This year, the focus was on developing Tinydark's upcoming open-world roleplaying game, URPG. This involved a lot of work on GAM3, the game engine that houses it. We also moved away from The Orbium and now all game accounts are simply housed under tinydark.com. And finally: we became an officially registered LLC!
What follows are just the highlights of another 1,000+ hours poured into Tinydark. Thanks to all the volunteers who helped with the non-programming-related tasks this year.
Jan - Mar
January saw the introduction of the Crafting system in GAM3 and brought a host of new items to craft with it. I cooled down from a serious dev grind in February and swung back in March to bring fallback projects, new bubble-style event projects, and the Carving free time activity.
Apr - June
Starting off April Fools with printing support for the engine, we moved on to many UI improvements and fleshed out some of the content of URPG in May. April was mostly spent preparing the Orbium -> Tinydark conversion.
The Combat Update released June 22nd and with it, the three "pillars" of URPG: Society, Adventuring, and Roleplay were realized. This was a massive content drop and technology upgrade, featuring new spells, perks, monsters to fight, items to craft, and prose written for all of it. Our players would spend the next few months practicing combat and delving deeper into the mine, until finally the golem known as Crystal made history by killing the final boss on October 14th.
July - Sept
Registered Tinydark as a real company in July. URPG received new content and technology all throughout this quarter, notably the buffs panel, character blurb, and the new combat/hunting panel.
tinydark.com was rewritten and redesigned to be more modern and useful, as well as house all our upcoming functionality.
Oct - Dec
In October, all links to theorbium.com were redirected to tinydark.com. This finalized the switch from Orbium to Tinydark.
Released the Characters page for creating and managing your characters; bumped available character slots up to 2. Introduced dream and travel magic and improved the top bar with a new menu. We finally wrapped up the year with the Inbox feature and a Christmas update featuring URPG's first seasonal content.
Looking Ahead: 2023
In 2022, I had to accept that I need to slow down and improve my development process. With the birth of my third child, free time's gotten sparse. I'm not going to be able to release URPG into open beta this year. I've had incredibly good feedback for Bean Grower and it's time to treat it like a proper game. This year's goals are, in order:
Finish the URPG column on the roadmap. I am not moving on until the engine has customized items.
Do what I can of the Slow Quarter. I'm putting a hard expiration of May 15th on this.
Release new version of Bean Grower. We're going to the Play Store, and I have a list of things that I want to do for Bean Grower before it hits. Apple's App Store is a stretch goal.
Release Black Crown: Exhumed. This includes a Steam launch, hopefully before the Halloween sale. At the very minimum, I want BC:E fully playable on the web by the first week of October.
Once it's sensible, I'll return to URPG with the expectation of releasing into Open Beta some time in Q2 of 2024.
See you in 2023,
Vael Victus