#tinydark

[tinydark]

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 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

[vael]

Minimum Knowledge Required to Use GAM3

Someone who I have some faith in recently asked about using GAM3, Tinydark's proprietary game engine, to make a game similar to Marosia with elements of Flight Rising. I'm still in stealth mode but I thought I'd offer a license, and endeavor to get them an installation running some time in December.

GAM3 is a no-code piece of software. The pitch for GAM3 is the same it was in 2013: you shouldn't need to be a programmer to make a game. Eleven years later(!), that has never been more true. But in order to achieve the flexibility required to build complex games, I have had to make features which closely resemble programming.

Here's a screenshot from the most complex thing GAM3's ever made, URPG's battle system. This is the skill Mighty Leap and what follows after this event is played, is a ton of logic smartly injected (and cached) to account for all the features that URPG's alpha combat requires.

Most events aren't nearly this complex, but if you look closely you'll see a lotta code-lookin' things. This isn't a tutorial -- that will come in 2025 -- so I'll leave it at that and proceed with detailing the minimum knowledge you'll need for a comfortable GAM3 development experience.

Programming 101

You should understand the concept of variables, conditionals such as if statements, and how to use functions. Any functions available to PHP are available to use, but there are restrictions on any functions that could be security issues.

In this (nonsensical) example, we say: if the player chose choice #2, set the variable [$foo] to the number of swords they have * 2. Next, we increase their dexterity by whatever that amount: if they have 3 swords, +6 dexterity xp.

Understand web technology: here's a cute explainer I generated with ChatGPT which analogizes web development to building a house.

Styling With CSS

Websites are styled with CSS. Each game has its own stylesheet for overrides. We're still working on making everything perfectly flexible, but you're able to customize/override anything with CSS and most colors are based in configurable variables. Right-click on anything in the game and select Inspect Element to try changing a few properties and see what happens. :}

The layout itself is configurable through CSS grid. That's a big topic, but chances are you'll be able to figure out how to move things around easily.

Regardless, rest assured Tinydark is here for a minimal (or perhaps more) level of support should you need some styling help.

Game Design

Gasp! Yes. Game design is a real discipline. Here are a few resources I recommend.

Game Design Vocabulary -- I never got to read Naomi's part, but it's a good primer.

Extra Credits -- I was thrown for a loop when I tried to find the link to EC and it turns out they rebranded the channel as Extra History. You'll have to scroll down to find the Extra Credits episodes. They were formative for me as a younger designer.

Lost Garden -- A great general resource; Dan Cook is a brilliant designer and I have a lot of respect for him and Spry Fox. I recommend looking through his posts to find any that catch your eye.

Otherwise, it's hard to say what got me to the point of confidence I have now. I've failed a lot. I've read a lot of post-mortems. I've written a lot. I'm happy to provide feedback and guidance on the design of your game as well as talk about GAM3's strengths and weaknesses.

Finally, you'll really want to learn how to write a Game Design Doc. It is absolutely critical that you get your thoughts all out on paper and get settled on design pillars, as well as how to pivot out of them and determine the risks for your game/design.

[dadasims4]

Prefab Living #ts4cc #thesims #thesims4 #ts4home #thesims4house #tinyhouse #thesims4game #tinydark #ts4house #thesims4build @plumbobland https://www.instagram.com/p/Cc7g4iAjhtb/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[gam3engine]

Version 1.5

Releasing a small, but notable update before we begin the refactoring of the UI. Timelines have changed for the studio and thus the public release of GAM3, but know that it is all for the good: I’ll be rebuilding GAM3′s player side in React.js, resulting in a truly responsive, beautiful, flexible interface that will serve as the ideal foundation to build games on. It’s also an opportunity to smooth out some of GAM3′s rougher innards.

I am not going to speculate on a timeline for publicizing GAM3, but know that after a dreadful Summer, I’m back in action and actively developing. My primary goal is still to live off my work, and I’m happy to say I’ve finally dreamed up a game that may be able to serve as a flagship. Be sure to check out tinydark’s site for the latest info, and you are always welcome in our Discord.

Dev Improvements A new font has been implemented for headers, bolds, and the sidebar. Qual Wizard templates now consider the qual's class (hidden, minor, major)

Custom Change Text has a new button to better denote its toggleable nature. System log got a few minor improvements, most noticeable being that some entries (like change texts) are a little more descriptive.

Added a confirmation when hitting the browser's back button while writing in a description box or event result. General We now have a proper file manager! Find it under System. Text Search received some improvements, and is now case-insensitive. So much was done to improve the innards of GAM3, and so many small tweaks here and there, that I simply cannot detail them all! Bug Fixes The map system saw some fixes and minor styling improvements.

Fixed system log messages being created when no change was made.

[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

[tinydark]

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

[vael]

2023 Annual Review

"I might as well copy-paste last year's Annual Review..."

Of course, even last year I thought the same thing. "A tiger doesn't change its stripes," and now in my 35th year, it's apparent I won't be changing mine.

What went well this year?

Parenting. I'm very aware of the cost of lackluster parenting. "It's a terrible thing to do to someone." No matter how strained I am, I've said I am going to be a dedicated father. This year I dedicated myself to both my girls and continued my usual routine of rallying the boy to greatness.

When parenting, I track their milestones and development because I want the children to be able to play at (and somewhat over) the level of their peers so that they're able to play with the maximal number of children. Milestones are also easily measured: they can do the thing or not. My son still struggles to relate to his peers today because he's never been on their level, and it's a pitiable thing which I personally experienced as a child. It lead to my poor self-esteem and lack of ambition. When I celebrate milestones, this is why.

Violet. "My little storm cloud." 🖤 Violet continues to meet her milestones. She's ahem strong-willed, sweet, intelligent, curious, and funny: I think she's picked up on my ability to parody -- songs and such -- and she'll make up her own little parodies of various things. This year she became a lot less fearful.

Olivia. "Child of light." I thought Violet was an especially happy baby; Olivia redefined that for me. For her first year, we called her the colon D baby. This guy -> :D

Olivia is an absolute joy to be around. She took 13 months to walk, which was a surprise given that Violet was fully walking at 10 ½ months, but it looks like she instead allocated her effort towards speech, because this girl can talk. And enunciate! She's also good with her fine motor skills.

My wife was able to flawlessly breastfeed Olivia for six straight months, which is a big achievement.

Made two new friends. Each from different countries, and each of them web developers. I always love hearing about other cultures and it was because of my Argentinian friend that I...

Started learning Spanish; soft-quit PGO. This year I finally was able to put down Pokémon GO. Partially because I'm playing Pokemon Sleep now, but mostly that I was a little too obsessive about PvP and I felt childish being distracted in public so that I could play the PvE events.

I started Duolingo mid-November. My learning strategy is slow-paced and with frequent review. I fully achieve "legendary" on the current unit before moving on to the next. It's working, and it's got to be better for my cognition, and certainly for my life.

Rearranged the house. My wife came up with the plan. My son took my old office and my new office is in the study, previously our entertainment room. I could barely stand living in this house before, but now I'm comfortable.

Game development. I may have burned myself doing it, but I can't argue with the results. I don't think I've ever been better poised for a successful year than I am now.

