General

• Huge performance gains. Chiefly, our caching system saw a 2-3x perf improvement, and a few things here and there were improved. URPG's initial load was sped up by something like 200ms, which I can certainly feel. Then, I split the 'bundle' (a 1.8mb js file!) on the account page so it's far smaller and I was able to cut ~90kb out of the main bundle. Dropped 20kb of unused CSS.
• Engine: all events now have a subtle indicator upon play to show that the option has been selected. When new options show up (tracking in URPG) there's a nice intro animation.
• Pop-up state is now tracked, so (URPG) when we feed animals, the pop-up just stays there on the screen and updates the progress bar!
• Any new messages in the event log now get an attractive intro animation.
• We now report how much time actually remains for decay, on hover of the item (URPG Fountains)
• Item gain/loss messages were standardized, improved and fixed. For example, previously it gave a misleading message if the dev 'added' a negative number.
• Improved tinydark.com's search engine and LLM indexing, also some tweaks to the engine page, including reduced pricing for low-resource games

Server Update + Security Audit

• Modernized our server + software (GAM3) for performance and security purposes. Ubuntu 20 -> 24, MySQL 8 -> 8.4, PHP 8.2 -> 8.3.
• GAM3 itself ran the gamut for best security/code practices and there were definitely a few things to improve after 15 years of life as a game engine. :}

Bug Fixes

• Certain cooldown-hidden events (such as fountains) would stick around after being played
• Text results/event descriptions will no longer have the bug where references to a player's stats become the word '0' if they don't exist.
• Fixed 'floating' type of events (such as featured in URPG battles) sending the page to the top of the screen when played as event summary branches
• A new router means that awful "load game, click Characters, select one and hit back button twice to see a blank screen" bug is finally fixed.
• The feed was not updating when performing any inventory actions, requiring a refresh (or waiting) to see
• Severe regression 😱 where clicking any event/branch also immediately reloaded the feed afterwards, causing mild behind-the-scenes lag. Also made polling for new feed events considerably smarter/easier on the server.

#justdevthings
This was an absolutely monumental dev cycle for the engine. It is no exaggeration to say it was life-changing. See #channel for details.

And so wraps up this massive, productive, and strange dev cycle. The last update was February 24th, 2026. From now on, I will endeavor to update every 4-6 weeks max.

Prior to Black Crown's launch, and interested in seeing how well AI cybersecurity scans would work, I ran some automated security audits on our code and made some due diligence upgrades to the main server that hosts Tinydark projects. Incidentally -- and because it was a good time in my life for this -- I decided to review absolutely everything internal to the engine. We are now completely upgraded, improved, optimized, and modernized for the future. I look forward to pretty much never doing this again! 😮‍💨

I am evidently not trustworthy as a developer right now. The chaos of the web development industry and my own personal life have made it hard to sit down and think through Black Crown's reconstruction. It's hard for me to look at my dev tools and see I have a weekly unmet usage quota that I can use to directly build features the engine/a game will need, and not try to fire off a few tasks. And so? Bean Grower was almost entirely rewritten in a few weeks' time where it would have taken months (of frustration), while I continued to work on other things. So now Bean Grower is actually a good piece of software that can be deployed to app stores and Steam, and properly finished some day.

MonBre was a surprise and I'm not dedicating too much time to it; Phage has decided to jump in and adopt it. But who knows, if it gets far enough, it'll be a Hub game some day. 😮

I will now actually finish and release Black Crown.

Bean Grower

• Completely rebuilt the front-end of the game. The UI is more responsive and better animated, everything is snappier, and it's considerably easier/quicker for me to make new features and further improvements.
• UI improvements: tooltips are gone from mobile and replaced with drawer-style UI. The world visual now perfectly stretches/shrinks based on your screen's width. Duplicate locales under settlements now roll up into one, displayed as eg. "Cactus Farm x2" Reference pop-up was improved.
• Updates to the void theme.
• Each special bean now has its own harvest sound! 😄
• New rules: you cannot get more than 2 of the same special bean in a row, and you won't get the same name for a bean that's already on your bean board.

