Hello fellow Tiny Rogues and welcome to 2025. I hope you had a cozy holiday season.
TL;DR can be found at the bottom.
The Tiny Rogues Death Plushie
Quite a while ago I collected pledges for a Tiny Rogues Plushie. I partnered up with Makeship to design, produce, sell and ship a plushie.
At this point I own a sample of the Death plushie and you can see it already in the thumbnail of this blog post. I am very happy with the quality and I am sure everybody who ends up buying one will be satisfied.
The plushie launches on January 27th, 2025. There will be one more post with a link to the plushie here on Steam.
Originally I planned to "boost" this merch-drop with an accompanying update but my plans have changed. As a self-published solo developer I have no marketing obligations. I see no point in stressing myself out that early in the new year delivering another small update that distracts me from the bigger picture. After all we just had a small update for Christmas.
The plushie will come and if you want one you can buy one and that's going to be it.
I want to thank all the people who pledged for making this possible.
Makeship themselves are also giving away 2 plushies. Follow Tiny Rogues on X for more info. You will be able to participate between January 22nd and 25th.
If you don't use X (understandable - good for you) I will hopefully also giveaway some plushies on other platforms such as here on Steam, on the Discord and possibly on Bluesky but I don't know specifics yet.
The next Early Access Expansion
At the end of 2023 I expected to add far more content throughout 2024. On the contrary, 2024 was spent cleaning up. (Okay, I also got sidetracked and added skills at some point.)
I am happy to announce that I will actually start working on Into the Abyss VERY SOON™️. At the moment I am still finishing up a Visual Clarity Update which will also come with some other cool new and revamped game mechanics.
I am not sure yet if that update will be some sort stand-alone pre-patch for the next expansion or just be part of the actual expansion.
In 2025 my plan is to finally let Tiny Rogues live up to it's calling. If you don't know, this is my first commercial game project and the reason for Tiny Rogues' simple art style was that I intended to add a lot of content and make a ginormous roguelike. Back in 2022 I thought to compete with roguelike giants such as The Binding of Isaac I would need to catch up to their legacy of content. While I don't think like that anymore I am still keen on finally making use of this simple foundation of a game.
There are still some time-intensive non-content features which will have to be tackled at some point, mainly mid-run-saving and localization.
Before I invest time into those features though I want to go crazy and design another major expansion with a lot of content like classes, bosses and more.
Be assured, before 1.0 mid-run-saving and localization will be added.
I am actually not sure yet if it will be the promised Into the Abyss update, as the concepts for Into the Abyss and On the Edge of Infinity slowly started to merge. Without promising too much: Into the Abyss originally wasn't intended to offer any "endgame" system, such as "looping", "new game plus", or "endless mode". I found a lot of people wish for a game-mode allowing to continue certain characters beyond the run. I've spent a lot of time thinking about and designing a system that fits into Tiny Rogues and I'd personally enjoy. Contrary to what some people expect, the Abyss itself will not be an endless mode but I still want to add a similar thing in the next expansion.
Either way, don't be surprised when I come up with a new name for the next expansion. The rough expansion-name-roadmap outlined at the end of 2023 has changed quite a bit by now.
I cannot give any dates or even time-frames yet. I will go into my development cave and relentlessly work on what's hopefully going to be another incredible expansion. If you don't hear from me for months, rest assured that I'm working diligently and will release more information when the time is right. Wish me luck!
Near Future of Tiny Rogues
The Christmas Event will last until the end of January.
You might wonder, what will happen to the new Santa-specific achievements.
The current plan is to add an additional unlock condition to those achievements and disable Santa until next Christmas. The achievements will probably be un-Christmassy-fied and then attached to another character. (Some character that's also kind of a cheat and "for fun" character, possibly Super Hero.)
TLDR / Summary
- No update will accompany the Tiny Rogues Death plushie merch drop on January 27th.
- One more Steam post will follow and announce the plushie and give a link to the store page.
- Makeship will be giving away 2 plushies on X between January 22nd and January 25th.
- I am working on a Visual Clarity update at the moment. This update will possibly release before or alongside the next expansion.
- An early access expansion is the next step in the Tiny Rogues update pipeline. I am done with smaller patches for now. (other than maybe the Visual Clarity update, we will see)
- I cannot give any estimated date of release of any future update as of yet. The scope of the updates isn't even clear yet. As soon as I know more I will let you know here on Steam with another post.
- After next expansion I will look into mid-run-saving and localization but for the sake of releasing some actual playable content (floors, bosses, ...) those features will wait on the sidelines for now.
- Christmas Event will last until the end of January. The Santa specific achievements will probably get an additional non-seasonal unlock addition added to it. If you have the achievements already you won't have to unlock them again. (I can just change the achievement description on Steam.)
Thanks for reading and thanks for playing Tiny Rogues. Happy new year!
- RubyDev
PS: To clarify, because a lot of people might not know. I (RubyDev) call very big milestone updates throughout early access that bring large amounts of content: "expansions". They are not DLCs, they are just normal, free, very big updates which come with a subtitle for marketing purpose. Currently we are in the era of the 1st expansion called "Between Heaven and Hell".