This year I also received the most volunteer help I ever have. Aforementioned Argentinian friend wrote a robust weather script, and Tinydark's Raigen helped develop tinydark.com and Hub features; I'm also excited to announce we've been able to hire him to work remotely at my workplace. We even had an artist draw some holiday costumes for Tinyblob, our mascot.

Health. I took almost three months off eating "optional sugar," breaking my nightly ice cream routine. I'd felt like I was starting to get fat, so I simultaneously started focusing more on building my upper body. I went as far as to take before-and-afters for Facebook, but I eventually had to stop so I could focus on game dev. Though I stopped my upper body work, I did start jogging in the morning. I fell out of the habit once Daylight Saving Time hit, and the girls' circadian rhythms were an hour ahead.

Artificial Intelligence. Not exactly "my" win, but AI has been instrumental in this year's high production. To think it's only gotten better throughout the year and stands to get even better, it's such a privilege to be able to use AI. That's just code; assets have always been a problem for my game development, but AI trivializes some of my asset issues (it's still pretty bad proper asset generation).

What didn't go so well?

Relentless work ethic. I have a long, contemplative post on this here, but: I am too ambitious. "A good problem to have." Well, in August I had my first real panic attack at 3AM. I thought it was a heart attack at first. But what's mildly concerning is that I felt stronger for it after; I overcame it on my own and that now that I know what it is, I'm better prepared for it. I didn't feel like I should try to avoid this at all, but rather that I'm more prepared for a second panic attack. Seems kinda not-a-good mentality.

My body. I said my forward neck posture would be my focus of the year, and I did a passable job of it, but it wasn't enough. I still get headaches and they feel like they're getting worse. We don't have the money nor do I have the bandwidth to see a rolfer, and I'm not sure what to do other than try to keep my posture in mind throughout the day. I tried to train myself to sleep without a pillow but had minimal success. I typically lay down once a day, mid-day if work allows it, for about 15 minutes just to clear my head and alleviate some of the pain.

I also abused caffeine: by my definition, two cups/packets/sessions a day. That likely contributed to the panic attack.

My focus. Nothing new here. It's just hard to truly focus when my morning's waylaid by children and I'm needed throughout the day. Interruptions break focus, so that's that: I cannot truly focus. The time I get at night is rarely good for focusing considering it's so scarce, the girls could wake up at any time, and that's typically the bulk of time I get to spend talking with my wife.

Buried. Two-under-two, working my job, working tinydark, doing (it seems) more chores than the typical husband does, my crumbling body and keeping myself healthy are the primary stressors.

No sympathy allowed; I chose this path and would choose it again.

Finances. We had two kids in two years (I regret not waiting an extra six months) so it's to be expected, but we've found ourselves deep in the negatives at the end of the year. Inflation's a real killer. We (ie: my wife) made some progress with the decision to grocery shop at two different stores for our weekly shopping trip, but the extra store is Trader Joe's... full of novel temptations. We're still better off for it, anyway.

Released neither Black Crown: Exhumed nor Bean Grower. I did have to take two weeks off for some contracting, but ultimately I just decided to spend more time on URPG, and everything takes longer than I expect.

What did I learn?

I feel like this year, I didn't get too worked up about our lack of financial progress. It feels more like acceptance than complacency. I will be free, unburied when my dream is realized: we just need to save up enough money for a down payment on a new house build, then sustain our finances while it's built, and finally sell this house for a minimum of $100k in the bank when all is said and done. I have confirmed this is entirely possible, and I'm grateful to have moved South before the pandemic. This is why it's acceptance: achieving this peace of mind is the only way I can finally buy the ice cream.

Otherwise, I've meditated on it, and honestly: I don't know that I really learned anything notable. At least as far as wisdom vs. tangible knowledge.

Goals and Expectations: 2024

Game dev. I can at least guarantee Bean Grower's getting a final release, presumably onto an app store. I'm giving myself three damn months for it. Black Crown is also getting three damn months, but I will concede that Steam Store support might be a stretch goal. Either way, I'm ending this year with two full titles under my belt.

Financial recovery. Sort of a given, and who knows, maybe the 15,000 hours I've spent building a game studio will actually pan out this year.

-- --

Welp, figger that's it. Vael

[vael]

Worklust

I like to work. I like to produce results, to progress wherever possible, to optimize and be efficient. If I'm driving solo in the car, I'm listening to web dev podcasts. If I'm working out, it's in front of my computer with dumbbells, watching YouTube. I don't always choose edifying material, but if it's recreational, then it takes up my self-allotted recreation time for the day. Even when gaming, I play optimally: I'm reading guides, strategies, and news for anything I'm into.

I write this two weeks into my "vaelcation," a six-week period ending January 29th, 2024. In August, I decided to stop dedicating my usual ~5-7 hours of the week working out, and instead dedicate them to game development. This was to ensure Black Crown: Exhumed got finished on time. It didn't, and I wasn't even close. In September, I accepted that I would have to take December off and significantly reduce the Tinydark workload that month. I ended up working half into December before deciding to stop and take January off as well. I was burnt out, and that only became more apparent as I developed Black Crown. Despite its impending release, I found myself getting lazy and "acting out," as I call it: more easily falling into distraction.

I'm going to talk about my relationship with work. This is a companion post to 2023's Annual Review, so it's meant for me to look back on in the future.

You Could Be Doing More

When Jocko Willink was asked, "If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why?" His answer was: discipline equals freedom. That's a popular mantra of his, and it's true: if you feel like you don't have enough time, follow a more disciplined time-management schedule. If you're lacking energy, then have the discipline to eat and sleep well, and stick to a workout routine. Our daily lives are composed of decisions that result from our own ability to stay disciplined, or give in.

If asked the same question, my answer is similar and slightly less adequate: you could be doing more. Most people would assume it means that you could be a better person, kinder and more charitable with your time and resources. That's important, but for me it's a reminder that I can be performing better, and my life will be better for it. This is true for anyone. There's always more or better you could be doing. Most people are capable of far more than they're doing -- and I mean far more. My mantra serves to remind myself that I don't need three or more hours of recreation a day, and to stay focused on what fulfills me.

I Did Too Much

The most obvious and immediate objection to this mantra is that an adherent may believe they're capable of doing more than they actually are. I'd argue this makes a person stronger by pushing their limits. Another objection is that it leads to burnout, a term I've never wanted to acknowledge might apply to me. To me, burnout signals a lack of passion. It's common for people in software development to lose steam once they realize the undertaking is larger than they expected, or external factors make said undertaking difficult to make time for. I've never had a problem (at times to my detriment) "climbing the mountain," that is, working toward a goal no matter how long it takes, as long as I feel it's worthwhile.

Both objections would end up applying to me. I'm constantly finding myself bemoaning that I don't have enough time, and if I don't get enough time for my own work in the day, I sacrifice recreation time at night. The fact is there's only so much time to complete the day's tasks, and I'm not going to sacrifice my dedication to the kids (ages 3 and 1) in order to make more time for my hobby work; not that it'd work out well for me if I ignored them, anyway.

When I admit to burnout, it truly is not due to a lack of passion for Tinydark, but Tinydark is the reason that I don't -- like most people would in my position -- make time to sit and play games at night, and I'm more likely to push bedtime when I'm working than if I'm playing.

