What’s better than drinking wine with friends? Making wine with friends! Grow, socialize, sell, and enjoy yourself in Vineyard Valley!
Check out the kickstarter here and don’t forget to donate: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ceruleangamesinc/vineyard-valley-a-social-winemaking-game
Design, build and run a vineyard and winery in a sandbox style environment where both NPCs and other players can visit, tour, shop and enjoy – all without the annoyance of energy or ‘pay to win’ tactics.
In Vineyard Valley, you start with your own patch of land to grow your business. Ripen grapes and fruit, then ferment them into numerous types of wine. Sell that wine in a shopping village you design and build – or sell them in barrels to other players for them to sell! This game combines the business sim elements we know and love – especially those from the classic business sims and tycoon games of the 90s – and introduces a strong multiplayer social aspect where you and your friends run businesses side by side. And we’re not talking Ville style – we’re talking true business sim style, only designed in a way that is more relaxing than running a real business.
It will be up to you to design, plan, build and manage a successful vineyard and winery. The success of your business is based on the decisions you make. Plant the best crops, hire the best staff, sell the best goods – all in an online, multiplayer sandbox environment. And as a sandbox environment, this means you can also just spend some fret-free time relaxing and building your own gorgeous vineyard.
You won’t be alone in your venture – each of your friends run their own vineyard and winery, and together you make your businesses a success! Spend time with your friends and help them pick crops, crush grapes, design and build their vineyard and so much more. Sell or trade products with them that you create, just like real businesses would. Or if you want to just enjoy some time together, sit back with your friends and enjoy great conversation while listening to the sounds of nature over a spot of tea. Or plan a gathering with many people and create an event – perhaps you will hold an auction, a contest or put on a show? What you do will be up to you.
Even if you don’t back our project, you will still get to play – Vineyard Valley is a freemium game! As soon as it’s available, you can start enjoying the sandbox, vineyard environment right away. If you are interested but not interested in funding, won’t you take a moment at least and please share our Kickstarter? We do need the funding to be able to afford to develop the game!
Thank you for reading about Vineyard Valley – where you make your dreams come true! With wine. Because wine not?
Risks and challenges Learn about accountability on Kickstarter
Vineyard Valley is an ambitious game, and therefore has some interesting risks and challenges. Here are the biggest ones and how we intend to overcome them, in a Q&A Fashion:
Q: An average social game such as this would typically have a budget of over $500,000. Yours is under $100k, AND it supports multiple platforms! With what dark magic do you plan to use to produce this game with such a small budget?
A: We have a number of methods of making this happen….
First – we are using the Unity game engine. This game engine makes a lot of things much easier to accomplish than using other engines and platforms, such as the commonly used Flash engine. In addition, Cerulean Games has been working with Unity for years, and has produced a large library of in-house code that we can implement which covers a lot of features that otherwise would need to be developed from the ground up. We also have the entire Unity asset store to take advantage of – purchasing an important piece of code from there is vastly less expensive than the time it would take to develop that code.
When it comes to multi-platforms, with using Unity we can – with general ease – port the game to multiple platforms without completely re-developing the game. It’s something we are already doing for clients and have found it to be a relative breeze – especially if we plan the multi-platform support from the very beginning of production.
Cerulean Games has a large amount of game production experience as well. Our CEO and Lead Producer alone has been doing games for over 12 years with a history of successfully completed and shipped titles for multiple platforms. Our company in addition has many shipped titles, including those for major brands. So in conclusion – with using Unity, our existing library of Unity code, the ability to inexpensively purchase a lot of needed code, and with our long history of development, we are very confident we can complete this game in-budget.
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Q: A game like this requires a very, very large number of art assets to have enough for the user to work with. How do you plan to produce enough with such a small budget?
A: This is similar to the answer to the above question. We will have artists working on Vineyard Valley, and we will be producing a lot of original art for the game. To compliment this, we will also be purchasing large art libraries. These art libraries will save us tens of thousands in art production costs, and allow the game to have a large quantity of assets at a reasonable budget.
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Q: If the worst happens and the game does take longer to produce than anticipated, what will you do to still try and hit the original Holiday Season 2013 window?
A: We have a lot planned for the game. A lot of detail, a lot of features, and a lot of functionality. The very, very first things we are building into the game is the raw basics of functionality – terrain editing, object placement, crop growing, etc. If we do find around October that the production timeline is behind where it needs to be, we have a large number of additional planned features that we can push into 2014, and still release a game with quite a lot by the 2013 Holiday Season.
In the off-chance that we do completely have to push the game back and release in 2014 entirely – we will make sure all backers receive something extra in the game to make up for the delay. This ‘extra something’ will include extra sacks of free Vinos as well as making some of the in-game content entirely free rather than charging Vinos.
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Q: Do you guys even know ANYTHING about wine? I mean, you should probably know what it is before making a game about it…
A: Ok, you got us there. Well, some of us at least, most of us are drinkers of craft beer. We do however have major wine aficionados within Cerulean Games, and they are salivating at the opportunity to impart all of their knowledge upon us. In addition, we are planning trips to multiple vineyards. Colorado has an amazing wine country, and we will be both taking tours of every vineyard there that we can, and sitting down with their owners and picking their brains. We also will be attending an industry conference in San Francisco later this year and we will be using the opportunity of being there to take a tour of California wine country as well. When it comes down to it, almost every game we produce we have to do a vast amount of research for prior to developing the game to make sure we do it right. This game is absolutely no exception.
Check out the kickstarter here and don’t forget to donate: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ceruleangamesinc/vineyard-valley-a-social-winemaking-game
