tinydark - Tumblr blog

tinydark · 1 month ago

Text

State of the Studio - May 2025

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

#black crown exhumed #urpg #tinydark

0 notes

tinydark · 6 months ago

Text

State of the Studio - December 2024

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

#black crown exhumed #the black crown project #black crown project #tinydark

0 notes

tinydark · 10 months ago

Text

State of the Studio - Summer 2024

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 [email protected]

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

#tinydark #indie game dev

1 note · View note

tinydark · 1 year ago

Text

2023 Review, 2024 Outlook

In 2023, we saw some big upgrades to GAM3, our proprietary game engine. Black Crown: Exhumed grew closer to release. While I'd intended to properly release Bean Grower and Black Crown in 2023, both proved too ambitious and GAM3's custom items upgrade took longer than expected.

2023 Review

Aside from a massive technical refactor that players mostly won't notice…

Custom Items! Crafted items' tier, stats and tags now reflect your character's skill value and material tier. You can also customize their name and description.

UI: base UI refresh, new Character panel, Category upgrade, new equipment panel, and a rudimentary Dark Mode

Content Book: keeps track of all content you've submitted to the game.

Fully integrated and modern forums for every GAM3 installation.

Inbox notifications and highlights

Event Pools: the ability to hold events in a 'hand,' similar to Fallen London's deck system

New "Area" banner at the top which tells you day/night, weather, and world time

Automatic projects + fermenting alcohol. Immersion aid when drunk.

Pointing at objects/players

Giving items

URPG-specific: achievements, new perks. Ambitious Halloween and Christmas events. Thanks to everyone who showed up to those.

Black Crown-specific: finished the data import and released the Miasma Viewer.

Special thanks to volunteer Raigen for all his work on improving the Hub and tinydark.com, and CoderLotl for the weather script and day/night cycle. Thanks to Cat for drawing four new holiday costumes for Tinyblob, our mascot.

2024 Outlook

This is going to be a huge year for the studio. Check the Tinydark Roadmap for details.

I'm currently in the midst of a cooldown period which ends in early February. After that, I'm dedicating February to getting Black Crown: Exhumed released in what I can only dub "Phase 1," which means the full game will be totally free and play will be unlimited, and I'll only stuff as many features and goodness as I can into it before making a quiet announcement.

Then we have "area stats" and farming scheduled for URPG. After that I'll resurrect Daiele, one of my old prototype games, and simultaneously bring the Lab to the Tinydark Hub.

Bean Grower is going to get three months of development, with the goal of releasing on the Play Store (and hopefully Apple Store) by the end of its dev cycle.

From there, my focus is on Black Crown: Exhumed's full release. I really want to be on Steam. Bundling web apps on Steam is tricky, but possible, and sets the precedent for future games to release there as well.

About URPG

URPG is a tech project. Its existence is justified by the technology required to produce it. I have very high hopes and ambitions for it, but if nothing else, its dev cycle results in the technology to rapidly build other games. It would turn out that quite a lot of technology is required to sufficiently build a modern, commercially viable "cantrlike." Very little of what I'm building is specific to URPG, but rather what I have been doing is teaching the engine how to make persistent, multiplayer open-world browser games.

I've talked about an estimated release date for far too long. This year I unbranded the current state of the game as an "alpha test." It's better to call it a demo or preview, and we'll be going yet another year not entering beta. Even if it were technically ready, I'm neither prepared to moderate nor market URPG. I truly believe that cantrlikes have a strong potential to become a recognized niche in gaming, but they have to be done right and with scale in mind; no entry has done this well so far. Yet their continued stability (Cantr has a functioning playerbase 20+ years after its launch) is a testament to the genre. For me, the dream is still very much alive, and if I have my way, I'll be able to license the engine out for others to create their own cantrlikes.

I need to get through 2024. I need to release titles as any other game developer does and start making money. Bean Grower doesn't even have its own landing page, let alone existence on an app store. I can reasonably assume that I'll release Bean Grower and Black Crown; they're each getting three months to do so. I expect to start January strong next year and add the features URPG will need in order to get to beta some time in 2025.

Thanks for reading, Vael Victus

#studio #tinydark

0 notes

tinydark · 2 years ago

Text

Tinydark 2022 Review

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

Tinydark Roadmap

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

#studio

2 notes · View notes

tinydark · 3 years ago

Text

Into The Tiny Dark

It is time to enter another phase of development. Tinydark is mostly a solo dev operation. Me, Vael Victus, with an occasional helping hand from a friend or volunteer. Soon I’ll become a father for the third time; as of writing, my daughter is expected in the coming days. Development will slow down considerably for a while. See the roadmap for details.

Untitled Roleplaying Game (URPG)

The dream is alive and strong. We saw some big updates this year and I’m pleased with the playerbase’s reception and engagement. I’m making something important, which is what I’ve sought to do since I started game dev in 2007.

I wish I could say open beta is coming in 2023, but it just won’t be possible with my plans for Bean Grower and Black Crown. Everything on the roadmap will be chipped away at over the coming months, and then I’ll pause for what I call The Slow Quarter.

The plan is still the same for URPG: what we’re playing now is an inchoate world; I have some plans for persistence in open beta, but you’ll have to start fresh. But we’re at least 15 months away from anything like that. :} The beta will take place on an island, six races will be playable, and then when we’re ready for release, decay will rapidly set in and make an island of ruins, and the main play continent will be where the final version takes place. Oh -- I do want to find a name for the game in 2023.

The Slow Quarter

For the past four years, I have had an unwavering commitment to Tinydark, breaking for six weeks in early 2020 with my first daughter, and then a three-week break in February 2022. Otherwise I have been fitting development in wherever I can, and that usually comes at the cost of my personal free time and fitness. It’s become clear that this is unsustainable and when I made the decision to delay Black Crown for another year, it came with the acceptance that no matter how much I burn myself, there is simply not enough time in the day.

Balancing:

Three kids

Lead developer at my 9-5

Contracting on the side

Personal fitness and sleep

Is going to leave me with even less time. I’ll actually burn out and become bitter if I don’t start caring for myself. So, I’ll be taking some time to slow down and do some technical things that really should be done during this time, as well as catch up on the videogame backlog. I’m couchbound with the baby all November to catch up on the TV shows I’ve been neglecting...

