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Kindred Fates

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Kindred Fates

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Kindred Fates is an action combat, open world, monster battling RPG with permadeath. Forge your path through a shadowy winding story, and form lifelong bonds with powerful monsters in this unforgiving world.

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Combat Arena Beta is released!

Apr 27

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 and then link the correct email in Preferences under Account Linking
Go to your Account Inventory. Find the "Closed-Beta Combat Arena Key" item and click "Redeem" and then "Show".
Go to Steam. Hover over "Games" in the top bar, then click "redeem a product code". You can now put in the key shown in your account inventory and add the game to your Steam library.
Note that the Steam listing for the game might still appear as "Combat Arena Alpha", but it will change soon when Steam gets a chance to fix it. It's a cosmetic issue only.

If your account inventory is empty, ensure you're logging in with/linking the correct email. If you paid with PayPal, the email might be the one tied to your PayPal account. If none of this works, you can email us at support@skymill.com, make a support ticket in the Discord server, or send a message on Kickstarter. You can also contact us if you have issues redeeming the key.

While you're in your account inventory, we recommend also making sure your desired final game copy is selected!
While the Beta isn't available on Switch, Switch backers are still able to redeem their Beta code on PC while still keeping their future access to Switch.

Now, what's changed in the combat arena? For those who aren't familiar, the Beta was initially intended to be pure combat arenas like the Alpha, but we've decided to add a small amount of singleplayer content!

We don’t want to spoil it for you, but here are some general major things to note/changes compared to Alpha:

You can explore a small amount of the overworld and experience a variety of things, including bonding with and training Kinfolk.
There are no longer any preset Kinfolk or items to use in PvP. You have to catch and train your team yourself, and find or buy items for them to hold!
You cannot play a PvP match until you finish the intro fight with the Guild Officer at camp.
There is one additional PvP arena, making the total six. We had initially planned to release with two more arenas, but we had to delay this due to technical difficulties. The other arena will be added in an upcoming patch!
There are two additional Kinfolk, making the total twelve.
The level cap is 30. For PvP, all Kinfolk are equalized at level 50.
We’ve added a new singleplayer game mode, which we’ve been referring to as Red Letter Mode.
You’ll have to find out how to access it in the game!
Most importantly, permadeath is on! Be careful while exploring, because if your Kinfolk's flame burns out, it's gone forever. (Permadeath does not occur in PvP).

We’ll put out a list of patch notes on our website at a later time. We wanted to focus on getting the update out ASAP first!

Searching for a Public PvP match will match you with people who are also searching Public. However, if you're very interested in PvP, we recommend joining our Discord server and making use of our looking-for-game channels. We also have dedicated channels for feedback and bug reports. You're welcome to give feedback here as well, but we recommend reporting bugs on Discord so you can see if someone else has already reported it first!

As well, we're now running an advanced testing group! This is a group of volunteers who are given early access to potential Beta updates and test it for bugs before we do a public release. To join, all you have to do is make several high quality bug reports on our Discord server, and you will be approached. Note that the ATG group requires the signing of a non-disclosure-agreement.

We hope you have fun in the Beta! We look forward to hearing your feedback, and thank you in advance for your bug reports! Please message us with any feedback, questions, or concerns.

Kindred Fates

Is this dead now that Palworld has been released?

Seems like this Palworld is everything this game was trying to be and then some. Any value in still releasing this game? Or maybe the devs should join the Palworld dev team and try adding things to and improving that game?

Reverence

Mar 6 @ 12:39am

General Discussions

Community Newsletter: April 2025

Apr 4

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 default outfit (for now) to avoid situations where it might spawn in naked.
Gameplay Improvements:
- Improved our inventory UI to provide a smoother experience when using items on Kinfolk. Item effects or lack thereof can now be previewed on hover, and then the item may be used with a single click.
- Improved our item quick use bar to support access to every inventory tab. The player can now cycle vertically through different inventory tabs and horizontally through items of that category. This allows the human character to use any item in their inventory without having to open the inventory UI, and even allows the human character to quickly use items in battle.
- Improved how "impactful" abilities feel by polishing effects like camera shake.
- Polished one of the Beta Kinfolk as a playable character which uses a few new abilities.
- PVP players will be happy to hear that control inputs have improved yet again! The server now assumes that a button is currently held if the button has been pressed more times than it has been released. Previously we networked every frame that a button was held, and this was prone to input errors if a single frame was dropped and the server thought the button was no longer being held down. By only tracking the more reliable press and release events, held inputs can be communicated much more reliably. Said simply, holding down buttons should be more reliable now.
Controller Support:
- Added better controller support for the item quick use bar. The player can now hold L2 to activate the menu and navigate with the D-pad.
- Added controller support to almost all the remaining UI in the game. This includes the help menu, NPC shops, and the cooking UI.
- Added controller support to all of our tutorial popups. Any tutorial images that display button inputs now update the button image to show controller buttons if the player is using a Dualshock or Xbox controller, or they show keyboard keys if the player is using keyboard and mouse. Tutorials were the final area of the game where controller input display didn’t update automatically, so it’s nice to finally have this in!
Single Player:
- Created final art for a puzzle that can be found in one of the small exploration areas.
- Improved the flow of the tutorial with a new area, including encounterable Kinfolk, gatherables, and pickup items.
- Added two new short cutscenes to the new tutorial area to help guide the player through the introduction.
- Walking to the edge of the campsite location (where players currently begin when playing the Alpha) now allows players to travel to one of two small explorable areas.
- Worked on adding several Kinfolk spawners to areas of the map that previously had none, and fine-tuned some of the existing spawners in other areas.
- Added a new NPC to the campsite that the player can interact with and purchase items from.
- Refined the different configurations of Kinfolk that it’s possible for bandits to have, and removed non-Beta Kinfolk from the pool.
- Many of our points of interest in the world were using placeholder art, but we’ve been working on replacing all of this with new final artwork (greyboxes begone!). As an example of this, we’d like to show you an interaction with a bandit camp. Keep in mind this is work in progress, as keen-eyed viewers will be able to notice a few remaining bugs.
Up next (other than bug fixes), we need to work on reimplementing character customization, reimplementing Red Letter Mode, implementing the new arenas, and thoroughly testing these and the mission related to Red Letter Mode.
This is the last newsletter before Beta comes out on April 26! However, we will be making another post like this when Beta drops, detailing how to access your key and going over what the Beta contains. We’re excited to see you then!