My self-care is abysmal but I'm more concerned for the cognitive effects than the mental effects. This year, I've made more stupid mistakes and felt an efficiency loss from physical fatigue more than ever. I'm unhappy that my own father's habits lead to an earlier death than necessary, yet I can't take proper care of myself, just to squeeze out extra hours of work per week. I'm very resilient to stress and I don't care if I suffer because I know that when I'm done, it will have been worth it, and I know that success itself feels good: just like gaming or watching YouTube, so I might as well keep chuggin'.

I believe AI is going to rock the modern world and by the end of the decade, we're going to see a dramatic ethos shift in the attitude towards work when AI can reasonably complete many "knowledge work" tasks. I think we're heading toward something worse than the pandemic (whatever it is) and I need to be prepared for higher costs and an eventual lower salary. This gives me only more reason to press on and make money with the studio, further fueling the fire.

Elements of Burnout

As this is a companion piece to my annual review, I want to detail what my life has been like all year and what the cause of the burnout is.

Tinydark's ace-in-the-hole has always been my 9-5 job. While I'm the lead developer there, traditionally the job has afforded me a fair amount of free time so long as there isn't work to do. Once our tasks from the client are complete, I'm free to do whatever I want. While this has sometimes meant I make unnecessarily ambitious projects (Tinydark's Hub), I've been able to do what I can because rather than slack off, I choose to work on my own software. Our client shifted executives this year, and that caused some new needs to be met by our software, on top of the work we'd already scheduled.

Then, I'm a work-from-home dad. Each morning, up until 10 minutes before I'm scheduled to go to work, my day is dedicated to (all 3) kids. That's breakfast and play-time. I sign in and begin work at 9. From 9 to 12 I'll be working occasionally stopping to change diapers, manage TV schedules so as not to give them too much screen time, dispense snacks and manage the baby's nap time. Then we all have lunch together and the baby gets a second nap before my wife is able to take over.

Ever since the third trimester with the baby, my wife's suffered with disordered sleep. This is pretty typical for that stage of pregnancy and the following months (especially breastfeeding moms) but it's been challenging to get a handle on an earlier sleep schedule that would allow her to take over. Since I need my sleep for work the next day, my wife takes the brunt of any night-time needs the kids have, and if the children are sick, it's just hell for her. Still, we're hopeful that 2024 will be easier on us and I'm grateful for the help I do receive, such as her cleaning and staging the house for the next day's play.

Ultimately I'm very grateful to be working from home so that I can be with the kids, and that I can have a job where I'm allowed the time to take care of them and fit in any of my own dev wherever possible. I don't think there's a lesson to learn from this year, and my vaelcation so far has proven that I will find something work-y to preoccupy myself with even if I'm not coding; such as this long post. I still believe we can all be doing more and if there was anything to learn, it's how to manage my expectations better.

[vael]

2022 Annual Review

(shuffling papers) Pandemic, war, Musk buys Twitter, artificial intelligence... Humanity has certainly had an eventful year. Now age 34, here’s how 2022 was for me.

What went well this year?

Olivia was born. It’s remarkable that I’m able to have two consecutive annual reviews in which I say a new child was born! She was born completely healthy, with the exception of a congenital knee dislocation. Thankfully, it was a quick fix and she’ll be fine.

At the time of writing, she’s nearing eight weeks old and meeting her milestones. I want to publicly commend my wife Eve on her flawless dedication to breastfeeding so far.

Raising Violet. Violet continues to surpass her milestones. It’s so incredibly rewarding to watch her develop day by day, learning how to ask for something rather than scream and point at it. I don’t think we go a day without her making us laugh. The “two under two” lifestyle is a big challenge, but I’m able to give her sufficient attention.

Web development. I learned a good amount this year, and I’m happy to announce that as the lead developer at my job, I was finally able to start a new piece of software in Svelte! That means that in the next few months, a Fortune 500 company will be using Svelte in production; albeit for internal usage only.

Game development. I didn’t get all that I wanted done this year, but it was still a good year. I finally migrated Tinydark off Orbium; all games now live under tinydark.com and the Orbium is now known as the Hub. I upgraded the Hub until I was comfortable that it wasn’t an embarrassment. I’m also happy to say it looks like a friend I was mentoring will be able to step in and get some work done on the Hub.

GAM3 and URPG saw many upgrades. Details here. I really enjoyed making content for URPG.

Oh, and Tinydark is an officially registered company now. :}

Cursing. I’ve managed to keep my language clean around the kids. I’m still internally vulgar; I’ll be coding or gaming and I’ll curse. Will try to improve.

What didn’t go so well?

Lost contact with my mom. No details on this, but she’s made it clear it’s fairly permanent.

Focus, cognition, and fatigue. I could honestly write five paragraphs about this, but this was my worst year for cognition yet. I’m having a hard time retaining what I learn and I’m permanently on a “third wind” and desperately need a solid eight hours of sleep for pretty much a year straight. It just can’t happen with our present lifestyle.

I’m doing way too much stuff for someone in my state, but I just have to take the small wins where I can get them for now. Once Olivia’s sleep regulates, I can start moving toward eight hours of sleep.

I couldn’t release Black Crown: Exhumed. I did release a teaser website for it. There was too much left to be done, but the game is 99% imported.

Pokemon GO addiction. I still play, but I’m trying to limit myself. PvP is incredibly addicting for my gaming archetype and it’s just too easy to throw in a quick three-minute game here or there. I have to be careful because the rapid tapping required for PvP can end in hand pain.

My body. I kept up with strength training, but I’ve let my cardio and flexibility slide. I’m in pain as I write this because I picked up the baby the wrong way this morning. The pain I’m in is something of a distraction when working.

The biggest problem is my forward neck posture. I get a headache 4-5 days a week just from the condition my neck (and back) is in and this is a top priority for 2023.

What did I learn?

I would say I learned to finally accept that I don’t have enough time to do everything I want as quickly as I want to. This is tough for me to cope with, and I think there’s a risk that I’ll unlearn it in the coming years...

I spent a lot of time this year studying woke culture. I ramped it up again after my daughter was born; I think I felt similar to how some mothers “nest” before the baby’s born. I want everything to be safe and happy for my children, and it seemed that learning about this serious threat to democracy and quality of life was my way of coping.

Finally, I’m deciding to not give people more than I get in return. I’m a good friend, which means I’ll often reach out to people even if they haven’t messaged me in a while. I am no longer in the position to write lengthy emails and check up with people who don’t think about me nearly as much as I think of them.

Goals and Expectations: 2023

I’ve been developing games with the goal of living off them since 2007. I do not forget this important fact as I press on, building technology, trying to make a “browser game” that’s worthwhile, ethically designed, and that I could make good money with. When I accepted that I just don’t have time to guarantee a 2023 release for URPG, my mind quickly defaulted to Bean Grower. I need to start releasing, I need to start making money; I need to be a dragon.

Release Bean Grower on the app store. BG’s had a great response and it’s served its intended purpose: a supplemental game for the studio, one that doesn’t need a landing page and isn’t expected to be a game that someone plays every day. Yet experience shows that BG may have more potential than I thought, and I’d like to spend 100-150 hours finishing it off as Version 2 release. This will be a good opportunity to get a game onto the app store, which is a ToDo for Black Crown and URPG.

Release Black Crown: Exhumed in October. Making it for the Steam Halloween Sale is a stretch, but I’m confident I can get it done. 

