Hey dear shopkeepers,
We are happy, excited, and little nervous to reveal the launch date for Faire Trade on Steam Early Access!
That's right! On October 16th you can get your hands on Faire Trade as it is launching into Early Access and join in our exciting venture of creating a super duper great shopkeeping game. The game is still very much in development but also very much in a state where you can play around with it.
With Faire Trade, we have set out to rebuild the fundamental architecture from Winkeltje in order to create a better foundation for a new and improved shopkeeping experience. This means a complete overhaul of pretty much everything that has gone into Winkeltje. You can look forward to new areas such as a farm and home domain in which you can build. But also new areas to explore, such as the village and visit some of its interiors.
A lot of you have wondered why we wouldn't just improve Winkeltje instead of creating Faire Trade. And there are some very good (mostly technical) reasons for this. Let us dig into this reasoning with a list of some of the things that we would like to have in our ideal shopkeeping game.
We fantasize about a shopkeeping game with:
- Mod support.
- Better performance.
- Better supply and demand mechanics.
- More (interesting) crafting options and avenues.
- The ability to leave the shop.
- A home for the shopkeeper.
- A farm for the shopkeeper.
- Employees that can do more than just restock the shop.
- Other places to explore like a village.
- Events that actually take place somewhere.
- More interesting products to sell and shop styles to create.
- More and prettier assets (products, furniture, walls, etc...)
- More and prettier characters with physics.
- More character customization options.
- Sustainable art development, significantly reducing project bloat.
- An interesting story with rich characters.
- Better terrain with flowy grass and water.
- Controller support.
- Input remapping.
- Multiple languages.
- Wonderful music and sounds.
- And much much more...
Several items on this wish list of things would require us to completely change the underlying foundation that Winkeltje was built on. Which essentially would mean tearing down the whole game and rebuilding it from the ground up. Over the years, we have gotten intimately familiar with the technical limits of Winkeltje and have dreamt of a new shopkeeping game where many of these limits would be a thing of the past.
It is sobering to realize is that when we started making Winkeltje in 2017, we didn't even know if there would be an audience for this type of experience. So the scope of Winkeltje had to be kept small and manageable to even get the game released. Let alone support several more years to get it to where it is right now.
So let us consider what we don't want.
We don't want to ruin the Winkeltje experience as it currently is. And history has shown that fans of any game get rightfully upset when their beloved experience gets "improved" and replaced with no way replay as it was. So with Faire Trade, we have set out to try and make a shopkeeping game that can reach greater heights by rebuilding it from the ground up with the things we have learned from having developed Winkeltje over a span of 5 years.
If that is something that excites you as much as it excites us, then we would be thrilled to have you join us in our journey to make this into the best shopkeeping game out there. It would help a lot of you could wishlist Faire Trade and join the discussion on Discord where you can help shape the future of Faire Trade.