Technically Speaking

I’ll go into the technical details on my personal blog at some point, but I’ve largely been coding blind to errors, particularly ones in the user interface. This, plus my breakneck development speed shunning QA, have given me a reputation for making a lot of bugs. Yes it’s an alpha, but we’re also reaching our two-year anniversary soon. Alpha is no excuse for some of the errors I made. I need better systems in place, and that’s what going to be happening.

Some parts of the code also need refactoring; it’s been over three years since the initial refactor, and the aforementioned dev speed has sometimes meant “I’ll make time for that soon” becomes “it’s been months, I’ve really got to do that” and it still never gets done.

I’ll close out by saying the volunteer effort has gone well so far, and it’s great just having players in the engine making the actual game, no code required. I’m very appreciative of their efforts. And we’re only a small group of people! I haven’t marketed or really spread the word myself. Whether you’re no longer active or still active today, I’m happy you signed up and checked out what I’ve been building for so long.

Until next post, Vael

#studio

0 notes

tinydark · 3 years ago

Text

Introducing the Tinydark Hub

The Orbium was Tinydark’s first home. Launching in 2016, the dream was to make something of a social network for any Tinydark games, and games of our partners, who’d build them with our proprietary game engine, GAM3. It was inspired by Twinoid, which was possibly the world’s first social network for gamers, featuring likes, comments, and a wall. We never intended to go that far, but Orbium cloned a few of its features.

Now, Orbium has been replaced by Hub, available at https://hub.tinydark.com. The previous URL was https://www.theorbium.com/ and will smoothly redirect all links to the Hub.

Your Orbium account is now your Tinydark account. We loved Orbium, but it was confusing for people to sign up to what they thought was a third-party service for Tinydark games. This rebranding brought with it hundreds of hours of development in order to make the Hub more attractive and easier to use.

Patch Notes

You now log in through tinydark.com. Logging into any game will log you into the Hub, and logging into the Hub will log you into all games.

The app received a facelift to help it feel more like tinydark.com (albeit themed blue)

Rewrote email verification to be more secure and reusable. Password resetting was improved.

Brand new UI for managing your contacts.

Privacy improvements.

Unsubscribing your email now actually works.

Orbs are now known as Tinycoins.

Removed bonus Tinycoins (Orbs) when purchasing premium currency.

Uninstalled games now offer a slider of screenshots from the game

Many small improvements and bug fixes were made.

New tinydark.com

The Hub also brings with it a brand new tinydark.com. We encourage everyone to check out our mission statement to see the strictures we enforce on our design to keep things ethical, and player-focused. You may also be interested in the studio roadmap.

Visit https://tinydark.com/ to check it out!

#studio

0 notes

tinydark · 3 years ago

Text

Black Crown: Exhumed

In 2021, I teased that The Black Crown Project would return, with a probable estimate of October 2022. Some work has been done and TBCP is nearly fully imported, but to release it now wouldn't do the game justice.

I am happy (and relieved) to announce that my iteration of The Black Crown Project is set to launch in October of 2023, a year ahead of my estimate. It will be called Black Crown: Exhumed.

And I've made a teaser page for it. Behold!

https://blackcrownexhumed.com/

Some time in October 2023 is a very realistic time horizon. Much of everything it needs to exist will be built before I even start its developmental sprint. Be sure to check out the roadmap for details; it is the most honest the roadmap has ever been.

Until then --- HNNNNNNG, Vael Victus

#the black crown project #black crown exhumed

3 notes · View notes

tinydark · 3 years ago

Text

State of the Studio (Jan 2022)

The last studio update was in October 2020. Since then I've had a daughter (a year old now ♥), launched my multiplayer open-world roleplaying game (URPG) into alpha and announced the rebirth of The Black Crown Project.

So far, fifty people have signed up to play URPG. I'm very happy with the reception and retention. There's been some impressive RP that makes me want the "RP accolades" feature just so I can ⭐ it.

Most of my development time has been spent in GAM3, Tinydark's proprietary game engine. We've seen huge systems added this year, the biggest being crafting: which was, start to finish, the most complex feature I've made in my entire web development career. UI work was done mostly for custom input elements; the game still very much looks like a website. I ran a huge performance audit to ensure we can handle at least 5,000 active characters. I'm going to try to get better about externalizing my work via the roadmap, but patch notes are extensive on our Discord.

In February 2021, I announced that I'll be bringing The Black Crown Project back online in 2022. Little has been done since then, as planned, but I have decided on a name for my iteration of the game. It will be titled Black Crown: Exhumed.

I've also had to take on some agency work in the past half-year; both for money and experience. It's been good to break out of my comfort zone, but dual-wielding agency work and Tinydark has been a challenge.

Of Web Games and Microstudios

I'll preface this with my vision for the studio and where I think the web (browser) game scene is right now. Web technology has improved and we're seeing that bear fruit in some newer games' interfaces. We've been able to publish our games to app stores and Steam for a while now, but not too many games have. The ability to write a single version of a game and have it appear anywhere with access to a browser is a huge strength of web games, and I hope to see more a trend toward "progressive web apps" in our scene.

I've been lazy this year with discovering other browser games, but I'd like to point to World Seed and Prosperous Universe as good examples of the level of polish every web game should strive for. There is always the legendary Fallen London as well, who have made some big updates this year, including to their engine. See the PBBG subreddit for more.

When I think of where I want Tinydark to be in the future, I imagine game experiences that are suitable for quick check-ins, but also longer, fullscreen play sessions. They look like games, not websites. UI elements animate as they do in videogames, and we have ambient tracks and some UI sound effects. I want the player to feel like it's sensible to spend 15+ minutes just immersed in the game as they would be in a traditional videogame.

It will not be easy and despite how much I burn the candle at both ends, things always take longer than I expect, both for feature creep and implementation. But for once in this fourteen-year adventure, I know I'm heading in the right direction. It has always been my dream to live off my work, to be able to commit 50-60 hours a week to making games. The next two games I'm releasing will bring me closer to that.

Now let's get into the fun stuff.

2022 and Beyond

Here is the Tinydark Roadmap.

