- Community Newsletter: August 2026 - 1 September 2026
ProgressSince we’ve been making so much progress on Deerdog/Humble_Shepherd, why don’t we get more acquainted? Internally, we’ve been referring to this character as Bargeist! The name draws inspiration from Barghest, the Northern English mythological canine, and the German word for ghost, “geist.” Given that this is a community-created Kinfolk, it wouldn’t feel right to finalize the name before getting the community’s opinion. We’re excited to hear your thoughts!Bargeist’s animations are finished, so we’re looking forward to sharing footage of combat soon! With that finished, we’re moving onto polishing Nyazen’s standard animations and starting their combat animations. We’ve also started on animations for Briar_Runner, one of Brihorn’s evolutions. We spent this month on a focused performance push across the overworld, and it paid off massively! The world now runs somewhere between 1.5x…
- Community Newsletter: July 2026 - 1 August 2026
Progress Humble_Shepherd is our next focus for animations! We’re currently working on their standard animations, which you can see an early work in progress video of below. Gatherable items like berries, herbs and other things you pick up out in the world are now stored as data rather than as gameobjects in the scene. Previously each one sat in the world fully loaded whether you were standing next to it or a mile away. Now the world holds a marker saying "a wildberry bush goes here," and the bush is assembled as you get close and then recycled once you've moved on. We can scatter far more of them around without the memory cost, and it fits neatly with the system that loads the world in pieces around you. This optimization should help the open world exploration to have better performance! Puzzle objects like destructible crates, explosive barrels, rune rocks and lock spheres you come acr…
- Community Newsletter: June 2026 - 27 June 2026
ProgressWith the help of our community members on Discord and Bluesky, we now have an official name for Hull_Piercer! Please welcome Ravanuuk to Kindred Fates! Big thanks to everyone who weighed in on this and contributed their ideas for names. While we’re at it, here’s a new look at the big guy’s evolution tree, along with another new official name.With Nyazen’s standard animations nearly finished, we’ve started on their combat animations! We’re keeping a few of their standard animations in a rough form so we can keep experimenting with movement options. Once Nyazen’s animations are finished, it’s Humble_Shepherd’s turn! Humble_Shepherd and Briar_Runner recently got updated rigging that allows for jiggle skeletons, a method that makes it easier to animate more natural motion in limbs and tails. This month's big focus on the development side was an internal tool we've been calling the K…
- Community Newsletter: May 2026 - 30 May 2026
ProgressNyazen’s unique body type continues to give us a fun challenge as we work on their standard animations! Most recently, we’ve been blocking out a rough version of their “walk” animation (if you can call it that) to figure out what works best. Here’s a preview of the most recent version, where we’re experimenting with a contrast between up-and-down motion at the front of their body and a slight spiral motion for their tail. We’d love to hear your thoughts!As part of our upgrade to the most recent version of Unity LTS, we’ve reviewed and changed the structure for a variety of our systems to improve efficiency. Altogether, we’re looking at some massive improvements which increase both the quality and speed of development! Character customization: We took another pass at how human characters are put together, and the new version is significantly lighter on memory and more flexible fo…
- Community Newsletter: April 2026 - 25 April 2026
ProgressWe’ve come a long way on Nyazen’s model and animations this month! The majority of the rigging is done, except for the smaller details of the fur on their ears and sides of their face. We want to be sure that all of their animations are appropriately majestic, and there’s no achieving that without close attention to the finer details.In the meantime, we have the beginnings of an idle animation to share! Please note that this is an early draft, and while it showcases Nyazen with open eyes, they will typically have closed eyes as seen in the concept art.Due to Nyazen’s unique body type, they have a somewhat unorthodox (yet oddly familiar) T-pose! This is a full view of the model’s neutral pose:Over the last two weeks we overhauled the game's dialogue backbone. The old xNode-based conversation graphs from the previous version of Unity have been retired in favor of a new, more conci…
- Community Newsletter: February 2026 - 28 February 2026
Six years ago today, our Kickstarter campaign came to a close, and with it, something incredible happened. Over 11,000 of you believed in the vision of Kindred Fates enough to back it, and that moment changed everything for us. It's a milestone worth celebrating, and we want to start by saying thank you. Genuinely, thank you.We also want to be honest with you, because you deserve that.We know progress hasn't moved at the pace any of us hoped for. There's no sugarcoating that. When you backed this project, you put your trust in us, and we carry that weight every single day. As many of you know, everyone on the team has taken on work outside of Kindred Fates this past year to support ourselves. While that's meant less time to dedicate to the game, it's also what's kept the project alive. Those jobs allow us to keep the lights on, keep the team together, and fund critical work like new art…
- Community Newsletter: January 2026 - 31 January 2026
Happy new year! From now on we’ll be posting newsletters on the final Friday of every month instead of the first Friday, that way they can encompass the entire month. Apologies that we didn’t mention that in the previous newsletter before making the change!ProgressOur latest build of the Combat Arena Beta is in the late stages of testing! Earlier this week, we sent a build to our Advanced Testing Group to find any additional bugs. We’re looking forward to having this build available to all of our Beta players! Here are some of the latest changes:Prophect has been added as a playable character, including functionality to evolve from Skulken.Marking abilities can now optionally have their mark transfer to the incoming teammate when a Kinfolk swaps. Tidemark and Tidemark Dash use this.Fixed a bug where Tidemark dash was occasionally not dealing damage with the dash finisher. It seems like…
