SkyRanch.Life - a beautiful Free Dating Sim RPG in development with Vampires, Elves, Furries, Monsters, and God knows what else ✝️

[JeFawk]

Hey hey


​

You can play SkyRanch.Life by downloading it using the links in our game thread.

We also wrote a small guide

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on how to run the game if you have issues and more info

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.

Update #1
Update #2
Update #3
Update #4
Update #5
Update #6
Update #7
Update #8
Update #9
Update #10
This post will be updated periodically as the game development progresses.

Spoiler: Quick intro

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Spoiler: About the Game

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Spoiler: Nightclub scene - images

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Spoiler: Characters - images

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Spoiler: About Characters

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Spoiler: Main Character, Vleed Sângerel - image

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Spoiler: The Ranch Plot

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Spoiler: The Ranch Plot - image

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Spoiler: Furnishing a House - GIF

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Spoiler: Teaser March 2023 - Video

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Spoiler: The Technical Part

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Spoiler: Patreon Pledge and What Do They Do

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Spoiler: High Priority Game Features

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Spoiler: Low Priority Game Features

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[JeFawk]

Butt Tenderizing Hobby | SkyRanch Dating Sim RPG Visual Novel | Devlog #1​

I squeeze and things come out. Pathetic...–Vleed Sângerel​

Watch the funny and chaotic devlog or keep your scroll to keep your sanity and read only.


TLDR in changelog format at the end of the page.

An Expensive Hobby
Nobody likes a more succulent piece of living meat than Vleed.

Now, more than ever (because this was not coded before), Vleed can get very “hands on” in his sudden personal encounter.

The scene with Elisah Twiddlycorn getting her legs worked out by someone else has now been polished so much that Vleed himself is drooling on my keyboard, and not from his mouth.

Left butt cheek, right butt cheek, middle butt cheek, all the cheeks, all the time, separate, or together, behold ! They shaking yo.

Her static face has been blessed with the ability to express her approval—and disapproval— of Vleed’s outrageous behavior, also ahegos and oos galore.


And with this huge development of blinking eyes and moving mouth holes, the game is officially way more alive than just looking at static pictures and performing imaginative brain-actions.

As a side note, the grab animations are code-based, the speed and passion of which can be changed, taking it’s smaller or greater toll on your CPU.

Don't Spill It!

Some sad animation about drink abuse.


UIX - User Interface seXperience
If you don't want to see any UI in SkyRanch, just close your eyes .

We got rid of the minimalistic look, because it JeFawk has this masochistic desire to code buttons, over and over and over, and he is in need of dopamine tears.

The old minimalistic UI didn’t fit the fantasy-sci-fi style, so that’s that and now we got a new one. There is just so much that one can talk about buttons and panels while holding the reader’s interest.



The Vampiric Vision ability has been dopeyfied. It's fully animated and gets irritated from use.

​

TEXT
We like to write a lot (as you might have noticed), so we had to find a way to add our pleasure in the game: TEXT.

We’ve started working on the dialogue system so that Vleed can ask that rat what he’s up to, and choose to ignore him. That choice will be the end of our vampire, one day.

You will be able to get to know some characters quite a lot, or not at all, you decide (but you should read our TEXT because it’s worth it).

Art for your Left Eyeball
This week on the art side has mostly been about polishing assets and finishing assets, and everything was about assets.

The old nightclub got a proper overhaul, we got a few carpenters there and is no longer a dazzling blur of adjacent colors.

Two more scenes were added that were missing in the storyboard (which is pretty meaningless knowledge to whomever is reading this because we never publicly published the storyboard hah!).



Future Shenanigans
I got my alarm set tomorrow at 7 AM because some guy has to come check my tubes. — JeFawk

I’ll get out of bed, wash my face & stuff and sit down to fix some bugs and work on the dialogue screen.

Our main priority is to gamedev enough to release an early version that will not be completely broken and will be somewhat enjoyable.