In 2021, I resolved that Black Crown: Exhumed would be released in 2022. I expected that even if URPG wasn't released, we'd be in open beta and I'd collect feedback while producing BCE. Unfortunately URPG is just not close enough to stage a worthwhile open beta by Black Crown time, especially considering I'll be dismantling The Orbium. So, here's what the next year will look like, chronologically. Further detail is available on the roadmap.

(Now) Wrap up some URPG dev, open the engine to volunteers.

(Feb -> March) Migrate away from theorbium.com, rebuilding tinydark.com to host it. No more "Orbium accounts," everything is simply under your Tinydark account.

(March -> June) Work on as much URPG as possible. I expect combat to be in, and to be able to delve to Depth 6 to fight the strongest monsters in the mine, before I move on.

(June -> October) Build and release Black Crown: Exhumed. This will bring with it many engine upgrades that were on URPG's ToDo list.

(Beyond) BCE's really a done deal once it's released. I expect minor support requests at first then for it to be quiet thereafter. I'll head back to a full focus on getting URPG in open beta: more details under its section.

I should note my wife and I are, ahem, family planning and hope to expect a new baby by the year's end. We'll definitely be living that newborn baby life again before URPG's open beta and things will slow down around that time. It doesn't matter how ready URPG is for open beta; we must get through that time first.

Death of The Orbium

Bless 2017-Vael's heart; he was so inspired by Twinoid and imagined that in the coming years, he'd have a whole library of arcadey games driven by GAM3's rapid content generation. In reality, 2022-Vael recognizes he just likes to make cool things and we probably didn't need a mini-social-network to link people's games together. The world is not suited for smaller titles; I cannot think of any of my favorite games as anything less than robust experiences, so it was a poor vision for the studio.

In March, anyone with an email and any installed game (including TBCP's archive) will receive an email notifying them of a migration of all games from theorbium.com to hub.tinydark.com. It will simply be known as the "Tinydark Hub" and will serve as it does now: a game library with some surprisingly functioning social features.

tinydark.com will move to some newer technology and you'll log in there, or through any game's front page. I'll also get Single Sign On working properly across the network: logging into URPG will log you into Hub and any other game you have installed.

Finally, with the upgrade of tinydark.com will come a more intuitive feed for our tweets and blog posts. Each game will get its own Twitter account and we'll just pull from there.

Black Crown: Exhumed

Nothing has changed for the game since the announcement, other than the name. It's right to rebrand it as something new, and Exhumed was the perfect word: the Project was effectively buried, and I'm bringing it back mostly intact. I think the author, Robert Sherman, would prefer it to return in an offline capacity, but it is not yet possible for me to do so.

My target is October, and poetically, Halloween at the latest. Detailed on the roadmap, you can see the game needs a few things in order to be remade in its original form, and GAM3 can afford it some upgrades. Aside from monetization -- $10 to remove the action limit and unlock all previously "nex-locked" content -- it crucially will require a proper singleplayer mode for the engine, with which you can start playing immediately upon visiting the front page or installing the app, and choose to make an account later to save your progress. This is the default registration method for all Tinydark singleplayer games.

Given the uncertain timeline for URPG's ultimate release, I'm happy to be releasing a game this year. Bean Grower was the last game I released, and that was nearly four years ago. Exhumed will be my attempt at a fully realized "Steam-ready" game both in presentation and technology, so some big UI and animation work will be done for the engine. It's also a good opportunity to knock out some drudgery the engine will need.

URPG

My lofty goal for Untitled Roleplaying Game is 10,000 Daily Active Users. I don't assume I'll get that and I'd be happy with only 1,000, but I am building and designing for it nonetheless. In order to reach that goal, I have to make sure the product is in a very good place from the start, and that I have a game people want to financially support, so that I can take that support and put it towards the game.

When I talk about a high level of polish, of sound and ambient tracks that reflect the place you're in, it's because my intention is for people to boot up URPG and spend time immersed in their characters, even if they aren't roleplaying. I want there to be a reason to play each race multiple times, and for the game to become an "evergreen game," one that doesn't end after you run out of content.

If the support is there, I can see myself developing it for many years post-release. That's permanent content, features, "living stories," everything. I believe in what I'm making and that's why I'm willing to spend the 1,000s of hours it will take to complete the game. I'm banking a lot on the value of multiplayer roleplay and I wouldn't want to see URPG exist without it.

So, my estimates were stupidly off. Here's what I can guarantee: we will have an open beta in 2023. What will that look like? Customizable (bespoke) items will be possible, we'll have tile-based map travel supporting the z axis, player targeting, six races with fleshed out lore, and an island full of content. See the roadmap for more.

Will there be a wipe? Technically, no. The beta will take place on an island big enough to space six racial home cities far enough part that they're more than a two-day trip from each other. Like in the final release, traveling towards the center of the island will be dangerous. The game's balance will reflect an honest attempt at the numbers: item weight, resource gathering, perks.

As we near release, the world will decay at an accelerated rate for a few weeks and then freeze in time (characters will pass gracefully). The items and buildings will decay as much as they normally would under those conditions and the "open beta island" will become an explorable island of ruins in the final version of the game, accessible via ship. Any content made for the open beta will be squarely on that island except for the home cities, which will migrate to their rightful places on the main continent.

Of your alpha characters: the world will be complete wiped but you're free to channel the spirit of them, canon, into any open beta characters. I don't expect open beta to last more than a year. I will try my best to release URPG in 2023, but the only way I can imagine that happening is if I get some volunteers to help implement content. On the subject...

In Closing

I hope this long studio update was satisfactory. It's been a long road and will continue to be so, but at the end of it I will have reanimated Black Crown, released this incredibly ambitious roleplaying game, and will be sitting on a mountain of tech with which to build content and other games in the future.

Now, I'm not burnt out, but I am constantly developing at a high speed. I write this on a week that I've had to set aside just to catch up on real-life and digital chores because I was hellbent on getting crafting out at the level of quality that I wanted, as soon as possible, so I could be free to do so.

I've been solo for fourteen years and here I sit on a game engine which, without writing any new code, can spawn entirely new mechanics with ease, and I'm doing it all alone. I could use some help. Regretfully, at this time, I can't offer more than free game time/premium currency and my gratitude, but you'll be fully and permanently credited in anything you do. You'll share ownership of anything you make. You'll get access to the special volunteer server.