- Community Newsletter: December 2025 - 6 December 2025
ProgressWe’ve been making great progress on the Training Dummy bond activity! At the moment, the exercise for increasing a Kinfolk’s Speed stat is the most complete. While there are still plenty of details to perfect, we’re excited to have a more complete experience for the first of these Training Dummy mini-games.We're enjoying how this mini-game works for the Speed stat so far, but we’re still in the earlier phases for some of the other stats. For example, we’re currently planning a mini-game where a Kinfolk needs to successfully dodge attacks to train Special Defense, and successfully shield from attacks to train Physical Defense. We’d love to hear your ideas for mini-games that would be fun and thematic for training Health!We’re giving Prophect a bit more polish, and then we’ll be adding them to the Beta Combat Arena! Here are our main goals:Smooth out the transitions between attack…
- Community Newsletter: November 2025 - 8 November 2025
We’ve had some very exciting developments recently behind the scenes. While we're not allowed to share details publicly yet, what we can say is that our studio now has a much more stable and reliable foundation for the next couple of years.This doesn’t mean we’re suddenly fully funded, or that we have a publishing partner, but it does mean we can breathe easier, plan further ahead, and keep pushing the game forward with renewed confidence. It’s a huge moment for us, and we couldn’t have reached it without your continued support for Kindred Fates and belief in what we’re building.We can’t wait for the day when we can tell you more, but for now, know that the future looks brighter than ever.ProgressWe’re very excited to share that we’re currently implementing one of our bond mechanics: The Training Dummy!Using this in camp will allow you to train your Kinfolk with different mini-games for…
- Community Newsletter: October 2025 - 4 October 2025
This past month looked a little different for Skymill Studios. A big deadline at our second jobs meant less time than usual for Kindred Fates, but this isn’t what you should expect to see month to month and won’t be a frequent occurrence. Even so, we’re excited to share the progress we made on Kindred Fates and give it a closer look than we typically would!ProgressLast month we consolidated the code for held items, consumables, cooking, and powerups in Ether Run. This makes it easier to mix and match effects and status conditions to make items in the editor. One of our first points of focus was migrating all of our old items and food to this new system.As we reviewed these items, we noticed that their effects had become increasingly unique over time. Because of this, we made a new system for organizing these effects and made sure they all meshed seamlessly with the existing processes in…
- Community Newsletter: July 2025 - 5 July 2025
ProgressOur main focus over the past month has been improving polish and fixing bugs for the Beta Combat Arena, and we’re beginning to shift some of our focus to development for the Early Access single player.Our next arena is in the final stages of polish before we release it in the Combat Arena Beta! This arena is called Training Ground, and will be the default arena from now on when fighting the Guild Officer in camp. The arena is also visible from camp, but only accessible during combat.We now ensure valid IV and EV values in PvP by clamping values. This works by forcing all EVs and IVs to fall within the pre-assigned range for the given Kinfolk, and prevents hacked/exploited Kinfolk from having too many IVs or EVs in PvP.We’ve made adjustments to show a Kinfolk's nickname more often in UI and dialogue instead of their species name. This makes gameplay feel more immersive for those…
- Community Newsletter: June 2025 - 7 June 2025
ProgressOur main focus over the past month has been improving quality of life and major bug fixes for the Beta Combat Arena.We found and fixed the cause of corrupted save files, one of our highest priorities. Shrines were auto saving in the middle of reviving characters, resulting in broken save files. If you then closed the game or crashed and tried to reload that save file, it wouldn’t work. We also fixed a variety of issues that caused the game to crash.We now show the character models when starting a new game so players can make a more informed decision about which Kinfolk they want at the start of the Beta Combat Arena.We added a new multi save file system, giving players up to 5 save files at once. This allows the player to have backup saves in the same campaign from previous timestamps. The game also auto saves when going through dialogues, capturing Kinfolk, or starting Ether Ru…
- Combat Arena Beta is released! - 28 April 2025
The time has come! We're happy to finally announce that the Combat Arena Beta is available to download! We know it's been a long time, and as always, thank you so much for your patience as we've navigated unexpected delays and roadblocks. We're so excited for you to try it out! The Beta is accessible to those who own the Challenger package or higher, from either the Kickstarter campaign or Skymill store. It can also be purchased on Steam for $45 (the Steam price is intended to keep pricing fair for Kickstarter backers). If you've already redeemed an Alpha key in Steam, you should have access to Beta just through updating the game in your library and launching. If you have not redeemed any keys: Log in to the Skymill website using the email tied to your pledge https://www.skymillstudios.com/user-account If your pledge email is not one of the three login partners, log in with a partner an…
- Community Newsletter: April 2025 - 5 April 2025
