We're a team of three brothers and one very close friend who is basically a fourth brother, and we originally started making games for a pretty simple reason: we like playing games together.
Our first project was a deckbuilder - starting off an idea one of the brother had for a movie.
We worked on it on and off for around ten years - both digital and physical - before one of us finally asked a question that probably should have come up a little earlier:
“Does any of us really like playing deckbuilders?”
It turned out none of us did.
So we started talking about the games we actually enjoyed playing, and we kept coming back to The Settlers, early Anno, Caesar and Pharaoh. These were games we'd been playing together since the '90s, and there were things we loved about all of them.
Settlers had that satisfying idea of taking one resource somewhere and turning it into something useful. Anno kept making the economy larger as your settlement grew. Caesar and Pharaoh added all the extra problems that come with trying to keep a city functioning while providing different services to all the inhabitants.
We wanted something that brought those ideas together while still keeping the old-school feeling we remembered.
So we decided to try making it ourselves.
This was one of the earliest ideas for what a Folklands village might look like.
The actual game started slightly less impressively.
There wasn't much of a settlement yet, but technically there was grass, water and terrain, which felt like progress at the time.
Over the next year it slowly started looking more like Folklands.
The UI, buildings and art have all changed quite a bit since then. There were plenty of experiments along the way, some of which we're probably happier to leave in old screenshots.
But one idea has been there from the beginning:
As we've gotten older, we've ended up living in different places, and games have been one of the ways we've stayed in touch. We wanted Folklands to be something you could sit down and enjoy on your own, but also something we could easily play together without the stress of an RTS or needing to organize a long multiplayer session.
That's why - in Folklands - friends can join an existing game, and why you can pause a settlement and come back to it whenever you want. We wanted playing together to be the easy part.
And then other people started playing Folklands, and that changed things too.
One thing Early Access taught us very quickly is that some of you are willing to push a settlement much further than we expected.
At one point we'd optimized Folklands around settlements of roughly 200 Folks. Within the first few weeks, one player spent several nights trying to reach 2,000.
They eventually got there while running the game at around 1 FPS.
So, naturally, we had some optimizing to do.
Player feedback has changed the game in less destructive ways as well. Folklands originally had a taxation system that we thought made sense as part of the settlement economy. A lot of players told us it made the game less fun and clashed with the overall theme and mood of the game, so, naturally, we removed it.
That's been a big part of developing Folklands: starting with the settlement builder the four of us wanted to play, putting it in front of players, and then seeing what all of you actually do with it.
A few years after that first patch of grass and water, we're now just a few days away from 1.0.
We think it's come a fair way.
Your neighbor has Oil.
You have Wine.