2025 Update, with Steam Deck Support!
It’s been a while since we had a Verdant Skies update, and this has turned out to be a big one!
There were two big goals with this update- finish up full controller support for the Steam Deck and to keep the game running on modern systems by updating the underlying engine. These two items turned out to be a fair bit of work!
I’m a firm believer in keeping a game working as long as possible. I want Verdant Skies to be a game you can come back to years later. You should be able to reinstall it 10 years later and play it with your kids.
read more...Summer Modding Update and Sale!
Verdant Skies is now at 1.4.0! This huge update has major new features for mod makers and mod enthusiasts. We’ve also reworked romance events for Sasha, Yuki, Rosie, Wyatt and Miles. You’ll now have new flirting options with these characters, and if you’re not hinting at a relationship, they won’t confess their love for you.
Verdant Skies is on sale
65% off on Steam! Now’s the perfect time to gift it to a friend! We’re also on sale on our itch.io store, where you can get a DRM-free version.
read more...Verdant Skies is out now!
Live on Steam!
The last few years have been full of ups and downs, but it was all worth it to be able to bring Verdant Skies to life. Thanks for accompanying us on the journey!
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Release Date Announcement!
Release Date Announcement!
It’s been a busy month, but we’re thrilled to announce our release date of February 12th. We were hoping to have everything finished by the end of January, but we needed a little more time to make sure we give you the best experience possible at release. The biggest time sink has been getting meaningful daily dialogs written for all of the characters, and that’s the main thing we’re still finishing up. Sorry to disappoint everyone with the slight delay, but it’ll be worth it!
read more...Final Stretch to Release!
Final Stretch!
We’re grateful to all of you folks who have been patiently waiting for our release! We haven’t nailed down an exact date yet, but we’re in the final phase of testing and clean up, so you should expect to see us on Steam sometime later this month or in early February. Thanks for your patience and engagement throughout the development process. You are why we do what we do!
read more...End of 2017 Update!
Announcing Mod Support!
Customize artwork, dialogs, mails, items, crafting recipes and more using the Verdant Skies modding system! Since development started, we knew we wanted to support modding. We’re allowing users to use the same methods we used to create the content for the game to create their own content.
read more...December Developer Update
Making New Friends
As you build your colony on Viridis Primus, you’ll also be building relationships with your fellow colonists. Today we’ll explore some of the technical and creative tricks we use to craft the immersive narrative in Verdant Skies. We’ll also give you an update on our Steam integration progress and reveal another NPC.
November Development Update
Steam Page is Live!
Our Steam page ( http://store.steampowered.com/app/730050/Verdant_Skies/ ) is up! If you haven’t already, please visit and follow, favorite, or wishlist your copy of Verdant Skies today!
October Development Update
Featured in PCGamer!
We are very happy to have been featured on PC Gamer’s website. Lauren Morton focused on one of the mechanics that makes Verdant Skies stand out in the farming life simulation genre – genetic splicing! If you haven’t checked out the piece, you should. It’s a great read!
http://www.pcgamer.com/verdant-skies-is-a-farming-sim-where-you-play-as-a-space-scientist/
read more...August Developer Update
Verdant Skies Coming to PAX West!
It feels surreal to say that we are showing Verdant Skies at PAX West September 1-4 in Seattle, but we are! Our booth is # 7115, and we are very excited to be right across the aisle from Larian Studios on the 6th floor of the expo hall. (We’re really big fans!)
This is a huge step for us in our development process, and it is exciting as well as stressful! Depending on how our meetings go with publishers, we may finally be able to say we have a release date!
read more...July Developer Update
Busy as Bees!
The last few weeks we’ve been buzzing about preparing for several showings. First up is 2D Con from August 11th to 13th at the Doubletree in Minneapolis. We will also be at the Social Science event on August 16th at the Science Museum of Minnesota. We’ve also had some longer playtests that allowed us to test content beyond the tutorial.
The Relationship Journal, Badges, & More!
Andy finished programming the journal, which is an important tool to manage your relationships with the other colonists. At first, the journal only shows your current relationship status.
read more...Verdant Skies June Development Update
No summer vacation for us!
With no May update you may have thought we were taking the summer off. Nothing could be further from the truth! While many are out enjoying the summer sun, we’ve been hard at work creating content for Verdant Skies.
Happy Spring from the Verdant Skies Team!
Spring has sprung!
Much like our world outside, there’s many things blooming in the development of Verdant Skies! From crops to insects, we’ve added some great new art. Love is in the air as we continue to expand on the relationship system. Of course, what update is complete without some bug fixes!
read more...Verdant Skies- New in March
New fog effects, audio, controller support!
March has been a busy month for us; we showed Verdant Skies at MinneBar, a Minnesota tech conference. We all worked really hard to make VS as polished as possible for the event. For me, that meant a lot of work into perfecting the controller support, since only XBox controllers were available at the event. We got a great team picture of myself, Beth, and Lizzy.
read more...Verdant Skies Development News
It’s still February somewhere in the world
Yeah, technically it might be March now, but we’ve been so busy working on the game, posting about the news falls to the back burner. And honestly, making the game is more fun than writing blog posts anyway.
Cleanup, polish, improvements, and even a few new features have been the focus for the last month. Under the hood, there’s been some big upgrades to the audio engine (upgrading WWise to a new version) and a major rework on how shadows and reflections are rendered. These changes allow for better performance and fix a few outstanding graphical glitches that we’ve mostly just avoided showing in screenshots. Shadows and reflections are now much more consistent. For example, when you see a flower waving in the wind, the reflection and the shadow now also wave.
