2025 in Review and What's Coming in 2026
This year, I welcomed my fourth and presumably final child. While I took some time off Tinydark, I ultimately called my baby-time vacation a bit early and went back to working. I really love Tinydark and the stuff I'm making, and with the supercharged development speed thanks to AI, it's just as fun to work on games as it is to play them.
I'm optimistic for Tinydark's future, but I did fail to release Black Crown: Exhumed this year. Anyone who follows the studio cannot trust that I will do the things I said I'll do, at the time I said I'll do them. I'd like to get better about that this year. But here's what came of 2025, and what will come of 2026. As always, I cannot believe how much was done!
Done This Year
GAM3 (Tinydark's game engine)
The biggest feature we saw this year is NPCs: Non-Player Characters. Examples of NPCs might be traders or merchants, animals you can tame, enemies you can attack, or town guards. We have the ability to play as NPCs, opening up more roleplay and mechanical possibilities. In URPG, NPCs are created when taming animals or raising undead minions, and since we can inhabit them, some have special abilities: black cats can hunt, gnarlem can scare other players, and the yulebud can bestow a buff upon their owner.
This brought with it player agency - used to limit what a player can do in the open world - and player-to-player relationships. I'm incredibly grateful for the help Raigen provided this year to get NPCs working to spec, we simply wouldn't have agency without him.
Another huge feature is player targeting. It is now possible to target other players and act upon them. Anything that can happen to your character can now happen to any other; multiple characters, even, in the same event. This is how we feed animals, engage in PvP, heal or buff... all without writing a single line of code.
And here's a bunch of other stuff we got!
- Player: added dead/inactive/encumbered states, inventory drop-on-death, and broad engine awareness for "player state"
- Social requests: you can challenge another player's stat against yours in a variety of ways. Example uses are arm wrestling contests and to see if someone's bluffing about having magic.
- Introduced detailed view for posts, and the ability to tag posts as helpful, funny, important and whatever else the developer chooses
- Customize your own UI on a character or account-level basis (and for developers: game-wide, realtime layout editing!)
- A ton of developer QoL updates, and some protection to help developers not make errors.
If you'd like to make a game with GAM3, just contact us. $25 for your first month and $50/mo thereafter, discounts for singleplayer games.
Black Crown: Exhumed
I apologize the game has taken so long. Torn between Black Crown, engine features, URPG, and my personal life, development for Black Crown has come in waves, and with some overly optimistic time horizons. When it came time to focus on stitching the game back together, I didn't have the mind for it with the holidays, and opted for a Bean Grower release.
Here's what was done this year:
- Got the game working up until the point you begin your excavations
- New art for a variety of qualities and all options in the tutorial
- Various styling, technical changes, and UX improvements specific to Black Crown.
- Miasma Viewer improvements, including the sounds they made from the original game.
- Voice transcriptions of all Miasma text. Nearly finished and I'd like to get them on Spotify/YT Music/Alexa when they're done
Bean Grower
When I saw Bean Grower being played on a mobile device in-person, I decided to take some time to generally improve the experience because it didn't reflect well on the studio. One thing lead to another and we got a massive update to the game!
Void bean, new spirit abilities, public profiles, balance, UI improvements. So much more.
Other
A few times this year, I strayed from the path. It was a kinda weird time after we had the baby.
- MonBre, of all things, saw a big update. Maybe check out the open-world monster taming game that started it all. ;) Play MonBre here.
- Experimented with vibecoding: essentially 'blind programming' with AI assistance. The result is two half-coded projects: an integrated custom wiki for GAM3, and "GAM4", a battle simulator I made just to see if I could. Neither available yet.
- Wrote a game design document for Elevator, a game I'd like to make after URPG. Happy to share it with anyone.
Upcoming
I am focused on getting Black Crown: Exhumed out as I originally intended it, but without sound or ambience and sadly, without seasonal promotions. My first goal is to get the game fully playable from start to finish. Then I can code that which it needs after (guest mode, payments, UI). I cannot say how long playtesting will take, but I am aiming for BC:E to be done by the end of February, with whatever time it takes to market and publicize the game coming after.
Once Black Crown is out, I need to... do a lot of important things! I'm calling it the The Very Important Things Quarter, and it should be about a three-month period. I am fortunate to have a stable and well-paying job in web development, but it's no excuse to become staid in my abilities. I need to make some tech upgrades, start playing with other payment processors, explore what it will take to hit the app store, and crucially: GAM3 needs a performance audit. My empire rests upon decisions made over a decade ago when my only goal for the engine was to be a souped-up StoryNexus. As such, running 150+ characters' events every hour takes a minimum of 1000ms. If my goal is to host a world of 50,000 characters, that's a big problem!
It is time to improve GAM3's baseline UI, and it is more than time to start styling URPG. I can't even make more features because I'm so constrained by the layout. You can expect to see a beautiful feed implementation (the chat log) and a more inline approach to the UI; so much is pointlessly hidden within these jarring pop-up modals. We are well overdue for a proper layout. Once done, if the timing is right, I can move URPG's Free Time activities to their own panel and make some new ones, such as fishing.
Finally, I'm going to take those three months to sleep better and get back into exercise. My personal life should be stabilizing during this time and then I expect to hit the ground running once it comes time to bring URPG to beta. If Black Crown is popular enough, I'll add sound/ambience and possibly a seasonal promotion in time for Halloween. Otherwise I'll chug along on URPG's beta, which is honestly not that far away!
Thanks for reading and let's get hyped for a good year!
Vael Victus