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    The Story

    Saraty and Tyron have been a gamer couple since the day they've met 10 years ago. Some of our most fond memories, as well as some great friendships were made inside of multiplayer games. Tyrons career as software developer originated from learning the basics of programming through a 2d sandbox game, Saratys work as artist was heavily inspired by a horror game. It seemed only natural that we also got heavily addicted to Minecraft from early on in 2010. 

    Yet, update after update we couldn't help but feel that Minecraft is going in a different direction that we envisioned. We tried to offset that by creating our 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 the latest api changes.

    So we thought, we can do it better - after all - how hard can it be to make your own voxel game! So in February 2016 Tyron set out to build up a game engine with the first goal of being able to run something equivalent to our latest mod in about 1 year. We got side tracked a few times (Bloom/Godray shaders, World editing tools, etc.), but we're coming pretty close to having a similar game experience to Vintagecraft.

    By 2017 we have grown from one programmer and one artist to a group of 7 dedicated sandbox game making enthusiasts.

    We estimate that in Fall 2017 we will have re-implemented a significant part of vintagecraft into our very own game engine. Beyond that, 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. 


    The Reason

    Trove, Boundless, Portal Knights, SkySaga, Dragon Quest, Creativerse, Blockscape, FortressCraft... we know we're not the first ones that are trying to find a foothold in the sandbox genre that Minecraft established. We don't have a big budget, a grand team or the greatest genius. We don't even have a greatly distinct visual style or completely distinct game play mechanics. 

    What we do have however is a vision, an eye for detail, a great level of dedication and a profound passion for voxel games. Minecraft in its alpha days and some of its mods have opened our eyes to a unique kind of game play we have not seen or experienced anywhere else. In a way, we feel appalled by the apparent lack of depth and cohesion in most voxel games, so thats 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 our two minecraft mods Butterfly Mania and Vintagecraft we seem to have hit the right spot.

    There is indeed a good chance 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

    • Basic Human Decency. We...
      • ...want to maximize the gameplay experience and not monetary profit. We find Pay2Win, Loot crates and the likes to be appalling concepts.
      • ...pledge to always be keep an open channel to the community and listen to their concerns.
      • ...are honest about the games capabilities and limitations.
         
    • Deep gameplay
      Something we found greatly amiss in most games is the joy of slow but progressive collecting, building and exploring in great lengths. Far to 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), pretty shaders (bloom, godrays, fxaa and color grading), 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 peoples 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.
       
    • Truly for the people
      A times it seem inevitable that great inventions get abused by corporate interest. What if we were to take money out of the equation, by having a nonprofit organization further maintain and develop the games voxel engine and a for profit organization that builds the games content? We could have an amazing learning and exploration platform that is not skewed by the monetary interests of a few.
       
    • Virtual Reality 3D Block Sculpting
      Imagine using your Virtual Reality Headset and controllers to create 3d 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
       
    • Luke Jeffrey
      Lead Story Writer, Animation and Game Design Documentation
       
    • Ivan Farina / Team Ermia
      Lead Level Designer
       
    • Saraty
      Lead Modeling and Texturing Artist
      saraty.com
       
    • CreativeMD
      Mod API Programmer and Documentation
      creativemd.de
       
    • Josh Chappelle
      Gameplay Programmer and Issue Tracking
      joshchappelle.com
       
    • Tyron
      Engine Programmer, Webmaster, Sysadmin, Accounting, Marketing, Showcase, Customer Support, Funding and everything else
      tyron.at | Twitter | YouTube

       

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