Farming Fest

Big news! We're taking part in the Steam Farming Fest this month! An opportunity to celebrate one of our favourite game genres - Farming! As Skystead Ranch has a large element of Farming we thought this would be the perfect opportunity for you all to try out the current game in a demo format. That's right, at the end of this month, from the 26th of April to the 6th of May, Skystead Ranch will be available to download and play as a free Demo! Make sure you try it and let us know what you think.

New Skylets

Since last time, we have 6 exciting new Skylets in various stages of development! The new skylets are to fit a variety of gameplay roles as we introduce new themed zones. Some are very small, some can even fly, but all of them are as cute as can be! From left to right: Sizzle, Puffle, Tor, Bigby, Snarl
"Shiny" skin variants are also in the works as we are also improving upon the rare Skylet spawning! We have been changing up the colour pallet and adding emissive textures to give them that extra rare glow!

New zones

Our artist Laura has been hard at work making 2 new zones for you to play in the demo!

House Zone

The House Zone is situated above the starting island and comes with your very own humble abode! The purpose of this island is to be more of a player hub, where you can upgrade your house, customise the area with decorations and even do some fishing and cooking! (Fishing and cooking aren't implemented just yet)

Forest Zone

The second of the playable zones, like the starting island, is designed for you to farm, upgrade and discover new Skylets! The forest zone will be more lush than the first island with vibrant trees, dense undergrowth and all the wonderful Skylets that come with it!

Performance Improvements

With all the new additions to the game from the art department, we have been making sure we don't fall behind on the technical side too! Our programmer has been hard at work ensuring the frame rate, loading times, and other performance requirements are as polished as they can be. One big step was reworking the 3D grass model! Updates to the grass shaders allow for lifelike movement without taxing the drivers and a change in the way the grass is rendered allows us to have a lot more grass density for a lot less performance cost. Just look at that sweet grass!

Steam Deck and Controller Support

Our motivation for performance improvement was twofold. It is important for us to provide a better game overall, but we are also excited to make sure Skystead Ranch is console-ready too! We officially have a Steam Deck here at ToastieLabs! What that means is we are now able to officially support Skystead Ranch (and our other games) on the Steam Deck as we can do in-house QA testing on the Deck which we weren't able to do before.
With plans for Skystead Ranch releasing on the Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch, we have begun work on controller support as well as classic keyboard and mouse. Make sure you plug in your controller or play on your Steam Deck this month when the Demo goes live and let us know what you think!

New Controls

"With controller support comes new controls" - Uncle Ben or something

Camera Controls

Taking your feedback on board from the Next Fest back in October, as well as considering the player experience when playing with a controller, we have completely overhauled the player camera for Skystead Ranch. No longer is the game a top-down one-directional camera, but is now a 3rd Person camera with full 360-degree control! We're still working out the kinks when it comes to camera movement sensitivity, but the overall feel is much better for Skystead Ranch and we are very happy with the change. (Even if it does mean more work for the artists to fix the backs of the island that you couldn't see before, sorry Jack and Laura!)

Crook Controls

The next set of controls to overhaul was the crook controls. The ability to dig holes, clear the earth and build items needed to be redesigned to fit with the new camera and controller support system. An updated building UI has been added which makes the building flow much easier!
A lot of work is still needed to make sure this is ready for the demo, so best of luck to our programmer Rob!

Localisation

To all of you non-native English speakers, we are very proud to announce that work has officially begun on localising Skystead Ranch. The store pages and the base game are now translated into 11 additional languages! Please note: All of the localising still needs a thorough QA so there may be an issue or 2 until we get that all fixed for you.

Localised Languages:

• Chinese Simplified
• Chinese Traditional
• Dutch
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

Your Turn!

Thank you for following our progress with Skystead Ranch! We invite you to play the demo from the 26th and let us know what you think! https://store.steampowered.com/app/2399570/Skystead_Ranch/ The game is still in early access so your feedback is very important to us. After trying the game, press the "Discord" and "Questionnaire" buttons on the game's main menu and let us know what you think in as much or as little detail as you like. Thank you!