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.

Play Bean Grower here.

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

Six years later, a massive update arrives for Bean Grower! BG was designed to be a 'supplemental game' for the studio, something that you dip into occasionally while enjoying Tinydark's other games. It performed far better than that, but playing it myself on mobile made it clear that a coat of polish was in order. Advancements in AI meant that I could knock out a few improvements quickly, then I went overboard... what started as a modest update grew into what you're about to read here!

Special Bean: Void

• Available at 25,000 Prosperity, the Void bean is our first unlockable special bean. It comes with a subtle idle animation and makes a unique sound when harvested.
• Once you unlock the Void bean, you will gain access to the Void UI theme, located under your settings.

Nullify One

• Available at 30,000 Prosperity, this feature is found in your settings and lets you remove one type of special bean from random generation.

Spirit Updates (premium currency)

• New spirit ability: Reroll Bean Board. All beans in your board have their modifiers completely rerolled. Buying one will show an icon next to the love heart on the Bean Board. Costs 1 Tinycoin to buy.
• Renamed Harvest Blessing to Golden Fertilizer. Having >= 1 will make the icon show in the top bar, simply click to make all beans harvestable instantly.
• Both abilities allow you to buy multiples, so you can use them later.

Public Profiles

• Visit your settings to get a shareable link for your new public profile. Here's mine! https://bean-grower.tinydark.com/profiles/view/1

Balance

I wanted to make tilling slightly more important and make growth speed more exciting.

• Base bean love value is no longer influenced by bean's temperature; most players didn't even realize it was. The range for all primary beans has been lowered to 6-9, and special beans 7-10. This means beans are generally worth a bit less, but!
• The range for +Love mod is now 1-4, from 1-3.
• Growth Speed's range has gone from 45-75%, to 50-100%. Instant beans are possible!

UI

• Bean tooltips: Reworked information display to be more obvious and gamified. No longer run off the screen on mobile.
• Harvesting a bean now shows you the relevant stats you got from it (prosperity, love, special find)
• Major fix: the +tilling animations now correctly reflect what the bean actually received, based on the plot temperature and if they are void/vampire beans. The tooltip also correctly updates.
• Bean Board: Generally improved styles and we can fit a few more pixels worth of beans in the view. New beans now start on the left side of the row, rather than center. Improved the 'max bean' message to tell you how many you can buy.
• Introduced the void theme! A proper dark mode is scheduled for the next update.
• Cuter cloud for prosperity on the World view.
• Removed support for the middle-point 'tablet' view and streamlined styling in a variety of small ways

General

• Leaderboard presentation improved and we have a new leaderboard: max harvested beans in one day.
• The Tinydark Hub has been updated with the two new achievements.
• So many minor bug, mobile, and styling fixes that I can't even list 'em all!

Internal

• Migrated to a more modern and lightweight sound manager, which takes care of that very small delay we'd hear on sound play
• Theming support; all colors are now configurable (web developers may look at :root to modify to their heart's content)
• Admin dashboard full of interesting stats

- -

The next Bean Grower update is another few years away, but I expect to fully realize the vision for Bean Grower some day. :}

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

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

Eight months since the last update, and things have not gone as planned: in a very good way. Current roadmap is here. It was last updated today, September 4th.

Raigen
I've mentioned Raigen before. He'd done some work to improve the Hub and tinydark.com in 2023. This year, he was brought on in a part-time capacity to help with the studio while still under my mentorship. The result has been life-changing for me. I never thought I'd see anyone else contributing code directly to GAM3 (our game engine), but here we are six months after he got access and he's taken so much off the list, including things I wanted but didn't have time for, such as accessibility. Mini-profiles, the Character Codex, encumbrance, level-based icons, and improvements to our sound implementation are among his biggest contributions.

The work process goes as follows: I write a spec, he submits the code, then I review it and clean it up if necessary. This has meant that I personally don't get as much time to code as I normally would, but we're still knocking things out at a pace I could only have hoped for.

Black Crown: Exhumed
Spent time in February getting it actually working: the game is playable. It still gets tripped up at times, however, and that's my immediate priority. I have confidence that Black Crown will launch mid-late October 2024. It will be only a web release, not app store. This will be my first launched game since 2018's Bean Grower.

Licensing
Someone wants to use GAM3 to build a cantrlike (which I'll officially be defining soon). After determining project requirements, I realized how close the engine is to being useful for other non-Tinydark developers. I told them $50/mo and to expect something workable in December. Check out the Palin discord server here to get a glimpse of what they'll be building.

I want to make cool, memorable, enriching games, but I also want to enable other people to do so. It has always been my intention to do Tinydark full-time and I hadn't seriously entertained hosting some installations for profit until this person came to me asking about GAM3. If anyone's interested in building something with the engine, find me on Discord or send me an old-fashioned email at vael@tinydark.com

Following Black Crown's release, we'll be spending the rest of the year improving the engine in various ways that are supportive of multiple games, as well as standalone (non-Hub/Tinydark) games.

URPG
We've seen some big features so far this year: notably Area Stats, which allowed me to make a farming mechanic where players improve the farmland, and the Codex, which brought memories with it. I recently also made some UI improvements, though more quality passes are needed to reach my goal of "feeling like a Steam game."

Regarding a release date: URPG, still the Untitled Roleplaying Game awaiting its perfect title, released into alpha on December 26th, 2020. We're nearly 4 years into what I dubbed an alpha playtest. I know it's taken very long, but great things take a while. If I were only remaking Marosia with modern technology, I would have been done two years ago. The more time I put into URPG, the more imperative it becomes that it is a financial success, and the more likely that will be true. Still there's the plain fact that games such as these need to sit for a while to build a playerbase.

I wish I could say release was coming next year. It's entirely possible that we will see beta in Q4 2025. More likely is 2026, but take a look at the roadmap to see what all that time is for. There's also the reality of releasing and supporting a multiplayer game; marketing; stress-testing. I will also begin to quietly market the engine and I don't know what that could mean for my time commitments.

URPG-specific work will slow until next January, but allow me to build some hype. 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. All of that is definitely coming.

Back to work.
Vael Victus