Last updated September 14th, 2026
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. All efforts are self funded. We don’t recieve any money from investors, publishers, or fans, except for actual game sales. Protoria Studios policies and mission statement can be found here, and I encourage you to take a look if you’re curious or skeptical.
Skyfear is a one-time purchase of $14.99 USD. This the simplest and fairest business model. It’s old school, but it means we don’t rely on gameified and manipulative microservices.
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.
As of the latest FAQ update, I do possess an M1 Mac and porting Skyfear is being explored. There are many challenges to this but it is admittedly not a high priority, so we’ll see.
I have no experience developing for mobile and I’ve never even played a mobile game. There are no plans to explore that at this time.
Skyfear was released under early access in March 2025. You can purchase it today to play and provide feedback. Updates are delivered roughly once a month or 2-3 months apart at the most. For update history, read the Steam blog. For development progress, see the live 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, where you are free to roam and fly around unlocking cosmetic items. 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.
Mode game modes host battles of up to 8 players. The idea was to have small, up close and personal battles. It’s like a snowball fight. There are some game modes with fewer or larger player counts.
Yes. The Lairworld is a single player experience, and you can play battles offline vs bots. A major mission of Protoria Studios is offline capability; 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. Unplug your router if you like. I wanted to make a game that doesn’t rely on Internet even though it’s PVP. Think like Mortal Kombat.
Games where you play as dragons don’t have a massive audience. And I’ve seen lots of games that are matchmaking ONLY, and it takes forever to find a game, players or not. I don’t know why they do this. I wanted to make sure Skyfear is playable online even if only 2 players exist. So to maximize flexibility, there is a server browser that allows you to create exactly the games you want, and find exactly the games you want, and see every game that’s live. I don’t think the game needs matchmaking right now, but I had already built a matchmaking system, and as of mid-2026, am considering when to enable it. So yes, probably, at some point.
Absolutely. You can set up fully customizable game sessions, including passwords and the color of the server listing.
No. Skyfear is not a live service. You’re not being left behind if you aren’t playing. Save data is local. Zero online economy. It’s all there on your hard drive. 5 GB download. Think like Halo: Combat Evolved.
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 live roadmap. Nothing is scheduled, as in I know the day its releasing, however I have outlined what I want to add, and as long as there are players, I will continue to work.
For additional in-game content, no. The one-time purchase of the game should cover all in-game content. But I am planning to release bonus material such as original soundtrack that I made and behind-the-scenes stuff. When, I don’t know.
It’s already available and fully playable. Buy it or wishlist it on Steam.
5 GB. Download will be done in the same time as pizza in the oven.
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 in terms of texture, instead of 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 ~2022-2025 I’ve been solely focused on Skyfear. As of 2026, I am developing more new projects, but Skyfear is still my #1 priority until its “1.0” release.
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.
Yes/It should. Not all resolutions have been tested. 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 nor need 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, love you, you’re a champ. Hope to see you in the arena <3