping to get our hands on a 5090 founder edition, but it’s just not possible. Everything readily available it’s crazy expensive and it feels like we’ve been chasing a chimera (not that we’d know what to do with a chimera though).

Comics
Well, we started creating Poser content because we wanted to render our own comic book stories, nothing has comes out of that so far, but we do have some plans for a cute comic strip next year. We want to keep taking stuff out of the dreams drawer and into the real world and this little project could be just the thing.

Books
Well, after a long journey we finished reading the Wheel of Time saga and what a ride!
Haven’t watched the tv series yet and probably will not, doesn’t feel like it’s a good match for us, but we did re-watch Fawlty Towers for the n-th time, because we need some Brit comedy and especially Monthy Pythons in our year.

When it comes to us personally, we enjoy writing RPG Systems, our most ambitious to date is called Aeon Seer and it’s an expansive project set in our Milky Way Galaxy (honestly, Andromeda snatched the cool name). We also have a D&D world setting called Faerun 1900 and that’s a more advanced take at the Forgotten Realms setting and a fine-tuned playing system.

Looking forward to the future!

Well, it was a very busy, very hectic year and we’re grateful to anyone that supports us and allows ut to follow our creative call. We always hope we manage to offer people some great tools for their own creativity and art.

If you have any question, feel free to ask, one can only fit so much in a blog post (even in a very long one).

Ad Majora!
Aeon Soul