If you're interested in contributing writing, art, content, maintaining a wiki, or even being a moderator: let me know. You can find me on the Tinydark discord or mail me at [email protected]

Thanks for reading, Vael Victus

#tinydark #urpg #black crown exhumed #studio

0 notes

tinydark · 4 years ago

Text

The Black Crown Project Will Return

UPDATE SEPT 2022: Teaser here! Blog post here!

“aye bete es cooming back and i jest know, alright? i jest know. there’s certain signs yeh look fer when yeh in a place as empty as this is.” - Parlay

The What

Clerks, it has been too long. The Black Crown Project launched May 2013. It went offline October 2014. In July 2017, its author, Rob Sherman released an extensive archive with a license permitting anyone the ability to make anything with it, and in 2018 updated that to include commercial work.

The Black Crown Project was a multimodal narrative horror game with themes of disease, work, anthropology, and obsession, to name a few. It was released on the StoryNexus platform: the same platform which inspired me to make GAM3, a browser-based game engine, in January 2013. StoryNexus wouldn’t last much longer than Black Crown as a supported platform, and Failbetter (Fallen London, Sunless Sea) shifted their focus toward traditional games built in Unity.

I am Vael Victus of Tinydark Studio. In November 2020, Failbetter was able to provide us with a JSON dump of the entire game. Being that my engine was initially inspired by SN, I have been able to import much of the data intact and with a little bit of novel code, have somewhat restored the experience. Right now it lives in the form of a clunkily traversable archive available here:

https://www.theorbium.com/blackcrown/

Please note The Orbium will be rebranded sometime in 2021. You will simply have a Tinydark account. I’ll fix the above link when that happens.

The How

Pulling in the storylets was certainly a trial, but things are stable and I’m generally happy with the import process. What remains is the storylet (in GAM3: “event”) requirements and results. I could pull them in and start reconstructing the game, but the time isn’t right and it isn’t straightforward. More on that in the When section. For now, I would like to detail what I’d like to do with TBCP.

I’m happy to say the data is comprehensive enough that I can fully restore the game. In fact I can do better: a cursory probing suggests there were a few paths that may have been locked out due to bugs. I plan to restore the game and then improve it in the following ways:

Monetization. Black Crown launched with per-storylet premium currency unlocks which, to memory, could easily total $25 per character if all were taken. I estimate restoring the Project will require a further 200-250 hours of my time and I’m happy to do it for free. So. I’d like to provide all Nex-locked content for a flat fee of $10 for the account. This will modestly help offset hosting costs. Any previously locked storylet branch would simply be playable on any character, and the ones that cleared conditions would be put on cooldown (which are like ability cooldowns in any game). I plan to brand this as “buying the game”, which additionally would bring with it unlimited character slots and a near-infinite boost to your action bank: such that you could play the game for very long sessions. Maybe other goodies like Discord roles.

Gameplay. The action system will be present because actions are important to our genre. However, as per Tinydark design ethics, you will have a large bank of them, which should allow you to be away for 12 hours at a time before maxing out. Living Stories were events that fired on real-world time, but this made little sense in the context of Actions and were more a cheap way to pull the player back into the game. These events will now fire dependent on how many actions you’ve spent: every 50, The Manger may pop up. You may slightly heal every 80 actions. I don’t remember digging to be a very engaging experience, so I’ll see if there’s any room for some risk-reward mechanics there.

Technology. GAM3 far exceeds SN’s capabilities. Multiple character slots, better event (storylet) structure and flow, a more responsive UI, detailed character pages; these are just a few things Black Crown will be able to have built-in from the start. The structure of the game will change somewhat due to the way we handle events. We’re able to have as many child events as we like. Clerks possessing an Alexandrian memory may remember the intro to the game asked some questions, and each time, you would answer, read, hit the continue button, and then load up the next one. Instead you’ll answer, read, and immediately be presented the next one. It’s also this improvement in structure that makes the Project a little more time-consuming to get just right.

Balance. Progress via the main qualities was mostly irrelevant, either because the challenges were too hard or easy for your level to matter in them. I’ll be switching to the narrow difficulty scale for the main qualities. I’d like to invoke a small sense of character progression and the agency to strategically ‘grind’ the stats. (not simply by spending more actions)

App. We should have an app on the Android and Microsoft stores. Apple devices will be able to save the webpage as an app.

Some minor text edits. I may make the prose clearer where appropriate, but I won’t risk corrupting (purifying) the soul of the game.

And Beyond?

What I’ve detailed above is what I consider the Story Mode of Black Crown. It can exist that way forever and I’d be happy to provide the game as a Tinydark Studio offering. While I think I could eke out Shermanian prose if I stare at it long enough, I don’t think it’s right to add any new story paths to the base game.

I may be interested in exploring the realm of multiplayer roleplay and survival within the world of Black Crown. This would be its own “game mode” and the prerequisite would be completion of Story Mode on a character, granting access to a Roleplay character. I’ve always been interested in reading players’ personal trottering notes (interpretations of the miasmae) and GAM3 will easily be able to produce them as items by the time Black Crown would be released.

The When

I am aiming to re-release The Black Crown Project in October of 2022. I assume I’ll release the app versions shortly after the web version is released.

The release is far away because my primary focus, once this very blog post is published, is on another game I’m developing. I can reasonably assume the bulk of its development will be done by Summer 2022, and I’ll take a break to let things settle while developing Black Crown. Some other factors:

TBCP needs to resurrect some features from Olde GAM3, namely the pool (”deck”) system and maybe the pyramid or ‘triangle’ leveling curve Fallen London is known for.

Housing the miasmae on their own page, preferably with trottering notes.

The time it will take to read through all of Rob Sherman’s notes to better understand the game.

I think humanity is disease-fatigued right now and the whole three-feet-apart schtick may be a little out of season.

So yeah, get hyped. TBCP is coming back “forever.” The best source of updates is our Discord: https://discord.gg/tjYTUGQ

May your inhalations be shallow and your exhalations be responsibly paced, Vael Victus

#tbcp #black crown #black crown project

0 notes

tinydark · 5 years ago

Text

State of the Studio (Oct 2020)

Eight months later, and here’s another state of the studio. tinydark hasn’t slept a wink! You can always stay apprised on our Discord server. The past eight months have been spent refactoring our game engine and adding many new features to it, all housed under a prototype game called Elevator. In this post I will detail our future outlook, along with a juicy feature-teaser for the next game.