TLDR 19th March 2023 Update
Animations

• Animations for Elisah Twiddlycorn’s butt interaction scene.
• Idle animations for the nightclub scene
• Arm animations for Vleed

UI Overhaul

• Replaced old UI with something more fitting for a sci-fi-fantasy game.
• UI design and improvements

Dialogue

• Writing character dialogue and designing the dialogue screen.

Art Assets

• Animation frames for Vleed and Elisah
• Polished character assets
• Finished backgrounds for current and future scenes

What's next?
We are working on getting a first playable version ready. (Aiming for sometime in April-May)

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​

 

[JeFawk]

Update: Dialogue system with Sam Summertail

This update is to show the dialogue system. The animations for the characters (Vleed & Sam) are not done yet, thus here they have only 1 pose.

Reinventing the wheel is not great, however because of that, this custom system is very flexible as it has been written from scratch to fit our needs with SkyRanch.Life

The dialogue system has been coded and it's pretty customizable:
• Can be fully minimized to see the characters better
• Holds the history of the conversation
• Can be resized in case you want to read more or less at one time
• Has colored text related to the characters; the colors are based on quality (gray, green, blue, purple, gold)
• Has colored text related to what the characters are thinking; Vleed for now, the others will be revealed with the implementation of the Mind Read ability (so you use the ability while talking to a character and find out what they're thinking and not telling you
• Even though it doesn't show here, objects can be added in the dialogue, objects such as Photos, items, etc.



Some screenshots because the youtube video cannot be embedded :

 

[JeFawk]

Update: Tome of Mildly Useful Knowledge

Right after the last page was sewn, the tome took the soul of the tome maker. A little out of spite, mostly because of sepsis. - Tome Origins 5:1

There already is a lot of lore and world building in SkyRanch.Life, in our game design documents anyway. And we don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

We have stories about characters, their backgrounds, their mothers, hobbies, quirks, traits, how they talk (JeFawk runs around yelling stuff as if spoken by Sam Summertail, and hot diggity he's so annoying at times that he's annoying himself); professions, classes, combat moves, how prone they are to leave your party at a boss fight, favorite sexual positions, their weapon of choice in bed and on the floor, and more.

An insane amount of stuff.

But ... why?

Why you may ask? Because we love it, and in our combined love, without any protection, the co-writing of this masterpiece takes a lustful 1st 2nd, and 3rd place .

JeFawk is a conqueror of virtual worlds. He enjoys knowing what bloodline he just severed by killing off that last asshole, and he'll sing a song about it, probably in the kitchen while pouring a pint of wine.

Frostnight

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as a self-published author; she started writing her first book since she was a teen, and continued with many more.

JeFawk published a book as well but nobody should read

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.

We love lore and world building and SkyRanch.Life will have A LOT of it, which is where the amazing and dubious Tome of Mildly Useful Knowledge (and the hot demon trapped in it) comes into place.

Tome content

The Tome has discoverable entries, and these discoveries take place by enjoying the game. It hosts short stories and information about characters (what they like, what they don't, how they look, where they live, when they go to bed (it's not creepy at all, we promise)), locations, items, artifacts, the world, Vleed, and more.

Achievements are also added to the Tome, after all, what's an achievement without the back story of how it came to be.

Quests? Tome. Progression bars to fill up? Tome.

26 pages of lore have been added until now.

The technical bit

We focused more than a month on the development of this book system, and as it stands, it's pretty damn robust. We easily added text, illustrations, animations, FX, and even game logic to it! (You can find some things to click on and to unlock)

Screenshot
We don't want to spoil the content, so all we can show is this annoying GIF.

 

[JeFawk]

Animations and Interactions

One talks, the other listens...usually
We're trying to make the characters of SkyRanch look as alive as possible . All the while also being reasonable in terms of game performance and time spent (we're only 2 people barely people that is...).
The characters have facial expressions (facials as we like to call them), body pose changes, and a brand-new feature: linen removal. They even walk around and dance .Sam should stop dancing in public.



