Last updated April 24 2025
You are a dragon, and you fight other dragons in arena shooter combat.
I go by @telekrex. I’ve been developing games since 2010. I am the sole developer, but I founded Protoria Studios for publishing, and there I employ @SolidSpark and @Kennyiscool for product management and business solutions. We don’t have offices, full remote. If you’re curious about my work, check out my github.
Skyfear is a one-time purchase of $14.99 USD. This the simplest and fairest business model.
Skyfear is intended as a PC game played with mouse and keyboard. Windows is the only officially supported OS for now, but it can be emulated on Linux. I’ve seen it run just fine on SteamOs, Ubuntu, and PopOs, using either Wine or Steam’s Proton.
I want Skyfear on Mac, that’s a real target. For now it might be playable emulated with Wine, but this is untested.
I have no experience developing for mobile. I’ve never even played a mobile game. But if there’s demand for it, I would look into it.
Skyfear is in early access, as this makes the most sense for my ability to work on the game. For development progress, see roadmap.
Covered in spikes and scutes, two bat-like wings, a long serpent-like body, a strong chest, raptor-like legs, and the face of a monitor lizard. It is, by all means, the blueprint of a wyvern. These dragons are smaller than the usual hollywood goliath, they are more like the rhinoceros or komodo dragon sized. Their size allows them to be quick, because the gameplay is all about movement and shooting. They are supposed to be agile, like fighter jets or like bats. When you explore the Lairworld you will unlock body parts to fully customize your dragon such as eyes, horns, skins, vertebrae spikes, tail tips, and vocalizations.
You have a hub called the Lairworld, and then at your pleasure, you enter timed combat matches like an arena shooter, with a variety of maps and modes. Play online with other players or offline versus bots, with adjustable difficulty settings.
Combat combines third person shooter and action-sport-like movement into what feels like a snowball fight. It’s fast and responsive — you can slither around on the ground, jump into the air, fly like a bat, and roll like a fighter jet. Spray fire like a flamethrower or shoot rapid fire projectiles. Use special abilities to spice up a fight, and use perks to add physical advantages to your playstyle.
Completing battles will earn you XP and Material. When you level up in XP, DNA caches from the stars, called spores, will land in the Lairworld from a meteor. Then you can unlock customizations from them by transferring Material. The more XP you earn, the more spores show up, and the more Material you collect, the more spores you can open. So there’s a bit of back and forth between combat and working on your character.
Skyfear hosts battles of up to 6 players. The idea was to have small, up close and personal battles. It’s like a snowball fight.
Yes, there is a single player side that features offline bot battles. Extensive work has been put into making the AI challenging, fun, and replayable.
Yes, single player and multiplayer offer the same gameplay and you earn the same progress, with some % adjustments. It’s designed so you can still enjoy it if you don’t have high speed internet, competitive nature, or a group of friends. You can play the whole game solo offline if you like.
For now, there is a server browser to allow for max flexibility.
You can set up fully customizable game sessions, including passwords and the color of the server listing.
Skyfear is not a live service. It’s like Halo: Combat Evolved. You’re not being left behind if you aren’t playing. Save data is local. Zero content tied up in an online economy. It’s all there on your hard drive. 5 GB download.
Depends on how competitive you are and how quickly you want to level up. For the average player, I think there’s at least 30 hours worth of unlocking the main stuff, but there’s a skill ceiling to explore and lots of cosmetics to collect.
Check out the roadmap. Nothing is scheduled, however I have outlined what the intentions are, and as long as there are players, I will continue to work.
A soundtrack release, at least. I don’t know when. Additional in-game content will likely just be added in updates.
You can wishlist it on Steam or purchase it.
5 GB. See full system requirements here. This is subject to change, but not by much.
A source-built version of Unreal Engine 4.21.
I prioritized art direction, performance, and readability, instead of polygons. In the game’s early days photorealism was attempted but it was very difficult to scale, and when you’re flying around shooting fireballs, it doesn’t matter. I wanted realism as opposed to stylized, but I believe level of fidelity is a creative choice, and I chose around 10k faces per asset as a maximum. It probably looks like it came out in 2009, but that’s okay, I love that era of entertainment and the game’s frame rate is pretty good.
I grew up with Eragon and Dragonology books, which greatly played a part in the dragon’s design, and some of the user experience. Ridley Scott’s Alien was also looked at a lot. I didn’t want the dragon to be like a puppy, I wanted the player to control something fierce and other-worldly.
Making a prehistoric world was harder than I thought to develop. The Land Before Time gave me a lot of ideas about colors and shapes. James Cameron’s Avatar showed me you can create beautiful worlds with unnatural geometry, and The Shadow of Colossus showed me a video game world can feel vast with the right combination of atmosphere and foliage. I’d sort of describe the game’s aeshetic as prehistoric goth.
Gameplay-wise, Skyfear’s all about vicious feeling and responsive movement. Games that helped develop this feel are Quake, Halo, Call of Duty, Killzone, Vanquish, and Batman Arkham series.
Amidst popular franchises of the PlayStation 3 era, I really admired games that were ambitious despite their budget such as Haze and Lair, and Avatar’s game adaptation. You could tell with these games they wanted to do more than they could. A little arena shooter called Psychokinetic Wars really inspired me to make games.
If you like any of the media I’ve listed here, you will probably really get Skyfear.
The game was originally designed sometime around 2010, then I officially started developing the game in 2015. I’ve spent a lot of that time on other projects as well, having prototyped nearly 30 other game ideas, but from ~2022 ish and onward I’ve been solely focused on Skyfear.
Yes and no. Yes, the game can be played with the “Xbox” layout. PlayStation and third party controllers should work fine – it’s just that the game as of August 2025 does not yet have controller assets on the UI. The game is really intended for mouse + keyboard, and I personally haven’t seen much demand for controller, but eventually it will be fully compatible.
No, just Steam. Just buy and hit play.
Nope. Just hit play and the game opens.
No.
It should. If the resolution you want isn’t listed in the options menu, please suggest it on Discord or Steam Community Discussions. Or you can probably edit an .ini file somewhere to change it manually.
It does not have ray-tracing. It’s something I could look into adding later update. But it’s not necessary.
Probably not, not now. They got rid of things that Skyfear depends on in 4.21, so it would be a massive job to rebuild everything. But I won’t rule it out, because someday it may be an ideal thing to do for preservation purposes.
Yup! This is perhaps the easiest non PC platform to support, since Valve’s work with Proton handles the software compatibility, and on my end I just need to make sure the in-game experience can account for the screen size and controls. The frame rate is decent on the Deck since Skyfear has been built from the start to run okay on lower end PCs.
If you’ve read all this, you’re a champ. Hope to see you in the arena <3