First Thing’s First

We’re having a little girl! Her name will be Violet and she should arrive late December. I'll be taking about six weeks off from game development to just chill, play games, take care of the baby, rebuild my portfolio website, contribute to open source, and organize myself. When things return to a relative normal, I’ll hit the ground running. I’ve been grinding very hard since the pandemic started, and it is time for a well-deserved break.

Teaser: Untitled Roleplaying Game

Please be aware that any of this is subject to change.

I am next building a persistent multiplayer open-world fantasy roleplaying game. (”URPG” for now) It draws inspiration primarily from Dungeons and Dragons and a few other PBBGs. It is a game in which you create a character from a list of potential races, and you spawn with your own kind in a home city. You will age and have a lifespan dependent on your race: right now ranging from 5-7 months, with the option to boost life expectancy through diet, religion, and adventuring. The world progresses by one tick every hour, decrementing cooldowns and progressing any projects. (explained later) You’ll build your character’s skills and relationships over the course of their life, contributing to the world around them.

Gameplay is defined by one reigning dichotomy: Society and Adventure.

Society

Behind every adventure, there is the world it takes place in. Society provides services critical to the adventure, such as food, lodging, equipment, and other items. These require skills like farming, fishing, cooking, butchering, and smithing. Players are able to produce their own items via some of these skills, which use the skill and reagents to determine item quality. For example, an experienced cook (6) using below-average ingredients (4) may routinely produce Quality 5 items on a scale of 1-10. These items are able to be named and described as however the player sees fit: the cook can say they baked an apple pie if the ingredients are apples, eggs, and sugar, or the player can simply choose to default to ‘baked food’ or choose name and description from what others have made. This applies to any crafted item, such as smithed armor or tailored clothing, allowing players to produce customized items for themselves and others.

It is perfectly acceptable -- and fun -- to live a mundane life of farming and social engagement. While there are limits to how fun a mechanic like Mining or Fishing can be, thought has been put into keeping these skills interesting through Feats that you earn at certain levels. A society-focused character is a good low-pressure, low-risk character to play. Players who are inclined to writing item descriptions may enjoy crafting customized clothing and armor.

Adventure

A society could survive the years just farming, fishing, and cooking, but they aren’t going to get too far technologically. That is where the Adventurer comes in! Adventuring is wholly comprised of two activities: exploring the open world, and delving into dungeons and mines.

The open world is whatever is outside your city walls. This is the territory of roaming beasts, magic fountains, and special resources. It is also the means of travel in the wide world: though the (soft) plan is that players spawn in their race’s home city, much excitement and adventure is to be had traveling the world. Players can meet other races and benefit from their unique racial perks. They can barter and exchange valuable resources that may otherwise not be available to their locale.

The open world is also host to authored, static content such as a giant tree you can climb. That would be accomplished through the Climbing skill check, which would factor in your strength and weight of carried items. If you fail the skill check, you can simply try again on the next world tick. If you succeed, you will physically enter a new location which could have anything in it.

Dungeons and mines are dug into the earth. The design isn’t finalized on these, but the general idea is that you can manually dig mines either deeper or in any of the eight directions (NESW, diagonal). Each room dug will offer new resources to gather and metal to mine, and present danger in the form of monsters. The deeper you go, the better the materials will be, the harder it will be to dig, and the more dangerous the monsters become. An example of a skill check here is a spot that only tiny races or shrunken characters can fit through, to obtain a bonus resource. Dungeons are authored, static content and will not likely be available on day 1 release.

Adventurers are critical to a society’s development because they will return from their adventure with otherwise unobtainable loot. They may have dragged the corpse of a monster back to the surface; they may have butchered it down below. They may have escorted the town’s highly efficient miner into the depths, risking the miner’s life so that the town can make high-tier weapons. Alchemists undoubtedly require the extinguished core of a fire elemental for their Fire Resistance potion!

How It Plays

This sounds good, but how does the game actually play? Progress is made primarily through projects, and secondarily through active skill checks and action banks.

A project is something your character passively works on. A farmer may be improving/attending their field, or harvesting food from it. That happens every world tick, which is every hour on the hour. The results of said farming would be available in a project log or if they had an especially good harvest, a message emitted to the town. Another example would be the time it takes a tailor to weave clothing, which goes quicker the more skilled they are: it may take a novice tailor 30 ticks (hours) to create a dress, while an experienced tailor could do it better and in half the time. Adventurers are mostly an active sort, who spend their available Hunts on monsters, but may run projects to heal their wounds or butcher monsters down below.

Active skill checks are similar to dice rolls in Dungeons and Dragons. We can run simple or complex calculations to determine your ability to do something; if you fail, the action isn’t completed and you may have to wait some time to do it again. You may also suffer from wounds or other menaces. Examples of these are climbing, jumping across a chasm, calming a beast before you tame it, resisting poison; and combat is absolutely filled with them.

Action banks (the reader inhales sharply) are not going to be like those other games, no. (they exhale in relief) At their heart, actions provide a framework for modeling activity: you cannot write ten notes in the matter of the minutes, but you also shouldn’t have to spend a full tick creating a fifty-word note item reminding a character about a promise they made. Action banks are still being designed, but a good example of them is Hunts. Successful hunts summon animals to your tile (your x,y coordinates) and then allow for further engagement (the hunt) with them. From the start, you will have few animal Hunts available and they may regenerate slower. As you grow older and improve your hunting ability, your max hunts will grow larger and regenerate quicker.

Action banks and skill checks are the “active” counterpart to projects.

The Power of Roleplay

Many would agree that Dungeons and Dragons benefits greatly from its injunction to roleplay their characters as living beings in the game world. Similarly, URPG expects your character to be roleplayed whenever they are communicating with others. It extends no further than that: the game does not require great writing skill, nor does it even require that you actively communicate; though that’d be a strange choice to make in a collaborative multiplayer environment. All the game requires is that your in-game communication is always in-character, and your character’s actions are justifiable with their in-game knowledge, not yours.