Start building a new house... or at least find the land. After two new kids, inflation, and stylin’ and profilin’, our bank account’s not full enough for it. But I’m holding an ace: the house we’re in now has appreciated greatly since we built it. Everyone wants to live here. If I can use the equity in the house against the loan, we’ll be able to lay the first bricks this year. We’re stable now, but soon enough, Olivia will be too old to live in the master bedroom with us, and there are sundry things we don’t like about the place we live in now.

Healthy body, healthy mind. If I had my way, I’d spend this year eating as much meat as possible, strength training and cardio 6 days a week, and grinding game dev. Alas, I’m becoming my own bottleneck. I need to stretch daily, jog, take it easy on the caffeine, and see what comes of it.

For the mind, well. My ADHD is becoming a serious problem. I’m constantly making mistakes outside of the realm of IQ, and it’s affecting everything from my Pokemon win rate to the kids’ diaper changes. Aside from better sleep once it’s logistically possible, I want to get back to “information sponge” Vael. I want to spend time each week on intellectual YouTube and take notes. Some people want to read ten books a year; I want to listen to one JBP podcast a week. That’s 52 two-hour conversations with very smart people.

I’m also going to attempt to go back to my Sherlock-inspired habit of looking at my surroundings more and paying more attention in general. This means the phone’s going to stay in the pocket.

-- --

See you next year. Vael

[tinydark]

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 vael@tinydark.com

Thanks for reading, Vael Victus

[dadasims4]

TINY DARK #ts4 #ts4cc #sims4build #sims4home #thesims4house #buildsims4 #thesims4builds #ts4house #ts4home #sims4house #thesims4 #dark #tinydark https://www.instagram.com/p/CIKbyAMliN8/?igshid=w7ngi752ai4r

[vael]

2021 Annual Review

33, you're on your way, every day's a new day. - 100 Years

Well, here’s how my thirty-third year on Earth went. 2020 annual review here.

What went well this year?

Violet. Our little girl was born January 5th and she is the biggest success of the year. She is everything I could have hoped for. She’s a very happy baby, ahead of her milestones, and I feel like my wife and I have done our part. If the average parent performs at 50% their capacity, I’m comfortable saying we ended her first year at 90%. I think that’s a good level of dedication for us, and often enough, I felt the (good) grind of wanting to do something for myself but sacrificing for her instead.

Our reward is who she is now. The recipe to our secret sauce: stay humble and educate yourself, dedicate your time, limit (and scrutinize) screen time, feed your children quality food, and buy Montessori-inspired toys. You have an obligation to yourself, your child, and the world, to give your very best.

Personal fitness. It was probably asking a lot to “be in the best shape of my life” with a new baby and how busy I’d be with my own work. But this is the best shape I’ve been in in years. My shirts fit a little tighter. I found a solution for pectoral exercises. I even started glute workouts for fun. I’ve started what I call Protein Days, where I just load up on protein and work out every muscle group I can. That seems to be working well for me and relieves some pressure on days where I just want to write code.

Of course, it’s mostly strength training. I don’t like to run when caffeinated, and our land is too uneven to run on comfortably. Cardio is important and I’ll have to figure out something in the future. I walk daily with Violet (and sometimes Abel), but it is only enough to maintain stamina; not build it.

Web development. I took some agency work that helped me branch out. I don’t love working in PHP, but I’m happy to get paid to learn Laravel and hey, GAM3′s built in PHP, so it doesn’t hurt to get incrementally better at it. I especially enjoyed pentesting our software with BURP.

In my own work, there weren’t too many technological advancements. I got better with Svelte and learned a bit from code-reviewing World Seed’s frontend.

Game development. It was hard to feel like I kicked ass given all that I wanted to achieve this year, but I went through every update I’d released and felt better about how far I’ve come.

I’m nearly finished with adding the crafting system to GAM3. It is, from start to finish, both the most complex, and best developed feature I have made in my career. I’ve coded battle systems that were simpler than this! But I absolutely loved making crafting recipes; to get to be a game designer, take balance seriously, make fun items. It’s what I make the tech for.

It will be a long road to finish the game I want to make. I’m doing the work of two Vaels but I know it is what must be done if I want to stand out in the industry; and if I want to live off my work some day. I try to remember that Alexis Kennedy was 38 when he started Failbetter.

I also finalized tinydark’s mission statement.

Made some new friends. Two, and a handful of acquaintances as I make my tiny waves in the gaming industry.

What didn’t go so well?

Lost a friend. He broke up with me. It was hard on me at first but I agree that things had started to feel forced between us. Still, he was my oldest internet friend, dating back to our Furcadia days. He moved to upstate SC because of us and I hoped our children would get to play together, but it was not to be.

Mismanaged our finances. I’m a web developer of over 10 years; I make good money, and got into the habit of thinking I was invincible and money would always be there. So we needed a new SUV; I dropped a hearty down payment. Cleared 0.75 acres of our property. Abel’s overnight camp: done. I had only a vague notion that I was probably spending too much, but when it came time to buy some patio furniture, I realized I didn’t even have enough in the bank to cover our mortgage. I had to take a loan from my boss just to cover it. I didn’t feel great about myself, and looking back at it, I understand how it happened, but I simply cannot believe I let it happen.

When the agency I contract for mentioned they had a large, “greenfield” project, I didn’t care what it was for: I expressed strong interest immediately. I had no choice, and as I type this (bearing in mind first year of baby, especially buying quality, is damn expensive) we are safe, but not out of the woods yet. 

Worked too hard. I might as well just copy-paste what I said last year, because nothing has changed and it won’t. See Goals.

Cognitive performance. I describe it as such: I maintain a large capacity to perform mental tasks. I can, for example, sit down and architect a complex feature. I can learn at the rate I need to. But my speech is atrocious, I need a coffee to feel alert, I’m the most forgetful I’ve ever been, and excluding sleep, I’ve managed to take care of myself. My working theory is I just have too much going on.

What did I learn?

How to manage our finances. We sat down like proper adults and made a budget. I hold off on purchases until the next month if we’re over budget. It’s wild. If you haven’t looked over your transactions in a while, you really should: we discovered we’d been paying for a Shudder account for over a year when we weren’t even using it.

You might want software to help. I recommend Budgetwise for its clean interface and low price. The software pays for itself once you’ve made a goal and stick to it.

How to raise a baby. It’s been such a great experience. There are things I wouldn’t repeat again (like alternating sleep schedules 😱), new things I’d like to try, and overall I’m feeling like we’ve sufficiently refined our processes for the next one.

Goals and Expectations: 2022

Have another kid. We’re trying again.

Release a game. Black Crown: Exhumed. The original game, written by Robert Sherman, went offline many years ago. Failbetter were kind enough to release a database dump to Rob, who then released it to the dead game’s public repository. I have his personal blessing to resurrect the game, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Start saving. We’re going to need to build another house. We found the perfect floor plan, but material costs are ludicrous and we are nowhere near ready for the 20% down payment.

Stay just as productive; for better or worse. I am permanently “switched on,” and workaholism is a fine affliction. I don’t want to stop doing things. I know that I need more recreation time, but then I remember how great it felt to finally be able to sit and make content for URPG. With a new baby, a release of a major game which could very well make headlines, a new house and the release of the fabled roleplaying game I’m making: I just can’t see myself slowing down. I’ll do what I can from time to time; I’d like to take late February off for the Guild Wars 2 expansion, get 4-6 hours of gaming in per day, and what did Eve have to say about it? “Yeah, good luck with that.“ She knows me well.