Community

We had a lot of fun making this video for April Fool’s! Check it out here.
We recently asked fans on our Discord server and Bluesky[bsky.app] for their opinion on what we should name the Kinfolk shown in the last newsletter, codename Briar_Heart. We’ve narrowed our favorite options down to Bryroar, Brihorn, and Veratops. What do you think of these? Feel free to suggest alternatives as well!

Lexicon

The full lexicon can be found here[www.skymillstudios.com].

Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Cutscene: A non-interactive video sequence that occurs between segments of gameplay and depicts part of the story.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Point of interest: An area given special care and attention, intended to draw the player’s interest. An abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods filled with strange notes would be a point of interest.
Red Letter mode: The codename for an unrevealed game mode to be included in the Combat Arena Beta.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on May 2. (By then players will have finally had a taste of single player gameplay. What a beautiful thought that is. <3)

Kindred Fates

Community Newsletter: March 2025

Mar 11

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[www.skymillstudios.com] 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!

We're working on introducing a sense of player progression to the combat arena. In the Beta, the player will start with only 1 Kinfolk instead of having access to the full roster of Kinfolk in the storage box. To build their team, players must bond with Kinfolk they encounter in the game world. Kinfolk will be able to level up and learn new abilities in the Combat Arena.
We released a new patch for the Combat Arena Alpha last week! Some of the bigger changes are covered in this newsletter, but the Patch Notes[skymillstudios.squarespace.com] contain more details.
We’ve updated and standardized our Ability and Item descriptions to use language that we won’t need to updated every time we do a balancing pass, leaving less room for error.
We tested and began implementing new art assets in the Overworld, which will be used in the Beta. This includes the explore-able single player area and Red Letter mode.
We made additions to the starting tutorial to help players get up to speed. This includes instructions for things like connecting with other players for the Combat Arena.
Currently, we are working on making the new explore-able area for the Beta accessible from the camp area in the current version of the Alpha.
Networking updates:
- We made changes to how the game’s server runs, so it can now adjust its speed based on the performance of the host’s computer. This allows the game to run more smoothly with a faster response time.
- We modified our animation systems to help reduce the feel of network delay by up to 100 milliseconds.
- We modified how abilities fire to keep the local and remote versions of a player's character more in sync. It’s now much easier to reflexively dodge or block an enemy player's attacks in multiplayer because they are much more in sync.
- One of the smaller details we worked on was the trajectory of Twister when used by a flying character, helping it to more reliably land where the character is aiming. In this video, we use debugging tools to illustrate the path of the ability both when it’s being aimed and when it’s being fired. We’ve been making many similar changes that are smaller on their own, but overall have a big impact on the game’s polish.

Lexicon

The full lexicon can be found here[www.skymillstudios.com].

Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Client: A player’s computer when playing in multiplayer. All the clients connect to a server to make sure the same thing is happening on everyone’s computers.
Host: (In P2P multiplayer) The player whose device manages the game world and sends data to the other player, making sure everyone is in sync. Also referred to as the server.
Networking: The process of sending data between machines so that people playing a multiplayer game together experience the same things at the same time.
Red Letter mode: The codename for an unrevealed game mode to be included in the Combat Arena Beta.
Remote Client: (aka Remote Player) Any player whose data is being networked across the server to simulate a character's actions. In P2P multiplayer, this is the opposite of the host.
Overworld: The playable area in the open world exploration part of the game.

Thanks for stopping by! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on April 4.

Kindred Fates

Kindred Fates is now region blocked in Germany

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey/germany A valid age rating is required for your game to be up for purchase in Germany. See link above. As of recently, the store page has become inaccessible for us Germans. And folks who wishlisted the game have the item greyed out due to the region block. That's because of a new law over here that requires all games to either have a USK rating, or an automated rating via steam. Please add a valid age rating. It's just a few automated click...

Schlumpsha

Jan 1 @ 6:30pm

General Discussions

Beta? When?

Some concerns on the direct website indicate that players that participated in Alpha, or didn't get the chance to, have not been updated on the apparent delays of the Beta dropping, and as it is the very end of 2023, players aren't sure about the legitimacy of customer care since (allegedly) the newsletters-to-date don't address the aforementioned-Beta or much progress that players can expect going into 2024. Not intending to cause panic, but would like to keep that in circulation and in mind as we all m...