Out of Character collaboration and communication is encouraged, especially for players who aren’t yet comfortable with roleplaying. I am currently designing a way to sensibly have OOC communication available in the game, alongside the story and community feed.

You may set your character as either High or Low RP. High RP will embrace roleplay, they will write detailed descriptions for their characters and push forward their story and the stories around them. They will read through the community feed to stay current on affairs. Low RP may be more interested in simply playing the mechanics of the game, if not only on that character. These designations are shown to other players so they know who to invest in and not, and are able to be changed at any time. Consider, too, that even if someone isn’t an active roleplayer, they can still provide rich object descriptions to the world.

There can be a lot of text to read when coming back to any multiplayer PBBG, but “roleplay games” have the potential to drown you in text depending on how active your community is. Care is being given to ease this burden: the game will launch with an Inbox that contains information that may be relevant to you, which it mostly knows by who addresses you. (think @mentions on social media) We also have feed filters and a few other things that may ease the reading burden, like a prominent town board that leaders can write on to inform citizens about state of the community.

Roleplay is a pillar of the game’s design. It is what interests me most about this project. From a design perspective, the game would exist just fine without it, but context is hugely important in games: everything in a game could arguably be represented as the data behind them, but who wants to attack Enemy ID 385 with their Melee Weapon 3? It is context and imagination that provide meaning, and that is what the game will strive to achieve. It also has a secondary goal of encouraging people to write and roleplay, hopefully easing the stigma around roleplay itself.

Other Thoughts

This is running a bit long, so I’ll splatter some ideas onto the page.

I am very interested in animal husbandry. (in videogames) There will be a nice system for taming, taking care of your animals, and breeding them. Any animal under your control is also a “character” you can play, so you will also be able to roleplay as them and, from their perspective, choose to breed. Animals are important primarily because they can be slaughtered and their materials used for crafting, but they may also be attached to vehicles for locomotion.

Magic will be in-depth and characters will roll for magic every birthday. (7 days) It will also be possible to learn through religion/story events. Planned branches of magic: dream, healing, water, ice, fire, animal, shapeshifting, travel, death.

There will be some modest item decay. The goal is to keep the world from saturating with objects, not give the player repair chores. Monsters hitting your armor should rightfully damage it and require simple (non-project) repairs after an adventure.

A magical equivalent to electricity is planned for the game. It is to be considered the highest tier of technology, and somewhat replaces dependence on living beings, from animal to player.

PvP will be possible but isn’t a huge concern right now. It will likely be skewed toward the defender because tinydark does not like to make games that kill you while you’re offline.

When is it coming?

2021. It's hard to say when the Version 1 release will be, but it's at least August 2021. If you’re interested, come to our Discord and you can hop into Playtest 2 and 3 in 2021, which should be the equivalent of ‘beta’ for the game. Playtest 1 is full.

The Engine: GAM3

The refactoring has gone well, if slower than I expected. Modern web development offers a very suitable environment for a game: no other type of application is more concerned with application state than a game, and building in Svelte has very pleasant experience. Feature by feature, the engine grows stronger, and the refactoring has made it stable and performant. Memory and CPU usage is looking great, which means your phone consumes less battery. I’m proud of the work I’ve done.

To externalize where I’m going and why the engine’s tech is so important, here are some games I’d like to make this decade.

Multiplayer open-world fantasy RPG

Post-apocalyptic survival game which scales per-player

Finish Bean Grower

Fireburner (half-written; a quarter designed)

Elevator may function as an avant-garde chatroom [it was never intended to be a real game]

Comedy RPG

Daiele, maybe!

MurCity-inspired game

MonBre 2, with ghosts this time, and a true MMORPG in which you see other players on the map.

Narrative singleplayer utopian horror game about school, children, designer babies, bodies, feelings, player agency, and space. I am deeply passionate about this project.

The Black Crown Project waits in rest, pregnant with possibility

I’d like to open the engine up to external developers at some point!

A few of these games could be made already, but the grander designs of MonBre 2 and URPG require tech that will keep me busy all throughout 2021. Given the state of the world and next year’s outlook, I think I feel more comfortable with the mountain of tech that will be required going forward. Especially when I know I’ll be releasing URPG in 2021, and tinydark will enter what I call “prime time.”

The Orbium

Is getting rebranded. The Orbium was inspired by Twinoid, and some decisions I made about it were made with the hope that I’d get other developers using GAM3. These developers would join “the Orbium network.” I can’t aspire to that for a long time, if ever; in truth, I believe my time spent tweaking out Orbium and hoping to pitch GAM3 stemmed from a lack of confidence in my own design ability. It is easy to sit and add features to a product ad aeternum; it is hard to get people using the product.

Alas, throughout it all I’ve made myself a pretty badass Single-Sign On Service and I learned a lot while making it. The new URL will be https://tinydark.games and rather than an Orbium account, you’ll simply have a “tinydark account.” I think this is a lot less confusing for new players, and helps enforce the tinydark brand.

In Closing

I suppose I will just say I am excited to be building a game I believe in. I have a small group of interested players and I think I can do something good for the "roleplaying genre”, whatever that is. If it works out, I would love to champion and advocate for developers to consider the power and potential of roleplay.

I plan to register tinydark as a real company and become active in 2021. I think I will finally be ready.

Vael

#urpg #orbium #studio

0 notes

tinydark · 5 years ago

Text

State of the Studio (Feb 2020)

A half-year later, here’s where tinydark is, has been, and where we’re going.

Sept → Nov 2019

Went mostly as planned. I spent time improving my own web development workflow and learning Svelte. I spent far too long researching the histories of Cantr, Faerytale Online, and Marosia. I researched the value of roleplay and how to build traditional fantasy worlds.

Introduced multiplayer into GAM3, our proprietary game engine. Made a basic chat/roleplay prototype. Completely discarded the old player-side experience to be built in Svelte. Started writing some lore in World Anvil.

December 2019

I said GAM3′s refactoring would “either take me 25 or 100 hours.” This month it became apparent to me that I was in for a minimum of 100 hours of refactoring work.

I’d forgotten just how much GAM3 can do. It’s made singleplayer narrative games, resource management games, and even an RTS-style strategy game. It can even resurrect StoryNexus games. There was (and is) a lot to port over.