Stop cursing. Really have to dismantle the pagan ritual circle in the back yard. No, just kidding, I need to stop saying bad words because I have a toddler who’s more receptive than a CCP surveillance van.

Make an actual company. I honestly forgot about even doing this; I really need to register tinydark as a real entity. We stand to make money this year (hey, we made $80 in 2021... before server costs) so I should really do this Thing.

COVID will get better. I can only speak on the US here. My predictions have been right so far. I think omicron is a good trend toward the inevitable weak, contagious strain of coronavirus. I expect 2021′s holiday season (up to Jan 15th, 2022) to have been the biggest spike of the pandemic in the US. My family will still be sticking to outdoor activities in 2022.

And that’s a wrap. See you next year, probably with three kids. Vael

[vael]

Marosia Teardown (2020, Final)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

A teardown is a document that dismantles a company, service, or product with the goal of informing business decisions. My business is tinydark, a microstudio that produces ethically designed, experimental indie games. A “teardown” may sound aggressive, but it’s really just a deep analysis of the subject. Today I’ll be tearing down the game Marosia. I’m developing a game like Marosia. (see here)

This is an update on the original teardown. The game (dubbed by players as Newrosia) returned under new ownership and has gotten some updates; additionally, I’ve learned a lot about roleplay and these types of games in the past year and have some deeper insights.

Update Dec 30th, 2021: After over three weeks of hiatus, the game has returned now with its fourth administrator at the helm. The golden rule and two-day rule have been done away with, and the rules generally received a spiffing-up.

And my project, titled URPG, has grown in scope and ambition. See the roadmap for details.

What Is It?

Marosia describes itself as an RPG in a fantasy setting with open-world society simulation mechanics. "The free-to-play collaborative story” is its apparent slogan. It is an open-world RPG which boasts an entirely player-created world and a complete absence of traditional NPCs. Movement is tile-based and the world feels large, even if it is much smaller than similar games.

As a player, you are required to roleplay. This means you’ll speak in-character and your character will have to learn about the world through their own experiences. They don’t know a volcano lies two tiles away just because you do, nor do they know the word of the gods or any historical events that haven’t been written down or retold. Character progression is slowed if you have not made a roleplay post in the last four days. Inactive roleplayers are generally not cared for and are dubbed “sleepy.”

Your first character will have to be an adult, but future characters may choose to be children: mildly helpless but with inherited abilities, a longer lifespan, and a chance at magic. You will spawn with others of your race and where it goes from there is up to you. Most characters will first acquire tools and clothing, either through craft or donations. As time and events progress, active roleplayers will begin making friends and plans. Throughout it all the player will be engaging mechanically through the world via Projects, and the results of those mechanics (producing clothes, tools, taming animals, constructing buildings) help reinforce the roleplayed events. They also serve to constitute world and character state in an easily understood manner: you cannot claim to be wearing an item you aren’t, and the game offers immense flexibility to world-build via the description of items and buildings.

As a new player, I was fascinated by its roleplay backed by an open-world model. When I jumped in, playing a female sanguine (vampire), I simply spoke “Hello?” into the void and an “Adult Female Sanguine” spoke back, welcoming me to the settlement I spawned in. I was hooked the moment I understood that I was to learn this person’s name through roleplay, and assign them a name myself. I realized that anyone could lie about their name and be a different person to other people. All across the game world, people are constantly roleplaying, plotting, starting new societies, and new bloodlines. It truly is a persistent story, and forever expanding, with a Game of Thrones-like complexity.

Core Loop

Because of the focus on roleplay and society-building, it’s hard to pin down what a player is expected to do, but at any time you’ll be running a Project to forward some goal. Progress will be added to a project every hour depending on relevant attributes or skills. There are a few actions like pickpocketing or hunting which are immediate and do not require a project.

The project system is simple and versatile. Crafting is done through projects and enables creation of many valuable objects, from weapons and armor, to tools and medicine, to entire structures; even towns themselves. These objects bridge the gap between mechanics and roleplay. Skills are the usual fare: tailoring, taming animals, fighting, etc. all raise their respective skills and your overall attribute. Most projects allow other characters to join in so that everyone can work on gathering the same pile of stone or wood.

Not all projects are crafting projects. The ranching skill enables the taming and husbandry of animals. A chicken may run through your tile with a letter attached to it for a distant town: attempting to steal it begins a project which scales down in duration according to your Guile skill. Healing yourself will take a base five hours of effort.

It is fair to say the game loop is flexible and dependent on the status of the project you’re working on, with some minor considerations for keeping your character fed and yourself apprised of the story.

Engagement

If Marosia hooks you, it engages very strongly. Where it fails will be detailed under Design Concerns.

Project-based skilling means players are often checking in when a project’s nearing completion so that they may start another one and continue building both their primary attribute and the skill in question. The project often ends with a physical product or a chance at obtaining something, adding even more value to utilizing your time. As these skills are built slowly over time and a character’s minimum lifespan is 13 real-life months, investment crescendos.

Creating your story and participating in a collaborative story with others offers novel engagement that produces the same engagement that reading a book or watching just one more episode can produce. The more a player engages with characters around them, the more invested they become in their character, the world, and the game as a whole.

Sense of social responsibility. The truly enmeshed may find themselves feeling like they need to or should continue playing even if they’re personally not that interested. Especially when a player holds a high level of mastery over a skill that their colony relies on, they may want to continue providing their services.

Ethics

Marosia’s design is fairly ethical. At almost any point, you can choose to immediately cull a character, causing them to die from natural causes if you are tired of playing them. (see Design Concerns) If you just need a break, you can hibernate them for a minimum of one week, putting them into a state where they cannot starve to death or be interacted with.

Missing an entire day of projects due to real life would hurt the powergamer, but ultimately it would not have such a dramatic effect on progression that the player should feel the need to log in to stay on projects. Sometimes it is the case that short projects will require the player’s attention throughout the day: smelting takes about 2 hours but will often require 10 projects to make equipment. The game provides “factories” that allow players to queue up projects, but they must be manually built and only one can be built per tile.

In practice, a player will sometimes push bedtime in order to start a new project if one is about to finish; otherwise the character is idle while they sleep. I recommend a default or “fallback” project that the player can set up in cases like that.

Design Concerns

Lack of Tutorial

Games generally explain their rules and systems through tutorials. Much care is given in mobile and browser gaming to adoption and easing friction. For the most part, Marosia tosses you into creation with the expectation that you’ll explore the UI and head to the wiki soon after. While the genre is niche enough and the playerbase better suited for reading documentation for the privilege of play, games should strive to be as self-documenting as possible. There exist a few guides, but they’re located externally.

English and Writing Skill Required

English. A friend of mine was reported and told not to play, for his flavor of Asperger’s results in atrocious spelling. I have personally experienced roleplay with people whose primary language was clearly not English, to the degree they did not understand my character’s actions.

Writing skill required. Despite being comfortable writing fiction, I was nervous at first when I saw how active my first town was and how well they were roleplaying. Roleplaying a single character asynchronously was intimidating.