Dialogue with Sam GDD
This ⤵ is the game design document section of Vleed Sângerel talking to Sam Summertail.
The text pieces and choices are fully animated. A lot of effort & time was put into this, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that it looks awesome, and we think it was totally worth it (which doesn't matter either, what matters is if YOU like it!)
Most branches are actually real and don't all meet up a bit later to continue the story linearly. Fake choices suck, we try to avoid that as much as possible.
The branching actually makes a difference, whether that is in discovering

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, achievements, acquiring items, or simply dicking about.


Forced Loot
Vleed was pissed off that Sam was spamming him with ads.
As he attempted to calm down, what did Sam do? Seized the moment to slip his flier in Vleed's inventory, just in case he'd be murdered. One last ad placement was all he wanted from his foxy life .


Sammy's Happy Shirt
After extensive discussions, they both agreed that Sam should donate his shirt for a good cause . Here you can see his wild signature move. If this doesn't get the ladies and lads horny, he doesn't know what will.



One's Trash is Another's Treasure
The dialogues affect the game world. Time to take this shirt to the Shirtless Children Charity .



What's Next
The animations and the effect of the interactions will be developed for the other characters with extreme care. Hopefully we can slowly increase the quality as we polish our skills and try out new techniques.

Like What You See?
We do too!
Become a Patron to support & participate in the development of SkyRanch! Get some cool perks, and cheer with us as we're pushing towards an alpha release!

 

[JeFawk]

Vampiric Power and naughty Chaos

A Vampire's addiction
Vampiric Power is the vampire's resource, similar to Mana but better suited for a real badass.
With it you fortify your mental

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, empower your attacks, and establish good relationships based on blackmail, manipulation, and assholity.
Such dark contorted power can be acquired mostly using frowned-upon means, however, desperation can lead to sucking on some blood pudding for minor kicks, just enough for that Manipulation spell...

Fill 'er up
Vampiric Power pouring animation: Diablo vibes, sexual content.
Everything has a price, oh and that glass is floating due to Vleed's Selective Gravity passive. He rather not touch things unless they're warm and suckable.

Chaos
You can't expect to do bullshit all the time and get away with it.
An original take on the Crime System: Chaos. Fill it up and find out!
Different locations cause different events to trigger once the Chaos meter is full. Of course you can just not fill it up, but where's the fun in that? (you'll skip content we worked on, I'd avoid it if I were you)
Floor-tossing drinks in the nightclub because you don't like your reflection in the glass?
Getting Sam Summertail to show his secondary fox nature?
Maybe you think biting is a social norm here.
Chaos. Fill it up and find out.

Like where this is going?
Consider checking the perks of becoming a Patron, but if you're out of time, TLDR: early non-compressed builds (omg the bandwidth...), WIP art, behind the scenes. Talking to you on Discord is 1st social priority*.

Spoiler

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[JeFawk]

Attributes and Magical Formulas ∑πƒ∆

Attributes
SkyRanch.Life has 22 unique attributes, and that's quite a lot considering the average AAA games have under 10.

The use of attributes varies from winning a dice roll against a sofa, to amour-ing someone on that sofa.

Attributes mostly help, but also hinder. Are you in a rush to swiftly do something very fast? The Patience attribute will definitely slow you down.

Waiting for the appropriate time to erect your self-proclaimed superiority? Patience: I'm here for you bro.



Default or dimwitted
Your character (Vleed Sângerel for now) comes with a predefined set of assigned attributes which overall work pretty well, but you can always surprise him and yourself by changing the values.

Mindblowingly, you will see your stats alter in real time!

You can challenge your brain in an attempt to reach that Max Health Points = 0, or whatever other weird spec you wish to try out.

Magical formulas
Stats are the delightful numbers that make your character feel like a living math teacher.
They get calculated using hardcore scientifically proven formulas such as:
Spell Power = Intelligence (disclaimer: not actual formula)

Skyranchy stats
• Max Health Points: reaching 0 means Unexpected Nap Time.