Black Crown: Exhumed

• The game is now playable up until the end-game sequence. Many adjustments and improvements have been made to support the game. Sorry I haven't focused on release. 🙁
• Check out the wiki at https://blackcrownexhumed.com/wiki

URPG

• Check out the wiki at https://blackcrownexhumed.com/wiki
• The engine has a new World Time feature! So! URPG's day is now 28 hours long. That means our day count is now lower. This impacts hunting, see #channel for details.
• New (and default) 'timeline' events view style.
• Dead characters can now have rudimentary profiles. Just go to your inactive tab and click the gear, then you'll see Create Profile. Here's my undead oppossum! https://urpg.tinydark.com/profile/142
• Posts now have a character limit of 15,000 and posts which are lengthy on the screen get a Show More button.
• new achievement (+5 Soul Score) for having an animal >= age 28
• worked on a proper weather system! It's about half done.

MonBre

• IS NOW UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT?! @phage has started work on improvements, stay tuned!
• got some code and security improvements before I gave up and turned off strict mode for the game.

Tinydark Hub

• We have a new My Hub page (previously the confusing "Feed" page) which shows game news and your friends' achievements for any games you care about. What you see is toggleable by the gear in each header. You can now add emojis to your friends' posts as well. Admin tooling was improved and you get a welcome message upon signup.

I am now 100% focused on Black Crown: Exhumed's reconstruction. No, seriously, there is nothing more that I am doing than sitting here and piecing it together. After that, I do have some actual code to write for things such as the guest and monetization features.

I'm not planning to be very active on social media, but YouTube will soon be hosting Black Crown audio-text transcription videos (produced by my 15 y/o son) and this channel will, in the coming years, host Tinydark game trailers and our 24/7 radio. Subscribing would be appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/@tinydarkstudio

Black Crown: Exhumed

• The Miasma Viewer has seen some big upgrades: text transcriptions, sound effects, audio transcriptions, a better desktop layout and small fixes.
• The audio transcriptions are now available on Spotify, YouTube Music, Alexa and more. Just say "Alexa, play the album Black Crown: Exhumed" 😄
• I've spent a lot of time with Black Crown itself, reviewing the archive, obviously the miasma work for the transcriptions; interviews, posts. I am finally ready to finish this project.

General URPG

• You'll now get a feed message when one of your tamed animals is starving, and when they have died. 😢
• For the Collect activity, the water level factor was made slightly more forgiving for lower Hydration levels, and less rewarding for higher Hydration levels. This is to put success more in the hands of the players.
• Adjusted zone hydration so zones are less likely to dry up, and boosted Summon Rain a bit.
• Improved descriptions of our spawn buildings

General (engine)

• The category headers under Area and Inventory are now sortable, and the weight column reflects the pile's weight, not per-item.
• Owning (taming in URPG) an NPC automatically sets you to mutually trust each other
• More work was done on our integrated wiki, nothing worth showing at the moment but it's pretty nifty. :}

Bug Fixes

• Auto-projects (such as fermenting wine) weren't progressing
• Sometimes after playing an event which makes a feed (chat) message, it would not show up until page refresh.
• Fixed (invisible) error with tooltips and improved their performance a bit, and they no longer fade-in but still fade out
• Floating results showed bad values for scaling stats, such as Health
• The Content Book was erroneously tracking entries for sigh every damn thing you made, even if not customized
• Item maps were not returning for targeted players (such as giving another player a buff, which are items in GAM3)
• Rarely the 'grouping' feature of the feed would not properly group certain RP posts

#justdevthings

• New feature! Item Spawner, which both lets you spawn an item on any area's ground, and also view the area contents. With this came the ability for items to be system-protected, such as the tubes in URPG's Invitro, and also creator-protected (only creator can use the item).
• Support for 'special' reqs, and our first special req is Player In Area, which tests any players by relationship and/or formula.
• Events can now reduce or reset their own, and other events', cooldowns.
• All qual-related dropdowns on the event page use our sexy new input filter, and respect your GAM3 theme. Eventually all our dropdowns will be converted system-wide.
• More flexible event-hiding logic.
• Text results can now link to a qual itself, which will replace/use the qual's icon and give a nice tooltip hover over the text.
• Over 1,100 new icons, mostly fantasy-related.
• Internal cleanup of packages we weren't using; updates to existing packages