#but I'd also expect a fully new game to have a longer announcement->release period than the ports

[rivalsforlife]

every time I've thought to myself "maybe there will be a new ace attorney game announcement soon" and said it out loud somewhere it doesn't happen. I may be the sole thing protecting the world from aa7 and therefore I will continue making my stupid predictions. grace rivalsforlife's dance of deduction but no one is there to correct me so I am always wrong

[tinydark]

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