• Max Vampiric Power: the bread and butter of your vampiric nature.
With it you can Mind Read other characters and discover what kinky stuff they're into or what you should avoid (if you like to be a nice guy that is). Use Selective Gravity to snag some loot, or make your hot cocoa float so your dead hands won't cool it down.

• Movement Speed: caffeinated cat or sluggy grandpa-daddy?

• Attack Power: bonking is hard work (and so is game development).
This is the mostly-melee power of your swings. By default, Vleed would rather much engage in Intellectual warfare, but with customizations, he can swing some shit with unruly might, possibly leaving him rather dumb.

• Attack Speed, or as Vleed says "Why bother? They all die eventually."

• Spell Power baby! As Vleed is a vampire, casting mostly blood magic, this is very important for his plans to succeed, whatever those are.

• Spell Haste increases spell casting speed and more.
As Vleed has the patience of a butterfly, it would be wise to not test him. Too much Spell Haste can cause headaches as spells backfire, while too little help in achieving critical hits—sucks when both happen at the same time. The intricacies of Spell Casting remain largely unknown.



Replayability
Different playthroughs, different specs.

Maybe you'd like your ancient vampire to have more points in Flexibility rather than Wisdom. Contrary to popular belief, people don't automatically get wiser with age (Vleed is a few hundred years old, more or less).

Since you can customize your attributes so damn much, replayability is a bit more entertaining than watching grass grow. So embrace those digits and let your stats soar or sink as you embark on epic adventures leaving a trail of statistical awesomeness in your wake!

Do you enjoy spreadsheets?
We got plenty of numbers in them, and even more in the hidden columns!

Did you know we have multiple sheets too? WOOOW



With your support we'll make sure to implement the most gruesome formulas for the simplest of calculations. We'll utilize all the cores available to encrypt and decrypt the results, archive and decompress, turn to binary and back to whatever the heck it is, anything to make more numbers!

Patreon perks TLDR: you will be one more number in our Patreon spreadsheet, you will receive early non-compressed builds, WIP art, behind the scenes, numbers! Talking to you on Discord is number 1 social priority*.

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* as long as it's not utter nonsense or a complete waste of numbers

 

[JeFawk]

Not so random Dice Rolls

Slightly important things
In Skyranch.Life you roll for nonmonotonous actions and things such as special interactions, persuasion attempts, finding small treasures in obvious places, etc.
The dice roll itself lasts for just a few seconds, so if you'd rather not do this, just blink very slowly and keep clicking.
In this UI you have Vleed's attributes, statuses, and other modifiers, vs your opponent's relevant attributes, statuses, etc. Some statuses could relate to the level of darkness in the room for things which require accuracy, while other could be related to the amount of braincells available.



Your attributes + a pinch of RNG
In our version of dice rolling, different attributes come into play and have a good ol' fist fight. Since you can customize your stats and reassign points throughout the game, some dice rolls will be more challenging than others.
After the total points of both involved parties are calculated (attributes + statuses + other), the target which you have to roll over will be = defender's points - attacker's points, or the other way around if you're the defender in this equation.
The panels try to show as much relevant information as possible, to give you the best chance of understanding why and how, or you can just skip that part and look for a guide or ask people on our discord how to win some of the rolls

Wanna roll for a Patreon Tier?
By reading this you agree to throw an imaginary dice.
If you lose the roll, you have to pick one of our tiers and support us.
If you win, we have to pick a tier for you to support.
Which tier shall it be then?
Patreon perks TLDR: you receive attention from us*, you support our work, you get early builds, WIP art, behind the scenes, you are credited and will forever remain so even if you pause your pledge.

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* as long as it's not utter nonsense or a complete waste of numbers

 

[JeFawk]

SkyRanch.Life v. 0.1.0 Patreon Build is Live
Public build in ~ a month

After a gruesome 180 days of extra full time hardcore work, with our patreon's support, we have managed to ship the first ever playable version of SkyRanch.Life!

