In last year's update I enumerated the biggest features that were added to the engine and URPG. So much has been done this year that it'd inundate readers to go through it all. The introduction of Raigen to the team has changed a lot for what Tinydark can produce. Here's an overview of the year and what you can expect for 2025. See the roadmap for details.

Black Crown: Exhumed

The game is fully imported and playable, and some work has been done to make it present better. I missed the Halloween release by a large margin due to Hurricane Helene and a still-faulty import, but it likely wouldn't have been in such a good place that I would have been comfortable releasing anyway. What remains for gameplay is converting Failbetter's "Living Story" mechanics to GAM3's instance-based quality management and some playtesting to make sure every story path functions properly.

My hope is to release on Friday, January 31st, 2025. It will be considered Early Access; details on the website. And let me just say - Black Crown was so special, and it's such an honor to be able to resurrect it and bring it to the world again.

Bean Grower

Development was to be in two phases: the necessary technical side, then gameplay improvements which would lead to a V2. I could only justify time spent on the technical improvements, and I'm sorry to say it's unlikely that Bean Grower will see a V2 this decade.

Improvements included moving to its new URL, a visual redesign of the Prosperity box, reducing many technical dependencies, and critically: moving all code to its own codebase, as it was umbilically attached to the Tinydark Hub.

GAM3 Licensing/Palin

I'm pleased to announce that Palin, our first licensed game, has begun development. This is Tinydark's first external, contract-bound game to be developed using GAM3. Throughout the year, efforts will be made to improve developer tooling and documentation. Palin is expected to have a closed beta for Patreon supporters some time in 2025.

Updates to the engine, aimed at supporting external developers, are making it more efficient and flexible. Mostly these things will go unnoticed by players and it was never my intention to be a game studio more focused on technology than games, but the focus on technology will begin to shift in 2026 simply because there is only so much technology that needs to be made.

URPG/GAM3's Open World + NPCs

From February to mid-May, the focus is going to be on building a true open world experience in the engine, and to get NPCs working. While these may seem like big undertakings, the map view (which will be used on the dev side as well) has already seen a lot of progress and phase 1 of NPCs can be handled entirely by Raigen.

NPCs in the engine are non-player characters: any character not played by a player is an NPC. The enemies you'll face and the animals you'll tame are, mechanically speaking, players which are tagged as NPCs. This is why it's only a small jump to let players "inhabit" their owned NPCs and roleplay as them. One of my biggest regrets from the past five years is not getting NPCs in sooner, but alas.

Now. From my update in early September:

2025 is the year we get NPCs. The year you will be able to hunt an animal, use Death Magic to resurrect it, then inhabit it, and roleplay as you would any other character on your account. It's the year of real-time travel in a true open world, not the facade we have now. The year of custom battle skills that you design yourself, FF7-materia-style.

Everything I said there was going to happen, with certainty, before June. I doubt I'll be able to get custom battle skills before mid-May, because you see...

I Keep Making Babies

My fourth child, a boy, is due mid-May. He was a surprise. Another baby will not be as disruptive to Tinydark as my previous two because I've reworked my habits and we already have the infrastructure (and experience) for children, but I will have a short period where I necessarily need to rest. I will mostly tread water throughout June before picking back up in July.

And Beyond

I don't care what it takes (a lot of manual work), Black Crown: Exhumed is getting released in full. I endeavor to an app store release, but that may just mean Android unless things improve with Apple. Beyond Black Crown's full release, I truly cannot say what will be my focus, but I'll definitely be in the engine.

With another child on the way and my pessimism for the web dev job market, I'm feeling very mission-focused on turning a profit with Tinydark. It has been 17 years since I started my game dev journey. 2025, between Palin and Black Crown, will be the first time Tinydark has ever turned a profit. That's a milestone that means a lot to me. It means I'm one step closer to working on games full-time, so here's to 2025.

Vael Victus