Abundance of Rules, and The Golden Rule

Marosia’s got a ton of rules, and some finer points may be lost on newcomers. I would say most players have -- consciously or not -- broken a rule of varying severity. While other players are around to help, the game’s open-ended roleplay had me seeking help from the game’s original developer to understand how to play an atheist character.

Of all Marosia’s rules, the Golden Rule is most important. It’s simple: no Out-Of-Character planning. Any knowledge you have of the game world cannot be applied to the decisions your characters can make unless they personally experienced that knowledge gain. You cannot tell your friend you live in Newtown and that their character should join you. If characters on your account will cross paths, one of them will be put into hibernation. The last point leads to awkward situations where a character will decamp their location to allow another of theirs to pass through; the effect is worse if their newly arrived character must stay for a while.

In practice, many rules are quietly broken in the same way that any strained populace seeks out freedom under dictatorship. It is difficult to enforce rules against OOC planning when the reality is that if a player’s town is being attacked while their friend is at work or school, the friend will ping them to attention. Stories are better when people collaborate Out of Character, so the populace spend time DMing each other and making it clear who they play via Discord.

I sometimes wished I could just communicate this one tiny thing in [OOC brackets] in an in-game whisper to one character, but I’d be breaking a rule. This may result in ambiguous roleplay required to communicate important OOC information.

Finally, when I had decided I was done with the game, I made it clear to those around me in-game that I was going to cull. The rules are that you cannot cull if recently attacked, and that you must wait two hours since your last post; just when I thought I’d mastered all the rules, I had forgotten you are, bizarrely, not allowed to roleplay your own intentional death. I put a lot of effort into roleplaying my demise only to find that within 30 minutes, I’d received an infraction and the most recent post was deleted. I think this situation is a quintessential example of how Marosia could improve its policies: the text hurt no one, it offered closure for me and those around me, and the infraction upset me and wasted admin time. Better to offer the player an input box that makes a lovely death-red-colored feed notice with the content of their death post.

Administration

High admin turnover results in a strained administration team. Lacking admins, god characters are now able to be played by non-admins. Evidence of the owner cheating on their personal characters is inexcusable in a world where the integrity of data is critical to the story.

Scale: MUDflation/deflation, Developer Maintenance and Population Growth

It is a shame that an ambitious, open-world fantasy roleplaying game is doomed to such low population.

Given the trouble the game already has faced even with relatively low player counts, there is no way the developer can support the game at five times the population. Not every developer wants to live off their work, and Marosia is clearly a hobby project despite the many thousands of hours of devotion. But this level of manual intervention is just not sustainable, and the nature of player reports means that a reviewer must spend a lot of time reading text, or otherwise make quick judgments; it’s sadly been conveyed to me that it can sometimes be the latter, but in the one time I was punished for breaking the golden rule in “Oldrosia”, the punishment was generous.

Gods exist in the world, can be prayed to, and must be roleplayed by a real player: usually an admin. This takes even more time away from the developer who has to respond to prayers. (and it thus opens up the potential of bias) Even if the developer never touched a god again, there would still be maintenance required to ensure fair play.

Then there are the considerations of game balance scale.

Metal is a finite resource. Weapons and heavy armor can only be crafted with metal. Combat skills can only be trained if wielding a weapon. Smithing can be leveled to max within a character’s lifetime. This applies to many crafting disciplines.

Lacking any object decay, the highest quality weapons were theoretically possible to have existed, in perpetuity, after the three-month mark of the game’s existence. The same goes for high-quality food, tools, healing items, and weaponry. This permanently modifies the progression curve of the game and results in a ‘lucky draw’ of sorts dependent on where your character spawns in the world: they’ll either be spawned in a community where these abundant resources exist or not. In two years, it may be impossible for a newspawn to acquire their own weapon.

In practice, manual effort from the gods may replenish a mine or generate high-level gear for their followers. This is still not sustainable or fair. Even if the developer allows for prospecting of mines, the problem of an abundance of high-level gear remains. And it cannot go without saying: the game crashes for a few minutes every midnight as the world resolves itself; I’m not sure that adding item decay is even technologically scalable.

Dissonance: Asynchronous Roleplay

Posts are made as the player’s time allows, similar to forum-style RP, as opposed to the real-time RP that chat rooms or MUDs require. However, projects and the world are forever ticking away in real-time. The player may be sewing a garment while sparring, or working on some project in the middle of a wedding or funeral. Starting a project indicates that you’re online to other players, but you may not want to signal that when you’re only on bathroom break at work.

Because roleplay is asynchronous, sometimes you’ll see large posts from people reacting in “real time” to events that happened many hours ago. This becomes especially problematic when you consider that each player has certain active hours depending on their time zone. Given the rule that the player must be in-character at all times, it’s difficult to know when is a good time for others to roleplay with you; but when you are both active and roleplaying in real time, it’s very pleasant.

Finally, in more active towns, you may find yourself with anywhere from one to twenty minutes of reading to catch up on, as well as form your own reaction to. This makes it hard for the player to predict how long a play session will be, and is what I suspect to be a main driver of the constant burnout we see among veterans.

Similar Games

UPDATE 2022. I don’t want to get in the habit of updating this teardown, but it isn’t right to leave the original text in light of the past three years of change.

There are only two competitors for asynchronous roleplaying browser games.

Cantr II is the father of asynchronous RP games, nearing its second decade of existence. As such, its UI and codebase are fairly dated. Still, its development continues to plod along slowly. Staff are assigned to certain departments and are even allowed access to a modest content management system to add new objects into the game. In 2021 they released a newbie-friendly instance of the game called Genesis.

Faerytale Online requires that your character be birthed by another player in order to play. It took me four months to get in and when I finally did, I was a baby. Zero years old, being able to do little more than create and eat(!) fecal matter. The game’s been abandoned by the developer and as of 2022, has a curious new bug regarding the moon, which prevents any feed message from being generated twice a day, for a three-hour span. The expectation is it can go permanently offline at any minute, but I do recommend checking it out to see if you can get lucky enough to spawn. I found its mine (and city) system to be worth playing for.

I previously said that excluding myself, there were two other people that I know of making similar games. Neither of them will be finishing. There is talk of someone new making a similar game, but they are in need of a programmer.

Conclusion

On PBBG.org, I’ve given the game a 3/5 with the following review.

Firstly, I praise Marosia for providing a coherent multiplayer browser-based open world experience. It is not common to find this in PBBGs or even mobile games. I then praise Marosia for encouraging roleplay: there’s a lot of potential in RP. Finally, the game’s had an enormous amount of developer time put into it. The original developer had a lot of passion for her game. Her time commitment just purely on the code side is easily over two-thousand hours by my estimation. The new owner has put in some work to stabilize the game via bug fixes and balance changes.

Unfortunately, I can only barely recommend (3/5) checking the game out and playing for a bit before moving on. Current administration -- who bought the game from the original developer -- has even less regard for your stories than the previous developer did. They are overly concerned with “creepers” and the community that has formed around the game is, as over-used as the word may be, toxic. I do not blame them as people, but rather look to the administration of both the official Discord and the game itself as to why things are the way they are. In a game about crafting your own (albeit collaborative) story, you can lose it in any instant without appeal, for simply coming across the wrong character.

There are other, design-related concerns that I discuss in my teardown of the game, available here.