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One of the longest post we've ever made
Has some backstory, download links, how to install/run, known issues and our declaration of love towards our patrons.

Playtime on average 20 mins, min 6, max 40-50 ish, if you like to read

Feedback is welcomed

 

[JeFawk]

We have launched version 0.1.1 publicly

The links can be found on the first post or on

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.

Feedback is welcomed , thank you.

 

[JeFawk]

We have just made a Game Request here: https://f95zone.to/threads/skyranch-life-0-1-1-jefawks-spaghettorium.172056/

I think (unsure how the game requests get processed) voting helps?

Feel free to vote if you wish

 

[JeFawk]

Vote on Content Priority

You vote it, we develop it!

We're in a development stage where we can start working on another NPC character (design, poses, story, items, etc) or continue Vleed's story (exploration, and a new character with a short interaction).

We plan to dedicate time for all of the options presented here, but we'd like to know if there is a particular area of the game YOU would like to experience sooner rather than later.

Vote here:

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[JeFawk]

A very Halloweeny isometric sneak peek

A sneak peek of the isometric map we're working on. You'll be able to explore, pick ingredients and naughty things, poke stuff, and do normal RPG stuff but with our own twist.



Hope you enjoy, and have a very Spooky Halloween

 

[JeFawk]

Happy Holidays!
Another year draws to an end–phew, thank fuck .

This year we released the first public version of SkyRanch.Life as we took the design from the end of 2022 and spun it around a few times until it got dizzy and boom ! At the mid of 2023 SkyRanch.Life v. 0.1.0 was released followed by 2 updates.

With a whooping 1010 contributions to repositories and 525 specifically to SkyRanch.Life code this year was amazing for development ! (and many of the changes were not tracked via repository)



SkyRanch.Life pulse of 2023:



We thank you for your ongoing support and we hope to pleasantly surprise you next year with some really cool updates.

Happy Holidays and many cuddles .

 

[JeFawk]

Crashing into Spring
Welcome to our end of February 2024 devlog for SkyRanch

Things are drawing close to another game update —version 0.2! We’re just counting our sheep figuring out where some are stuck and which ones are missing .

Vleed Sângerel has been launched into space , yet even in this wild part of the solar system, he still finds himself confronted with his past and inescapable consequences .

In this next major update Vleed will get to visit Bat Rock —a mysterious place yet oddly familiar at the outskirts of SkyRanch.

From concept art to it's final form:


Here he is rudely greeted by the authorities, not really something which surprises him too much.


He gets to have an interesting conversation with the police-lady, and as interesting conversations go for Vleed, it takes the interlocutor through a carousel ride of emotions.


At Bat Rock you will finally be able to explore an open world , as open as the bats and the rocks allow you. Slowly but surely the areas open up for looting , exploration ✈, combat ⚔, romance perhaps ?


Follow the narrative and complete all the side-quests or don't and remain poor, broke, and with no damn fish.


If you're curious on what's gonna happen next you can join us on this gamedev journey and become our Patron! (don't forget to try it out first, it's free!)

 

[JeFawk]

SkyRanch.Life v. 0.2.1 is now Live

SkyRanch.Life version 0.2.1 brings numerous fixes and quality of life improvements over v. 0.2.0 (the Siren Sarah update) thanks to the extensive feedback received from our discordies .

This version skips the Early Access perk for Patrons since it's not a content-heavy release, even though it does have a nice smol addition: Easter Eggs !

For now, the Easter Eggs are counted on the front page of the Tome of Mildly Useful Knowledge, with their separate category coming soon. On this dedicated page we're working on you'll find hints to avoid the clicks of desperation .
Change log

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for the curious cats.

Next update will bring some exploration and we're excited to see how it will end up. If you're curious about the process you can join us on this gamedev journey and become our Patron!

Play it

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(will update the link with the f95 game's post once that's updated).