Progress We’re in the final stretch of preparing for the Beta release (which comes out on April 26!), so we’ve been working on scrubbing the floors, polishing the candlesticks, and dusting the shelves for your arrival! Bug Fixes: This took up the majority of the month, since we want Beta to be a fairly polished experience. These were mostly related to newly explorable areas, NPCs, cooking, inventory UI, gatherables, capturing Kinfolk, Kinfolk evolution, saving and loading, asset management, and cutscenes. We won’t bore you with a full list, but here are some highlights: When the player character blacks out, there’s no longer an option to respawn at a shrine further away than the bounds of the observable universe! Removed an exploit that would allow for Kinfolk duplication as well as attaching one to your cursor in the box menu. Ensured that the player character always spawns with the de…
- Community Newsletter: March 2025 - 12 March 2025
Progress This month, we focused on fine-tuning the game in preparation for the upcoming Beta release. This will be a fairly short newsletter, but we recently posted a very detailed overview of our development progress for the 5 year anniversary of our Kickstarter, as well as some major announcements about the future of Kindred Fates. If you haven’t read it yet, we strongly recommend that you do. We spent a lot of time putting this post together, so we really appreciated everyone who took the time to read it and share their support, thoughts, and concerns. In case you missed it, as a part of this announcement we shared a new Kinfolk, Briar_Heart! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/d2ad2b2b-51ce-4319-91ea-d50634c1f393/image00004.png?format=2500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d0b957a67bac40001fe4b33/1c1de29f-2acd-4d34-bcb7-3058affb4dd9/b…
- Community Newsletter: February 7, 2025 - 8 February 2025
Progress This sprint we focused on some big networking improvements and bug fixes for the Beta, as well as quality of life improvements. We’re currently on track to release the Beta near the end of Q1 this year! General Improvements A flying character only lands when they touch the ground if you have recently pressed the "Descend" key. This allows a flying character to dash downward at enemies and still remain flying, but you can optionally press the descend key at any time to land. Pressing the sprint key while flying acts as a "Stop Flying" input, and immediately transitions the character into a falling state when airborne. We're working on a few improvements to the current tutorial. This includes things like adding a tutorial page for how to search for online matches and making the path toward the camp area more intuitive for new players. We're standardizing the text for item and abi…
- Community Newsletter: January 24, 2025 - 25 January 2025
Progress This sprint we focused on technical improvements to the Alpha like continued stability, bug fixes, and networking improvements to make the game more playable on poor connections. A few team members were out of town or sick for an extended period since our last newsletter, so this one will be a bit shorter than usual. The team is chomping at the bit to get back to our normal schedule, so we expect to have some more interesting progress to show next time! We modified how we reference and load our assets like characters and abilities. This allowed us to fix a 1 second hitch that would occur when summoning a Kinfolk for the first time after booting up the game, which has been a pet peeve of ours for a few months now. This also allowed us to have fewer assets loaded at one time, freeing up more memory. We added the concept of a "network handshake" when a remote player joins a host.…
- Community Newsletter: January 10, 2025 - 11 January 2025
Progress Happy New Year! The Skymill team had a great holiday, and we’re looking forward to making this a big year for Kindred Fates! Since we last updated the Alpha, we've been hard at work on UI improvements, stability, and bug fixes: With the addition of controller support for the Kinfolk management and Kinfolk ability pages, we’re nearing full controller support for all of our UI! We’ve simplified our button rebinding UI to allow 1 column for keyboard/mouse rebinding, and 1 column for controller rebinding. The third column has been repurposed into a "Reset" button per key-binding instead of a being a third binding slot. Button prompts on the ability bar and on the team viewer update as you change key-bindings for specific actions. We’ve streamlined the Give/Take Item options so that the whole process takes place in the storage box UI instead of forcing the player to equip characters…
- Community Newsletter: December 14, 2024 - 14 December 2024
Progress One of the most important things we’ve been focusing on for the next Alpha update is ensuring players are logged in to their Skymill account as soon as they launch the game. Earlier today we verified that this is working as intended for both old and new players alike. From here we will be conducting final testing with a small number of players outside the dev team to ensure everything is running smoothly. If all goes well, the next public Combat Arena update will be releasing shortly afterward. On the stability side, we fixed a problem that was causing the game to use up memory unnecessarily every time it ran certain background tasks. This issue was making some of our QA testers' computers constantly crash when they switched to another program or played the game for more than 15 minutes. In anticipation of the Alpha update, we’ve been working hard on optimization to ensure that…
- Community Newsletter: November 29, 2024 - 30 November 2024
Progress We’ve resolved several major issues/shortcomings with the “Arena Boxes” feature, and have since renamed it to “Team Loadouts” to better communicate how this feature is used. Now Loadouts function much more like what our Combat Arena players are used to. For those who aren’t familiar, Team Loadouts allow you to create presets of Kinfolk teams with set abilities and held items. They now also have the advantage of allowing a single Kinfolk to appear in multiple different loadouts at the same time. For example, you can have a single Awburn exist in an "Offensive" loadout, and have that same Awburn exist in a "Sustain" loadout, which wasn’t possible with the old Arena Boxes. Each of those loadouts could also have Awburn using different abilities and held items. Loadouts should give players more flexibility in team building and promote experimentation with different team compositions…