If you’re interested in roleplaying in a game world like Marosia, check out this teaser for my upcoming game. It is time our niche had a safe place to craft our stories. It is time for our niche to grow into more than a niche. Roleplaying has huge potential and this game is only the first step on my game development journey to bring it to a wider audience. That will not be done through intensive rule-enforcement nor complete exclusion of non-roleplayers. I aim to be part of the solution.

Thanks for reading, Vael Victus

[tinydark]

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.

[vael]

2019 Annual Review

Each year, I look back at the previous year’s annual review and note that things didn’t go as planned. For some reason I am always surprised, but this time it’s a little painful, too. From 2018′s Annual Review:

“2019 outlook? Sunny! I hope it will be my best year yet.“

Oh, Vael. You built your house, you moved to the promised land. But your year did not go as planned. You are not even close to the zen you craved.

It has been a wild year. This will run long. All I can do is stick to the format and hope my memory and average writing skill will do the year justice. So, as usual, we start with the positive.

What went well this year?

We like our house. We do. The builder was no good, resulting in some warped walls and a lot of headache getting them to finish everything properly, but the layout is very suitable for us. My office is exactly what I needed, our TV room has just the right space for us. We finally have a respectable kitchen. Since I’m living and working in the house 24 hours a day, it’s important to have a comfortable space.

Game development. For the past five years, I’ve put in some serious work. A lot of it was within my game engine, GAM3, and tinydark’s gaming network, The Orbium. While I put in a lot of work, not much came in the way of actual games produced. I finally rallied in 2018 and put out Bean Grower. It was designed to be a supplemental game, not a main driver, so it will not bring in sustainable income. I went on to think that I should open GAM3 up to other developers, license the engine out and collect a share of what they make.

I resolved to refactor GAM3: a word which means to rewrite and modernize many parts of it so that it’s easier to work in, and for it to present better. I would come to realize this desire to share GAM3 was due to a lack of confidence in myself to produce something great, and financially sustainable. Around the time I was realizing that multiplayer was the answer, I discovered Marosia.

Then we moved, I took on contract work, and things generally slowed for me for a few months, eking out what development I could. I played Marosia throughout and in August, it died. I wrote a teardown for it. The stars had aligned: though I had a lot of prelim work to be done, I would make a successor to Marosia. I managed to hype a few people in the community with a demo of GAM3 and I spent the next few months coding a chat prototype and generally organizing myself, and finally mid-November began the refactoring. It would end there, but just this morning (seriously) we learned Marosia was coming back. I had a momentary freakout but it’s ultimately a good thing for my own game.

I haven’t been more excited for a project in a long time. I never thought I’d be so excited to create a standard fantasy world, but it’s a ton of fun, with intricacies I never considered. The game’s design lends itself to a sustainable monetization model: I’m thinking $3/mo for quality-of-life upgrades, with a discount for buying in bulk. I would have paid double for Marosia, so I think this is fair. (6 months of die2nite is currently priced at $69, 6 months of Hattrick is $90!) And most important of all, I can do it ethically, with a game that truly means something to people.

Web development. I’ve learned quite a bit this year! I am so grateful for svelte. I liked but never loved React.js. It always felt ponderous to me. I have no doubt The Orbium’s refactoring would have taken me half the time it did if I were learning svelte vs. React, simply because React is so much more convoluted than svelte, and all in the name of uglier syntax. Svelte seamlessly integrates style and functionality into UI components, which means that if I’m working with a button that clicks to open a modal, everything I need for that button is in that one file.

Due to my contract work (with Harley Davidson, I can reveal) I also got some experience with Symfony and other modern development practices in PHP. PHP doesn’t really excite me these days, loathing having to produce views with it, but it is at least comfy.

My job. “Yeah, yeah.” I got a raise, most of which was contributed to getting Eve and my son onto my badass healthcare plan. We’re developing like it’s 2012, which is frustrating and makes even simple tasks take forever, but I can’t complain about the pay nor the stability of the company and my position there. I also work mostly remotely.

What didn’t go so well?

2019 was dominated by the bad. Eve’s not putting out an Annual Review, but our pain is shared.

The move. 11 months after the contract was signed, our builder was finally ready to let us move in. The house was not finished, just livable. So we rushed out of Rhode Island. We packed my car with everything we could fit, even removing the spare tire, but we got almost all of it. Me, Eve, our son, and our two cats.

At around 7:30 PM, we were driving on a dark highway when we were struck by a muffler that had fallen out from the truck in front of us. It destroyed the front-end, spilling radiator fluid onto the road. I had no idea what was going on, but it so happened that a mechanic had broken down right near us and was able to help. The engine barely carried us to the nearest motel, and I was in shock. I carried all our stuff to our second-floor room, it was even lightly raining. And I was defeated. Eve reports she had never seen me so bad. I had no idea how long we’d be in this ghetto-ass motel, what it would cost us during this time of great financial need, and mostly: I was just miserable. We could have died. If it had hit one of our tires, we could have spun out at 70+ MPH. All I wanted to do was get to our house the next day, and here we were.

I won’t detail the rest here, but I do want to thank my friends for their support and appreciate the good fortune that we got through this time.

We got to the house at 11PM on a Sunday; I still appreciate our builder taking the time to show us around so late. And... it was not at all what we were expecting. We had no driveway, and it had rained. We were tracking in some mud but that didn’t even matter because the entire house had to be cleaned. There was dirt all over the floors, they’d forgotten I didn’t want a chandelier over the dining room table, and the feeling was that we’d gone through Hell (and austure financial practices) to get here and this was it. So much wasn’t done. We knew that, but we didn’t think we’d be sweeping and wetting the floor with paper towel just to have a place to put our stuff. Shoutout to my friend Cody for setting us up with a supply drop.

We spent a lot of time buying furniture, aided by our rental SUV, all the while worrying about our newly purchased things sitting around the house without our protection as workers came in and out. I had to go back to Virginia to pick up the car and through exhaustion, caffeine, stupidity, and anxiety, managed to go 88 MPH and get myself a ticket: a misdemeanor, even. I spent the entire day picking up that damn car (5 hours up and down) and returned home in the worse state I’d ever felt. I was emotionally, mentally, and physically depleted.

But there was no stopping for me: I took on contract work and I had to get it done just to stay afloat. And then we got a fucking dog.

The dog. At some point in 2018 we determined that our son could use a companion and that a dog really completes the family. Leading up to the move, we put a down payment on a rough collie: the “Lassie” breed. They usually run around $800 and we got her for $500. I was a fan of the breed and Eve had done research that proves it’s a great breed. (it is) Even after the accident, we thought we should pay the rest for her and bring some joy into our life.

We named her Esme, and getting a dog was definitely one of the worst macro decisions I’ve made for the family yet. I couldn’t last more than a month with her. It was my decision to get rid of her, which made my wife and son sad but we were getting so little out of the experience. The cats beat her up, she was afraid of everything, and all she wanted to do was run around but we kept her cooped up in the house because we had no fence. I hated that there was still a dog smell, and I hated that it farted during Game of Thrones. It was over when we went grocery shopping and came back to a poop-filled crate, which the circumstances of the night dictated I must clean.

