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An exploration of the meaning of family, told through the eyes of a new father. Explore the challenges he faced in his youth, how it affected the relationship with his own father, and how it will shape the kind of father he becomes.

While playing through the world, you will encounter and relive short stories from which you will learn about the past. These stories offer different worlds and times to explore.

Each short story is meant to challenge your perspective and to expand the story and your understanding of the world.

While some stories will be obvious, others are hidden. Explore the world and unlock them all!

Kinsfolk is part of Steam Next Fest!

If you were waiting to try the Kinsfolk demo, what a better time then now during Steam's Next Fest!

The new update has several bug fixes and a bit of new content.

I used this new opportunity to create a new trailer and showcase more new content.

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1yrqxOPsEk

[ 2025-10-13 11:50:49 CET ] [Original Post]

Demo bugfixes update live!

Fixes

Hi all, we recently had new players trying the demo (which is awesome!) and reporting some minor bugs and quality of life issues. These have been addressed, here is a almost complete list of all the changes in the new update.

Fixed clipping with several story meshes
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Fixed collision which could make you stuck in the initial house
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Adjust dialogue and interaction logic to make it feel more responsive
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Speed up the slow walking to make it less annoying but still keep the narrative intention
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Fixed chicken looking like it is flying
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Fixed invisible walls that would allow the player to enter the river
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Fixed the nav mesh allowing chickens to wonder into the river
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Adjust font to be more sharper (reduce blurriness)
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Add escape as a universal way to go back in main menus
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Fixed a bug where you could see an outline of a character flying
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Make all setting menus rotate so you don't have to go all the way back
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Fixed a bug that would trigger the child dialogue to soon
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Shoutouts

Wanted to give a shoutout to folks that reported the issues and helped made the game better, from the New Game Discord Community

Phantom
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gore_d_lover
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Samuel
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Catatouille
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Blupers

And just for fun, here are some photos of the bugs reported by people

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[ 2025-09-13 04:38:07 CET ] [Original Post]

GALM - Games Against Living Miserably

Kinsfolk in GALM

From September 8th to 15th, Kinsfolk will be part of GALM - Games Against Living Miserably - which is a gaming festival that is helping to shine a light on how games can lift people up when life gets heavy and raising vital funds to help CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) be there for anyone struggling.

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What you can do to participate?

Try the new Kinsfolk demo
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Checkout any of the other GALM festival games
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Checkout the CALM charity website
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[ 2025-09-08 18:54:27 CET ] [Original Post]

New Level Showcase & Demo Update!

New Level Showcase

I finally made a lot of progress on the Act 2 of Kinsfolk, together with the art style, story, voice lines and soundtrack being all done..., I can finally show something. Hope you enjoy it, here is a small showcase of the atmosphere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFz-nsWFZJA

Demo Update

I haven't updated the demo in a few months, so it is time to do so to get all the new goodies in!

The new demo has more voice lines and interactable story elements (especially in the farm level). I would love to hear what you think. I also added a lot of polish and details (the small things) that I always wanted to add but never thought it was urgent to do so.

I won't bore you with the details, instead have it a go in the demo and here is just a little screenshot of before vs after.

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[ 2025-06-20 04:09:04 CET ] [Original Post]

Big Demo Update!

Just several months back, Kinsfolk demo went live. And, thanks to you all that played it and submitted feedback I collected a lot of ideas how to improve the game further.

I incorporated those in the main game already, but also wanted to push a new demo so we can continue building the game together, and as a thank you to the community and everyone that gave feedback. If you get the chance, please give the new demo a go.

So what did change?

Story and Narration Mechanics

One of the main pain points and feedback themes I heard from the players was that gameplay did not feel interactive enough, and that story wasn't engaging.

The main problem was that the dialogue was full of long exposition dumps. To solve for that, I broke it down into multiple segments. Both subtitle- and dialogue-wise. Now instead of listening to the story for 30 seconds, you need to explore and find multiple pieces of dialogues to combine them to understand the wholes tory.

This also allowed me to highlight different parts of environment and reward exploration more.

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I also noticed that besides exploring, there was a lot of feedback about the story missing interactivity. To improve that, now some dialogue is dependent on player actions. Like this small gif, where the story is conditioned on the player's action.
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UI and UX

Another big area of feedback was the UI. To get the demo out, I did not think much about the UI, so I did it as fast as possible. But now I made sure the UI matches Kinsfolk's aesthetic and feels cohesive. You all reminded me how much this is important, so I did my best to clean it up.

Here are a few before and after shots to highlight the difference.

Controls (old vs new)

Main Menu (old vs new)

Subtitles (old vs new)

Other Improvements

A collection of smaller improvements that made it into this update as well. Mostly minor thing related to UX that folks mentioned in the feedback form.

Better controller support
UI now scales well with ultra-wide monitors
Added tooltips to make it easier to understand controls
Subtitles now are shown one piece at a time to match the dialogue
New animations to make the character feel better
Better movement

Closing Thoughts

Once again, thank you to everyone that played the original demo and took the time to give me feedback.