Before this initiative began, I had a laundry list of important GAM3 things I had to do. I kind of forgot this important fact until I began stumbling into things I’d remembered documenting. So I did most of them.

Software and especially game development always take longer than you think. Moving from generating views in PHP to holy grail of JavaScript has not been without pains.

Still I was optimistic for a release of the tech prototype mid-January, after my work trip.

January 2020

We started the New Year with the abrupt announcement that Marosia was returning, under new management, handing the right to use its IP, code, and assets over to a community member named Will.

After a brief and not-actual panic attack, I was relieved. I had been feeling the need to put something out ASAP, launch a teaser site in February and release around June/July. I still maintain that I could have done that, but not how I should have. The games industry is full of Early Access and unfulfilled developer promises and I don’t want to add to the malaise. I was relieved and quietly settled down to refactor the engine and work on the prototype.

February 2020

The prototype launched on February 2nd; a little later than I’d wanted, especially considering my good pal Cody wrote most of the content. I lost some time to a misunderstanding of how reactivity worked in Svelte, but no matter; I was and am incredibly happy with the end result. I can do so much without a single call to the database, or a server request at all, and that has far-reaching implications.

I then grinded hard to build out features for the second wave of prototype testers; too hard, but it was done. It felt good to play game developer again.

Reception’s been lukewarm because it’s a tech demo. All people could do is roleplay and pick clothing out of a bin, and equip them. We’re farther along now but there’s still a lot of work to be done before it’s a fun game.

Untitled Roleplaying Game

Working genre: “Persistent Open World RPG.” I hope to release by the end of 2020. I love the prospect of constituting roleplay with tangible mechanics. I love how rich the world and our stories can be, and how meaningful the game can be to its players. It’s also a sustainable way to make money ethically and even experimentally, which is what tinydark stands for. I’m happy Marosia returned because I never wanted to remake it and I wasn’t going to; I was just kind of going to deploy and hope people were up for a fresh take. Now I can do it without the (admittedly self-imposed) pressure.

These are the plans and expectations for this game as of late February 2020.

It’s going to be an app.

As in app-store app. The technology is finally here and I need only implement it; The Orbium is already halfway there, I just need to put the work in to get it app-store-able. I have ways to make writing RP more enjoyable on mobile.

Roleplay is encouraged but ultimately optional.

For a few good reasons.

People who are interested in roleplay but are not yet comfortable doing so should be encouraged to observe and speak up when they’re ready.

My friends and family wouldn’t play it, which signals a greater issue with adoption and retention.

Enforcing roleplay rarely stops the quiet ones from playing, only encouraging them to make empty posts just to avoid in-game penalties.

The game should strive to be mechanically compelling first: it should be a fun game, regardless of how quiet a settlement is or if you’re a nomad playing solo.

We should accommodate people who are interested in adding rich objects to the world but are less interested in directly roleplaying with others.

In-character justification will still be required for one’s actions. The first attack on a player will require a casus belli: justification for the attack. You are still expected to learn and assign people’s names. “OOC coordination” is allowed so long as an actual conversation takes place in-game.

You will be able to play with friends.

In the same way that you can avoid players, you should also be able to join in and play with them. You should be able to invite your friend to play as your race and have them spawn beside you. I am not concerned for multi-accounters as I have a toolbox already prepared to deal with them.

Sound and music.

If browser games are to evolve, we should act like mobile and traditional videogames. I would leave Fireburner -- an unreleased narrative game of ours -- open just listening to the sounds of nature. This should help immerse the player and just be pretty dang cool.

World and zone events.

It is trivial for GAM3 to create functionality that would otherwise have to be manually coded by a developer. As such, I can put a giant tree on a tile and allow people to climb it, or interact with a puzzle that only spawns at night. World events can spawn effects for real-world holidays or in-game lore moments.

So long as the game is popular enough to justify it, I’d like to craft worldwide “living stories” in the same way a DnD dungeon master would: lay out the story, allow the players to drive the narrative.

Actions.

Somewhat controversial in browser and mobile game design, people don’t generally enjoy spending “actions” or “energy” and waiting for an action bank to refill just to do it all again. Alone, they don’t match asynchronous multiplayer gameplay very well: suddenly someone would spend 10 actions building half a house. But together with a project system which would enable someone to build a house over real time, we’ll have a way to restrict certain functionality and also give a reason for the player to check back in even if they’re on a long project. For example, climbing the aforementioned giant tree, pickpocketing, eavesdropping, hunting, and maybe dragging objects would use up some energy. But the player could also decide to boost their current real-time project: if you’re fishing, you’ll guarantee a fish is caught on your next tick. If your Fishing skill is high enough, there may be the ability to increase your odds of finding a rare or larger fish.

Failing a single Action bank, we simply give the player a few pseudo-actions they can perform, such as Hunts or Stealth opportunities.

There’s plenty of work to be done.

This presently untitled game requires a lot of mechanical work. I’ve got an estimated 600 hours ahead of me but I produce anywhere from 20-30 hours a week in my spare time. A lot of the tech I’m building has been wishlist items for the engine; Daiele really needed an NPC and crafting system. Necro died under a mountain of the tech it would have needed.

I have a surprising amount of lore created, most of which I’m proud of, but I don’t have it written down and cataloged. There is still content creation to be done in the engine, and how big that mountain is will depend on how quickly I can design fauna, flora, the landscape, and location-specific events. It will also depend on who I can get to help out; please contact me if you’re interested in creating content for the game for a paltry sum of real-world currency and some in-game subscription time.

Then there are the boring things to be done: the game should have its own server, running on the latest technology. The Orbium needs maybe 20 hours of attention. The game needs its own landing page. I need to improve my admin tools for handling (and ideally reversing) griefing. I should deploy with some subscriber features built in.

Not much more to say; I’ve probably said too much. Thanks for reading, and I’ll get back to work now.

#Untitled Roleplaying Game #urpg #studio

4 notes · View notes

tinydark · 6 years ago

Text

State of the Studio (Sept 2019)

As the clement chill of Autumn approaches, I’d like to give an idea of where the studio’s at, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.

What’s Been Done This Year

Orbium just got an update.

Bean Grower got the 1.2 update in May.