Young Living. Eve was supposed to sell essential oils for some side money. We knew it wasn’t going to be big money, unless she got lucky or turned out to be a natural-born saleswoman, but it was something to do and we believe in the products. I really trust in Young Living and I personally have seen the benefits of their oils and products.

So she went to the YL convention in Utah to learn to sell and, hey, have some fun. She returned feeling even less confident: they’d changed some numbers, and the truth that we always knew was that the market’s highly saturated. There are memes trivializing the effects of oils and there’s no denying the company’s an MLM. A lot of the big earners made their sales early on. Coinciding with the bad feels of Autumn, we decided to put the oil dream aside and focus on mental and physical health.

Eve mental/physical health. The muffler changed a lot for us. It morphed what should have been a very happy time in our lives into a very stressful one. Eve felt fatigued and broken down, and I wasn’t much better off. One day before her planned back-to-action, pick ourselves up and get ready to enjoy Summer, she sprained and tore a ligament in her ankle while coming down the stairs. We hoped it was just a sprain and did everything we could to avoid going to the doctor, but a week later she hadn’t gotten better and so began the PT and bullshit regimen. Our plans of hiking the blue ridge mountains were crushed.

But she recovered, and I shit you not, the very day before she planned to return to action, it was Father’s Day. She was making me my special breakfast and was using a hand-blender to blend pumpkin french toast mix when she went to clean some gunk out of the blender with her finger. It was a split-second decision to help make breakfast faster. Her finger twitched, caught the irresponsibly sensitive power button and tore her finger up. Immediately took her to Urgent Care and then the Emergency Room. $3,000 and some luck later, she kept her finger, but has permanently lost some feeling in it.

That was a bad time for us. I was overworked, she was miserable, and yet she still managed to get to Utah to learn how to sell. To salvage our year. In Autumn, all the anxiety, stress, and the damage from her upbringing finally culminated and she broke. 

Her physical health tanked in tandem with her mental. She suffered frequent menstrual issues and her EDS (a joint disorder) flaring up. It is hard to detail all the pain and frustration, and it really is beyond the scope of what needs to be said. My wife is depressed, prone to feeling overwhelmed, and I’m happy to say that we are getting her professional help soon.

What’s remarkable is that I can’t recall a period of time that she didn’t try her best to recover. Every month, most weeks, she would constantly express that the next day or month was her time. She’s done it for this month and 2020 as well. And I don’t think she’s lazy or unmotivated. She is just defeated and I am a poor comforter. Honestly, I am just shit at helping people if the solution isn’t “well just force yourself to do the thing.” That’s how I get through my problems and it doesn’t work for everyone, not even always myself. Still she is strong. I think writing this out has helped me remember that.

Relationship with my son. I had hoped my increased efficiency and happiness would improve our relationship. I planned for more structure: things like “once we’re upstairs for bedtime rituals, no going back down.” Each night I make a point to spend a minimum of 30 focused minutes with him. But I have only succeeded in making our relationship worse. I don’t think he needs professional help, but there is something within him, from when he was three years old, that just prevents him from being a hard worker. Respect is important to me and I don’t respect him. He is a frustrated child, often not understanding the world, often forgetting things he was supposed to do. I’m not doing a good job of helping.

I think I could have done better, but there were simply too many fronts to fight.

Mental performance. I haven’t gotten any better from last year. I am still not as sharp as 2017-Vael. It is a matter of stress and lifestyle.

What did I learn?

How to be a homeowner! Generally how to manage a home. I got my tools, all cute with my little leaf blower.

SLOWWWW DOWWWWN. The outside of the house needs some work. We need to extend our driveway, clear an acre, and put up a fence. I could take a loan out to do this and be fine, but I could also just slow down. Take a deep breath. Enjoy what we have for the Summer. It sucks I won’t be able to use that acre for farming, but I think I have a good place to plant a single apple tree this year. And hey, less mowing.

A shit ton of web development.

Probably became more cynical. But I think The Good Place has helped remind me to be a good person.

To just accept Eve needs help. And that I really suck at helping her.

Future Outlook

All that bad stuff that happened? Pfft. Shitty year. 2020′s here, it’s a brand new decade. I’ve got a cool game I want to make, we’re gonna get Eve some help, and...

Get pregnant! Yeah! Right now we definitely aren’t ready for kids. We need to use our new health insurance to make a bunch of appointments, recover  financially, mentally, physically. But we very badly want more children. I feel it all the time. I have begun to suspect that genetics do matter, and I wonder if Abel’s laziness mirrors his biological father’s laziness. My dad loved to work and I do too. It might be possible to pass these traits on.

Better office. I need to get some furniture and improve my work environment.

Vacation! We desperately need a vacation. We’re going to Disney this year, either May or June.

Zen Vael. I will attempt to be “the person I want to be” as detailed last year. My soft goal for this is March 15th, as I set last year. I will undoubtedly fail that date. There is no way I’m wrangling my sleep and attitude in the next two months, but surely by the end of the year?

Thanks for reading.

Vael

[vael]

Cool!

I know I am going to be watching your game ideas more closely then I have, and I hope it turns out well! just don’t wear yourself out doing it, because that was how Marosia, Cantr, and FTO died/got abandoned by the developer.

Thanks. :} I want to take this opportunity to give a quick update.

I’ve been working hard on refactoring GAM3, the engine that runs all tinydark’s games. It’s been going a little slower than I expected, but it’s all so worth it; GAM3 is approaching its 7th year of existence and it was time to modernize and reorganize it. I hope to get both a prototype and teaser site for the game out in January; it may end up being mid-Feb for the teaser. I still need to create the game as an IP: it needs a name, domain.

Regarding wearing myself out, well: truthfully, I am a driven person, and even though I know better, after 31 years of life I have accepted that I simply love the narrative of overworking. It is me. I stay efficient, I stay learning, and through it all I try to keep my health and family in mind.

With “Myrosia”, the codename for the project, I don’t think I’ve been more driven in a long time. I have a group of players who are interested and it ticks all the development pillars I personally strive for: meaningful, experimental, fun gameplay. I'll candidly state the following somewhere I’m comfortable: my personal blog. I foresee a near future in which this project consumes me. I am aware it’s a ton of work, and I’m trying to pace myself. But for the past decade I have wanted nothing more than to live off my own work, to do this full time, to contract asset-makers and to have a real company that brings in real money. I have studied entrepreneur principles and have, I hope, managed to stay ethical in my monetization plans for the studio. I think I am doing the right thing and for once I have a direct path to take. I certainly want to play another open-world-collaborative-story-RPG game, and I’m happy to be the one to make it. I will not abandon this game, like I have not abandoned MonBre, even if no one plays it.

I want to put something else on the record. I have read the muddy history of FTO, saw the early Marosia kickstarter and her forum posts throughout the years, read the Cantr blog for all its Legos. I am not going to judge or state my opinion on them as people, but I think it’s clear there is something atypical about each of them, all different, and soon I will be part of this group. I once read that parser games are best suited for the autistic, that the gameplay itself is autistic. I suspect that development of these games, and then the management of the community around them, may extract from within the developer a persona that they didn’t know they had. I am just musing for now, and maybe too romantically, but as we leap into a new decade, I wanted it to be said. Nyx, the old developer of Marosia, counters that administration of the game is what morphs you. Update: Marosia returned under the management of a previous community leader, Will.

tl;dr: passionate about game, will try not to overwork myself