Please Wishlist the game and join the Discord Kinsfolk community to follow for more.

Cheers,
Vinko

[ 2025-02-10 23:44:07 CET ] [Original Post]

Help Improve Kinsfolk and Win Rewards!

Very short announcement this time! During the whole of August Kinsfolk will be part of the Indie Playtest Fest with a lot of other amazing indie games!

If you get playtest any of the games and leave feedback you can win prizes such as Steam Gift cards! Looking forward to hearing your feedback.

Check out the full list of indie games on the Indie Playtest Fest website.

If you want to participating for Kinsfolk, you just need to finish the demo and leave your feedback here and mention "indieplaytestfest" in the feedback form.
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As always, if you want to learn more about Kinsfolk, hang out with other players, give feedback, join the Kinsfolk community Discord server .

[ 2024-08-05 00:30:29 CET ] [Original Post]

Demo and Indie Game Festivals!

Demo is Live!

The demo for Kinsfolk is live! If you get to play it, would love to hear your feedback. There has already been a few smaller patches to address the player reported feedback. I will soon write a more detailed patch notes for better visibility.

Looking forward to hearing more form you all.

Discord Community Server

Yup, you heard it right! I created a Discord server for Kinsfolk so you can also directly ask for feedback, give suggestions or just report bugs or hang with other folks that played the game.

Indie Game Festival

Kinsfolk got a Casual Game Recommendation on the Game Connection Indie Game Festival!
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Playtest and Earn Rewards

Starting August 1st, Kinsfolk is part of the Indie Playtest Fest with many other amazing indie devs. You can play the demos (including Kinsfolk's) and win rewards! Check out the page for more details.

Demo Patching and More

Thanks to folks that gave feedback already I had a few smaller patches that address bugs as well as added proper options support, as well as pause menu. And finally here is a gif, because those are half of the fun of writing these updates.
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[ 2024-07-29 03:22:26 CET ] [Original Post]

June 9th 2024 Devlog #2

Hi all, it has been a while since the last update so just wanted to share some progress and things I have been working on.

I had some personal things happening which made me lose an entire month of progress on Kinsfolk since it was hard to juggle a full-time job alongside all of that. However, I started working again last week and already have some news and things to show!

Let's start :)

Save/Load systems

Kinsfolk is composed of a lot of smaller stories scattered throughout the world. Now that the number of stories grew, I had to implement a way to save progress so when you complete a story and return back you progress is nost lost!
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Working on a free and open-to-all demo!

I decided to take a slice of Kinsfolk's story and put it as a free demo on Steam! This requires some restructuring since I did not plan to do this initially. I think this is a wonderful way to get some direct feedback from the community, as well as for players to try it out and decide if they like the game (or if they want to participate in building it by providing feedback on the early version).

I am working on this now, stay tuned for the announcement!

Exploration, discovery and story progress!

In order to entice exploration in Kinsfolk, now every time you discover and finish a story, you will find out its name, together with a full list of stories that can be found on this level. Here's a bit of that in action:
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[ 2024-06-09 14:30:12 CET ] [Original Post]

24th March 2024 Devlog #1

Hi all, thought I could share some things I been working on for the past two weeks :)

I want to do these short devlogs here and there. Let me know if you enjoy reading them and what you would love to see.

After releasing the trailer I got some feedback on the aesthetic of the landscapes and that the animations looked a bit robotic. Below are all the things I worked on and improved.

Better Fog System

The old fog had ta few problems

it was white which caused it to blend both with the sky and the snow on the ground
it did not convey well the distance of environments due to it not being strong enough for far elements

These can been seen on the image below. You can see that adding a tint of blue to it (due to the sun being warm lighted) and adding more intensity for farther landscape makes the environment look bigger.
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In the new fog system below, look especially, at how much easier is to gauge distance between the two top right mountains. In the new fog system it is much cleaner to see that the one in the background is larger and more distant.
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More Environment Details

I got some feedback from the recent announcement trailer that, especially the farm level, the landscape and its details look very minimalistic and plain. Below you can see the difference now that I added more details.
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I usually leave these finer details for the end because as I work through the story, I am changing a lot of environment and landscape details. Now that the story has moved farther along I felt comfortable changing this.

New Locomotion System

The old movement system felt robotic and it was the default engine locomotion system which made it look unnatural. This can probably be best seen in the trailer below

The new locomotion system added

dynamic foot placement
interpolation so animations and actions look smoother
more animations overall including idle animations to make the character feel better

You can see this in the foot placement of the character below, how it matches the surface exactly :)
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[ 2024-03-24 13:30:12 CET ] [Original Post]

Kinsfolk Steam Page is Live!

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Hey all, if you are reading this you must have at least some interest in Kinsfolk :)

I plan to use this community hub to put news and updates around the game, hopefully it can also act as some sort of devlog as well.

Thank you for checking the community hub, if you want even more news you can follow me on twitter .

If you have any feedback or questions for the game or me, please let me know.

Stay tuned for more news about Kinsfolk hopefully soon,
Vinko