Black Crown: Exhumed

Black Crown: Exhumed

Coming October 2024

State of the Game (2024)

The game's introduction is currently playable in our closed test environment. Unfortunately, the import process took longer than expected and we're going to push to next Halloween. Three months of development are planned from July to October 2024 to get the game ready for release. Join our Discord for the latest news.

The Black Crown Project

Black Crown: Exhumed is a reconstruction of the original Black Crown Project, a narrative horror game that went offline on October 31st, 2014. The original game was built in the StoryNexus game engine, and it will be imported into Tinydark's GAM3 engine.

The Black Crown Project was a multimodal narrative horror game with themes of disease, work, anthropology, and obsession, to name a few. Players took on the role of clerk at the Widsith Institute, where they retrieved artifacts from the soil, analyzed them, and reinterred them. For their efforts, they earned promotions by way of exotic and divine disease. The player progressed through the game by analyzing artifacts, slowly understanding the world of Black Crown, and making key decisions that influenced the narrative.

Black Crown: Exhumed

The new iteration of the game will bring with it some upgrades, new content, and improvements to game design ethics. It will be hosted on the Tinydark Hub, a platform for all Tinydark games. The game will still be free to play, and will be available on web, mobile app stores, and Steam.

List of the major changes coming upon release of the game:

  • Monetization is dramatically changing. A few paths and options will be locked to free accounts, and you can simply buy the game for $10 to get complete access. All previous "Nex-locked" bonuses will run on GAM3's cooldown system where applicable.
  • Action banks will max out at 12 hours away from the game, and will be completely removed for anyone who purchases the game.
  • The passage of time is no longer real-time, but rather internal to your character's instance of the world.
  • Engine benefits: multiple character slots, better event structure and flow, a more responsive UI, detailed character pages.
  • Sound design, from ambient weather tracks to pained (and muffled) grunts.
  • A rotating set of 4 new diseases, one for each real-world season, inspired by our real-life maladies.
  • Player-submitted trottering notes.
  • Rebalancing of the main qualities.
You can find more details here: https://tinydark.com/blog/the-black-crown-project-will-return

Written by Dr. Rob Sherman of Bonfire Dog. Developed by Vael Victus of Tinydark Studio. Sign up for an account at tinydark.com to stay apprised of the game's development.