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.
Fortunately, Verdant Skies has been very stable on both Windows and Linux through the years, but I wanted to update the game ahead of compatability problems. This meant upgrading the game from Unity 2017 to 2019.4.39… then to 2020.3.40, then 2021.3.11, then through several point releases up to 2021.3.55f1, which, despite the confusing name, was released on Aug 5, 2025.
Steam Deck Verification
Steam Deck Verification was another big goal for this update. We already had great native linux support, and our performance was carefully managed, so it ran quite well on the console. But the Steam Deck is very strict about being able to access the entire game with the controllers. So I redid a ton of UIs. I found I needed to reowrk many of them entirely to make them easier to navigate with the controller. I also added controller-specific navigation tips, better arrows to indicate which button is focused, etc. Verdant Skies contains about 103 distinct UI windows, from the AlarmClockUI to WoodStainSelectionUI. So this was a huge amount of work.
Virtual keyboard support was another early pain-point. There’s only a handful of places in Verdant Skies where you can enter text, but a lot of games get by without any. But I believe naming yourself, your colonists, and your animals is really important to the vision of the game. For best accessibility, I use the system UIs for virtual keyboards - on Steam Deck, that means Steam’s popup keyboard.
I upgrade Rewired, the code library we use for controller support several times during this update. If you’re a controller user, you’ll find better rebinding support and a lot more hints that show the actual controller button in-game.
Big project!
Since the last pushed public update in April of 2021, there has been 203 commits to the project! That included 2 WWise upgrades (our audio and music engine), 2 Rewired upgrades, and a total of about 8 Unity engine upgrades. Internally, I brought forward a bunch of process / build / workflow tools from other projects. This gave us a drastic improvement to build times and launch times, and makes our deployment process more reliable.
Podcast Interview
If you’d like to hear more about this update and my experiences revisiting the Verdant Skies codebase, check out this Nice Games Club podcast episode!
Veridian Expanse!
Our next game, Veridian Expanse, has been in development for a while now. Although it’s a different genre of game, it canonically takes place in the same universe as Verdant Skies, so there is some fun cross-over lore. You can Wishlist it on Steam today, and we’d be very appreciative!