Winkeltje was our first venture into the shopkeeping genre and we have learned a tremendous amount from it. Many of these lessons could not be retroactively applied to Winkeltje and so it made a lot of sense to the team to start working on a sequel that will eventually go beyond the experience that Winkeltje has achieved thus far.
Faire Trade
Faire Trade is a shopkeeping simulation game that builds on its predecessor on a rebuilt foundation with much greater aspirations. It contains essential features such as buying low and selling high, customers, shop building, furnishing, decorating, crafting, farming, and a lot more. In addition, exciting new features will be introduced during early access as the game develops, based on feedback from our community.
https://youtu.be/oxo8N7mnYuA
Let’s start with the obvious, why change the name from Winkeltje to Faire Trade?
When listing all of the things that we wanted to improve in Winkeltje, the name very often came up as something that could be better considering its international audience.
Winkeltje as a game name is still dear to our hearts as developers with Dutch roots. But we also realize that ‘Winkeltje’ does not have much meaning outside of a Dutch audience so we wanted to update this to broaden the game's appeal to our global community, now spanning 16 languages.
Rebuilt from the ground up
Many of the other things we wanted to improve came down to foundational architectural choices that are incredibly time consuming and risky to change in an existing game. Given that the team was inexperienced in the relatively young shopkeeping genre, we had underestimated the interest and wishes from the community for us to continue to build and expand on the shopkeeping simulation experience. This meant that we had often implemented solutions that would ultimately limit the scope the community wanted us to reach.
We have succeeded in improving on foundational Winkeltje systems, such as pathfinding, but this turned out to be an incredibly monumental task in a game that in development was effectively treated as live service across multiple platforms.
Improving on things for Winkeltje like modding support, materials and lighting, and button remapping, turned out to be such foundational changes across multiple platforms and languages that it would change and destabilize the game to such a degree that it was a better choice for us to leave Winkeltje at its peak and try to surpass it in a new and better game.
What can you expect?
- ContentIn Faire Trade, models have been changed at a fundamental level to allow for faster creation, better performance, and more color variety. This overhaul required pretty much all existing Winkeltje content to be revisited and updated to reap the benefits of this new standard. The amount of content has more than doubled compared to Winkeltje.
- Gameplay Faire Trade has more complex mechanics with new ways of crafting, farming has gotten a significant upgrade, and there’s a dynamic economy running in the background to keep things interesting. In addition to this, we are working on enjoyable new side activities to complement your life as a shopkeeper.
- Mods Modding support was also a frequently recurring request from the Winkeltje community. Faire Trade has been built from the ground up with modding support in mind, making almost everything moddable. You will be able to add new content, modify existing content, add new art, or even build new features. Together with you, we very much look forward to exploring the exciting new possibilities that mods can bring to Faire Trade.
- Life outside the shop Faire Trade now has a village to explore! You can visit the tavern, unlock new decorations in the Guild Hall, talk to locals or buy new color variations from the local artist.
- Much, much more.. Faire Trade opens up an exciting and overwhelming amount of possibilities and there is a lot more in the works that is currently too early to show. There is an invigorating challenge ahead to reimplement many Winkeltje features the way you loved them and strive to add a lot more exciting ones that we know you will grow to care for.
