The Story

Saraty and Tyron have been a gamer couple since the day they've met 10 years ago. Some of their most fond memories and great friendships were made inside of multiplayer games. Tyron's career as software developer originated from learning the basics of programming through a 2D sandbox game nearly 20 years ago, Saraty's work as artist was heavily inspired by classic horror games, such as Silent Hill. It seemed only natural that they got heavily into Minecraft from early on, in 2010. 

Yet, update after update they couldn't help but feel that Minecraft is going in a different direction than what they envisioned. That "huge potential" mentality got lost somehwere along the way.  They tried to offset that by creating their own mods. First butterfly mania to regain some sort of long term goals and then Vintagecraft to just redo the whole survival experience. The lack of an official modding API made this undertaking into a tedious grind of slow iteration times and keeping up to date with large changes to the game and it's unofficial community-made API.

They seemed to be not the only ones. Plenty of players voiced their concerns on the many unrealized potentials of this game. Most did nothing about it. So they felt it's up to them to make the voxel game experience that many were dreaming of, and would not settle for less than setting a new standard in the voxel gaming genre. And thus, in February 2016,  Tyron began building a new game engine with the first goal of being able to run something equivalent to our latest mod in about 1 year, which was reached by Fall 2017.

We also have grown from one programmer and one artist to a group of 7 dedicated sandbox game making enthusiasts by this time.

We estimate that by late 2019 we will have a seriously good gaming experience. Looking further, we very much look forward to implement our ever growing list of grand ideas for a heavily polished and lovingly crafted sandbox survival game experience. Right now there's no plans to stop development anytime in the future. Even if our funds run out, we will continue working on it on our free time.

The Reason

Trove, Boundless, Portal Knights, SkySaga, Dragon Quest Builders, Creativerse, Blockscape, FortressCraft... we know we're not the first ones who are trying to find a foothold in the sandbox genre that Minecraft established. We might not have a huge budget or a grand team (yet!), but what we do have is 6 years of minecraft gaming/modding experience, a vision, an eye for detail, an incredible level of dedication and a profound passion for voxel games.

Minecraft in its alpha days and various mods have opened our eyes to a unique kind of game play we have not seen or experienced anywhere else, but that seems to haven gotten lost and forgotten along the way. Beyond that, we feel appalled by the apparent lack of depth and cohesion in most voxel games, so that's what we aim to change in our attempt.

Besides, we love creating our own game experiences! With nearly 100,000 downloads and a great response on Butterfly Mania and Vintagecraft we seem to have hit the right spot.

There is indeed a possibility this game will never get appreciated by a wider audience, but we sure as hell are going to give it our best shot!

The Philosophy

• Human Decency. We...
  • ...want to maximize the gameplay experience and not monetary profit. We find pay-to-win, loot crates and the likes to be repulsive concepts.
  • ...pledge to always keep an open channel to the community and listen to their concerns.
  • ...are honest about the game's capabilities and limitations.
     
• Deep gameplay, Meaningful Progression
  Something we found greatly amiss in most games is the joy of slow but progressive collecting, building and exploring in great lengths. Far too often every available item in the game is collected in a matter of hours or the player is thrown into a world with a massive variety of blocks and items not knowing where to start.
   
• Empower the Players 
  It is one thing to be able to place and remove blocks in a sandbox game, it is a whole other to build your game mechanics merely as a means of encouraging creative building and exploration.
  This is why we have a creative mode with a large toolset, a game engine that is decoupled from the game content and a large choice of configuration options for every asset in the game as well as an extensive mod API. You can strip the game to it's bare bones and build your own sandbox voxel experience from it. 
   
• Pushing Boundaries
  When building the game, we always try to push the technology a step further when compared to a standard voxel game. Some of these are 1024+ block build heights, colored voxel lighting, double the range for light sources (32 blocks instead of 16), high quality rendering (dynamic lights and shadows, bloom, godrays, FXAA, etc..), ensuring decent performance on low-end computers, very diverse terrain generation, highly configurable world generation systems, a native mod API, cinematic camera tools, keyboard macros and more.

The Possibilities

From the very beginning we have been ensuring that we create a solid foundation to build upon for many years to come. There's many extremly exciting topics left unexplored in this genre that we would love to try out. To name just a few:

• Mechanical Power
  A small set of visibly turning blocks that would produce a turing complete system for you to build all kinds of fantastical engines and computers from. A proof-of-concept already exists, but was programmed as a mod to Minecraft.
   
• Villages, Cities, Countys, Trade Routes Dynamic Market pricing
  Imagine a whole network of villages, each with their own unique goods and trade demands that are priced based on the current availability of the product. Each village connected via road or air way for you to travel along and pursue a trading career with.
   
• Interconnected, Multi-Sharded Servers
  What if instead of being able to hold 100 players a server could hold a 1,000? Or 10,000?
   
• Deep Community Integration
  Wouldn't it be neat to upload/download other people's builds right inside the game?
  What would happen if you flag a player as being a griefer or great team player for every other server owner to see?
  What if there's a server wide auction house to buy and sell goods that can be connected with other servers?
  What if screenshots taken in the game also contain the worldseed/servername and the coordinates? People could drag and drop screenshots into the game to get to the same place as in the screenshot.
   
• Virtual Reality 3D Block Sculpting
  Imagine using your Virtual Reality headset and controllers to create three-dimensional sculptures using a wide range of brushes and tools. 

The Team 

The people that relentlessy push Vintage Story forward:

• Lo-Phi
  Lead Music Artist and Music Integration
  www.lo-phi.com | Twitter
   
• Luke Jeffrey
  Lead Story Writer, Animation and Game Design Documentation
  Twitter
   
• Ivan Farina / Team Ermia
  Lead Level Designer
   
• Saraty
  Lead Modeling and Texturing Artist
  saraty.com | Twitter
   
• CreativeMD
  Mod Support Programmer, Mod API Documentation
  creativemd.de | Twitter
   
• Tyron
  CEO, Engine-, Gameplay- and Web-Programmer, System Administration, Accounting, Marketing, Customer Support, Funding and everything else
  tyron.at | Twitter | YouTube