Once more, into the tiny dark.

Hello, Vael here with a summary of the past five months. Updated roadmap here.

Black Crown: Exhumed

Is ready for playtesting if anyone wants to jump in early. I completely underestimated the playtesting burden. For this reason, it's just going to bake until September and we can forget my (admittedly silly) Early Access approach.

The trouble is just how much manual work reconstruction requires:

• The data dump that Failbetter (graciously) provided was missing Living Story references, and Black Crown invoked them 192 times. This is why I spent so much time on developer "Quality of Life," improving the engine's auditing tools and making the delay result feature to better simulate how time should flow in a singleplayer game, accommodating Black Crown's original design. I have to manually stitch each one of these LS back together.
• There is no apparent way to hide the requirements for an event in StoryNexus, and they take a different approach to hiding events that a player doesn't qualify for, so I have to manually update the game as I'm playing through it.
• Black Crown is a rather long game, it turns out, and that's especially true when you play all previously Nex-Locked branches (which are now free). They also require a rebalance because they were pretty strong, given that there was a real-world currency cost. It's just a lot to go through, especially accounting for each path a player can take.

When it was clear I wasn't going to make it for Early Access, I decided to refocus my efforts on getting NPCs working in the engine, and other BCE-unrelated things.

URPG/Open World

In the past five months we've received:

• NPCs. We have fully functioning support for Non-Player Characters. These are the animals you'll tame, the bone minions you'll raise via death magic, and enemies you'll fight. What remains as of this posting is to design each animal in the game, finalize implementation through the event system, and then relationships - assigning the animal to one or more characters, which as a characters, allows users to assign relationships to other characters (parent, sibling, romantic partner).
• Post Notes. Mark posts as Important, Funny, Helpful, or High Quality. Also brought with it the ability to expand and get more info on the post.
• Gear icon added to the character list. Allows renaming and deleting your character, and this internally brought with it "player state," that is: the ability to die or go inactive.

GAM3 (our game engine)

A ton of work was done to support both internal and external developers. Most noticeable for players is that they're now able to change their own CSS in the game on a per-character or per-account basis; developers use the same system to make CSS changes for their games.

From charting, to auditing, to the little things that just make the job go faster: GAM3's developer experience is in a better spot.

Despite reaching funding goals, Palin, the first licensed GAM3 game went offline in April. The engine's open to licensing at $50/mo (first month $25) if anyone wants to build. The fee includes hosting.

Development Outlook

I publish this the day after the birth of my fourth and final child. He was born healthy and all has gone well for us. Though I always wanted to, I did not expect to have a fourth child. The past 9 months have been a blur of baby-stuff, dad-stuff, working an honest 40 hours/week at my job due to a new contract, and fitting in Tinydark wherever I could. My body, brain, and relationships have suffered as I plugged away on all of that.

And for good reason. As mentioned prior, Tinydark is becoming a less optional element in my life. Quod me nutrit, me destruit. Advances in AI have made developers very efficient - and a commodity. While I have a secure job now, I have to consider what comes after. It's now easier to realize my vision for Tinydark, and less practical to enable my family to thrive as a traditionally employed web developer.

This is all to say: I'm going to take a necessary rest period, scheduling about 30 hours of work until July 5th, at which point I will work on Black Crown's full release and associated needs. Details on the roadmap. I expect to return to development feeling rested and less likely to accidentally release April Fool's jokes a day early for genuine lack of knowing what day it is. :}

Until Black Crown's release,
Vael