Developing Rosie’s Art Style
Character portraits in Verdant Skies have changed a lot through the development process. Each character begins with a biography, which plays a major role in every decision on the character’s design- clothing, attitude, pose, and more.
Click to Enlarge
Once the basics have been nailed down in the sketch, Lizzy begins to refine the details of the character and render the character in more detail.
read more...December Development Update!
Gamer’s Rhapsody: Best Game of 2016!
At Gamer’s Rhapsody we won 2016 Game of the Year and Best Story! And best of all, we had a lot of players who got to sit down with Verdant Skies and play through the beginning of the game. Since Gamer’s Rhapsody is a relatively small convention, players were able to continue their saves on the second and third day of the convention, so half a dozen players were able to get 1-3 hours of gameplay! Thanks to our dedicated testers who got through the first 3 character events, picked and sold $500 worth of flowers, and got all the tool upgrades.
read more...Greenlight Successful! November News
Thanks for your Greenlight Support!
Verdant Skies has been successfully Greenlit on Steam! We are deeply grateful for all of your votes and support; thanks to you, our game will be available on Steam when it is done.
New Clothing, Mechanics, Everything!
So much has changed in the last month, it’s hard to make a list. We’ve got a new flexible clothing system that allows you to combine dozens of different shirts, pants, skirts, and accessories.
read more...Vote on Steam Greenlight!
Steam Greenlight Voting
We’re now on Steam Greenlight, and we need your votes to get Verdant Skies listed on Steam! Please vote for us on our Greenlight page. Voting is free, you just need a steam account, and the more “yes” votes we get, the sooner Verdant Skies will be on Steam!
New Gameplay Video
Our new video shows off all sorts of new things you can do in Verdant Skies. Check out the upgraded fishing system, the crafting systems, planting, watering, and harvesting crops.
Verdant Skies – September News
September Developer Update:
Since the last public showing at 2D Con, nearly every aspect of the game has been improved. New music has been composed, artwork has been repainted, game mechanics have been reprogrammed, and new events have been written!
read more...August Verdant Skies Update
A huge amount of work has been done on Verdant Skies since our last post. The first programming pass has been finished on the in-game map. As I watch new testers play the game, I find that the map makes a pretty big difference in how they interact with the NPCs. Since they can find the characters more easily, they can get the dialog for each character every day, and they get a lot more of that person’s story.
read more...New custom housing options!
More code and artwork for the customizable house system has been finished! We’ve got a visual tour of some of the different ways you can decorate your home as you expand it through the different levels.
Individual doors and windows can be changed, as with the color of the house. Each person living on the planet has a home that matches their individual tastes.
Verdant Skies Developer Update
Lots has happened since 2DCon! There’s been 38 bug fixes or features added since the show. Another huge thank you to everyone who tested there, provided feedback, and gave us their ideas.
I’d like to highlight a few of the changes we made after 2DCon:
Added some of the new style house art that Lizzy made. It looks amazing, and even better- it’s customizable. As developers, we can swap out the doors and windows for different styles, and arrange them differently depending on our needs…. and that means that when it comes to the player’s house, there are lots of decorating options!
Verdant Skies is at 2D Con!
Stop by for the first public showing!
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Welcome to the newest team member
We’ve been working hard on getting Verdant Skies ready for 2DCon, but the blog fell behind a little bit. One big reason for that is because we got a new team member!
read more...Fishing!
A lot of games in this genre have a fishing system based on waiting for a bobber to move, quickly hitting a key, and then some sort of button mashing to reel in the fish. Most of these mini-games are sorta okay, but they are never too interesting, involve a lot of waiting, and can be pretty inaccessible to people with lower manual dexterity.
Instead, Verdant Skies includes the more exciting: Spear Fishing!
read more...Crafting in Verdant Skies
One of the recent features I’ve been programming has been the crafting system! After a lot of consideration, I came up with a list of features that were important for my vision of how crafting could work:
- The player can make and place things like workbenches, watering tanks, etc. Making and placing these objects is both a way for the player to advance, and it allows customization and ownership of the world.
- Crafting can take time, so players have an incentive to plan and prioritize what they are making. If they’re planning on making a lot of something, additional workbenches/ovens/etc will speed the process.
- Different crafting stations can be used to craft different things.
- Aid usability by limiting the number of craftable items in a single crafting station. (No huge lists that scroll forever)
New Icons!
We’ve been working on updating our player UI. Check out these new icons Lizzy made!
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Verdant Skies at GDC!
Andy and Beth will be at GDC for this entire week! GDC is a yearly game developers conference that’s held in San Fransisco- and it’s the big one.
read more...Making the Music of Verdant Skies
The team is trying to establish a coherent mood for Verdant Skies and a big part of that comes from Troy’s music. To begin the project, he established a palette of instruments that coalesced around guitar, drums, bass, and organ. Those aren’t everything, but it has done a nice job to establish the frontier-like elements of the game–an untamed wild, expansive and uncharted.
read more...Character Customization in Progress
This week we’ve been working on player appearance customization. Lizzy’s been hard at work creating clothing, hairstyles and facial features. Andy has successfully implemented skin tone selection and clothing color changes.
read more...Water Reflections and Developer Updates
I really wanted to make the world of Verdant Skies beautiful- and as a developer, I figured the best way I could contribute was with fancy graphical effects like these reflections.
In order to actually generate the reflections, we select everything that is “reflect-able” and draw it separately. We also draw the background color, which represents the color of the sky that is reflected by the water:
read more...To New Beginnings…
Greetings pioneers! The team here at Verdant Skies couldn’t be happier to share a peek into our new world with you. Please check out our announcement video and take in the lush landscapes of Viridis Primus. Leave your life behind and begin anew on this beautifully painted, hand-crafted planet.
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