Our proprietary game engine, GAM3, got an update in August and an update in January.

MonBre doesn’t really count, but it did receive its two seasonal updates this year.

Despite these updates, development has been slower than normal. I am, after all, a one-man studio with a rare helper here or there. When I suffer personal slowdowns, the studio does as well. I expected to have started GAM3′s refactoring by August the latest, but I’m actually glad I didn’t.

The primary reason for the slowdown is that I bought a house! And I moved 1,000 miles away, from Rhode Island to South Carolina. Packing, unpacking, throwing things out, talking with all these companies: it was exhausting and I underestimated how long it would take to get ourselves set up down here. Furniture building (often to The Sims OST) took over a month and left my back and hands in pain. And sadly, on the 15-hour journey down, our car was struck, causing financial and serious emotional strife. No one was hurt.

Due to the crash and exceeding even our “worst case” furniture/home budget, I had to take on contract work with a web development agency. It was good exposure and money, but it made it difficult to keep up with my own work. I still contract with them, but I’m trying to keep the contracts smaller so that I can focus on tinydark... and more modern web development.

In June, my PC broke down. I took the opportunity to buy a spare while it was repaired. Then finally, my wife was twice-injured this Summer, casting a dark mood over the season and draining what we’d saved up since the move. We have dubbed it our worst Summer ever, but we are over it now, and I have been developing close to the pace I’d like to be. I’ve settled into my home office and realized how important, after all, it was to have that spare computer.

tinydark’s Future

I am very excited for the future.

I really picked myself up in August, coding hard and publishing two teardowns (die2nite) (marosia) for two browser games. Marosia’s developer would go on to suddenly kill the game a few weeks into my writing, with all community hubs removed in one fell swoop. I loved the game and was already planning to make something like it, so when it died I decided that I should prioritize the development of a spiritual successor. No one took me seriously (as they shouldn't) until I showed them GAM3. Now I have a small audience -- and critically, initial playerbase -- anticipating a release.

Before its death, Marosia suddenly locked itself down, for some of us even mid-roleplay, because its developer was having a baby. This was supposed to be a temporary shutdown. More details are in the teardown itself, but it got my head spinning such that I couldn’t sleep, and so stayed awake thinking: there has to be some way I can pull this off, I didn’t plan for extensive multiplayer in GAM3 but how can I make this work? So I came to realize a few things:

A GAM3 event requires only one thing in order to be played: the player’s ID.

There is no reason I cannot schedule a job to run every hour, which plays an event for a player. It should be highly performant. “I could even make this a core no-code GAM3 feature!”

“Who’s in a current zone/locale?” Easiest query ever.

It’s time we get NPCs in GAM3. I suspected I needed them for battle-system enemies anyway.

But, as I laid out in the teardown, Marosia was deeply flawed. There were some good reasons to not make another Marosia, so my mind wandered to a game which will die with Flash’s death: Die2nite. A game I know people would pay monthly for, which is critical if I’m to grow to do this full-time. So I went throughout most of August imagining how an ethical, modern D2N might play.

Then Marosia die-died. “Not coming back.” Almost immediately people began rumbling for a successor because there is simply nothing out there like it, at least not nearly as good. We were in withdrawal. When Motion Twin finally kills Twinoid, plenty of die2nite players may be too.

So, that was a long-winded way of declaring the following:

The best path for tinydark to take is to become a necromancer, resurrecting dead web games, modernizing and improving their design in the process, and hoping to absorb some of the old playerbase.

Something like Marosia will be the first.

I plan to make something like Die2nite after.

Fireburner is still planned and even playable, but is not in the pipe for now.

Roadmap

The fun part: where Vael estimates when things will be done and embarrasses himself three months later. But seriously.

Teching Up - Sep & Oct I need to spend some time improving my development workflow and playing with new technologies. I’m definitely moving to VSCode and I’m planning to try out svelte over React.js. I anticipate learning node.js but I’m fearing it might be overkill for the only reason I need it: real-time chat/roleplay. Bear in mind that throughout tinydark’s journey, I still have to keep myself employable, because until I live off tinydark, “I am a web developer first.”

GAM3 Frontend Refactor - Oct & Nov The player’s view may look okay and even feel good now, but it’s built on jQuery. Playing an event spawns too many subsequent requests just to keep the UI updated. Going forward, GAM3′s going to start getting hungrier for resources, and in the modern web (game?) arena, I need every advantage I can get.

With the complete rebuild of the frontend, I’ll be keeping in mind GAM3′s new goals. I started building the engine in 2013, where it aspired to little more than StoryNexus’s “story game” style. The price of that is some patchy UI work that I’ll be happy to get rid of, as well as opening its UI to generally be more modular and flexible.

I expect it to take anywhere from 80-100 hours, but I’ve got a week off in October, so :}

Marosian Components - Nov and Beyond Three components need to be made: multiplayer, NPCs, open world.

Multiplayer: player profiles, chat, character description

Open World: dropping objects (GAM3 has no “ground” yet), object decay, and vehicles

NPCs: the taming system requires animals and animals will be NPCs. Since they’re real living objects that are planned to copy player functionality, they’ll be able to do everything a player can... like go on a boat and populate lands with new fauna.

“Myrosia” MVP - Q1 2020

A small closed beta in which all systems except NPC are going to be tested. NPCs are required for release but will be one of the last features made. The UI will not be styled and the game will be rough in many areas.

"Myrosia” Open Beta - Q2 2020 All systems in place, will likely be on its own domain at this point. From here we will just see how long it takes to finish certain features like magic and pickpocketing.

Orbium Summer Update - Summer 2020 Orbium needs a little more love before I’m comfortable with it resting quietly in cyberspace. I expect to develop Myrosia features in tandem.

Die2nite MVP - End of 2020 No new systems, no special styling, just raw content creation to see if the base game is fun.

Note: I’ve referenced opening GAM3 up to the public for almost two years now; there are no plans for such anymore, but it is an inevitability for the studio.

In Conclusion

I’m finally returning to form, enjoying the benefits of my home office and the time saved by working remotely. I feel like I’m on the right path, even though it’s going to require me delving deep into tech again like I said I wouldn’t.

Love, Vael

#tinydark #studio

0 notes