The Story

Saraty and Tyron @ GameOn! 2018Saraty 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. In 2015, Tyron was hired by Hypixel to work on their standalone game Hytale, however the game in planning was also not the experience either of them envisioned.

And thus, in February 2016, Tyron left Hypixel and began building a new game engine with the goal of turning the Vintagecraft experience into a stand alone game, which was reached by Fall 2017. We also have grown from one programmer and one artist to a group of 5 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 over 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

• Hold ourselves to higher standards
  We want to maximize gameplay experience and not monetary profit, 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 and stay honest about the game's capabilities and limitations.
   
• Deep gameplay and 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 community
  We believe a true sandbox game should have the definition of sandbox applied to all its facets. That includes game world customization, professional creative mode tools, officially supported modding APIs, building the game itself from mods and making the games source code available to read for everyone, so players truly can play the game in whatever way they desire. You can strip the game to it's bare bones and build your own sandbox voxel experience from it. 
   
• Push boundaries
  We'd like to push the technology frontier a step further in areas that benefit the players experience. Some of our achievements on that end are 1024+ block build heights, area specific dynamic weather patterns, colored long range light sources, high quality rendering pipeline (dynamic lights and shadows, bloom, godrays, FXAA, etc..), aesthetically consistent visuals, decent performance even on low-end computers, very diverse terrain generation, highly configurable world generation systems, a native mod API, building the game through our own mod api, 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 so many extremely exciting topics left unexplored in this genre that we would love to try out. To name just a few - mechanical power, villages, cities, counties, trade routes, dynamic market pricing, deep community integration, and an official mod hub.
 

The Team 

The people that relentlessly push Vintage Story forward

• Lo-Phi
  Lead Music Artist and Music Integration
  www.lo-phi.com | Twitter
   
• Luke Jeffrey
  Lead Story Writer, Animation, Game Design and Customer Support
  Twitter
   
• Saraty
  Lead Modeling and Texturing Artist
  saraty.com | Twitter | Deviantart
   
• Anna Baldur
  Modeling and Texture Artist
  Deviantart
   
• Redram
  Game design, Modeling and Texture Artist
   
• Tyron
  CEO, Engine-, Gameplay- and Web-Programmer, System Administration, Accounting, Marketing, Customer Support, Funding and everything else
  tyron.at | Twitter | Twitch | YouTube

   
Contributors

• copygirl
  Mod API and Code Consultation
  copy.mcft.net
   
• Luna "Clipsey"
  Master server Code
  clipsey.dk | Twitter
   
• Jessie Rogers
  Concept Art
  jessierogersart.com