Dev Log: Background : Jan 2024 to September 2025

We here at Tiny Paladin have been employing a very specific communication strategy for the last few years: Talking about your work is hard, so don't do it. I'm loathed to mess with tradition, but there are a few good reasons to change our ways. Prime among them being wanting people to play our game some day. So let's talk about it.

2023

Like almost all creative work, Ballad of the Arrow came out of the corpse of a failed project. Most of the current team was engaged on a completely different RPG: The Chain of Time. I won't dwell too much on old "Chainy Timey". It fell apart for the reason most games from new devs do : over-scope, over-ambition, over-specific ideas of what the end product should look like. We'll leave you, dear reader, with a few inexplicable screenshots and move on.

2024

Around the start of 2024, we kicked COT in the head. Whether or not we were still going to make games as a team was an open question, which we answered. The problem then was: "What do we make?". The only real requirements were:

I hope the irony of that second one is obvious, as I write this log two years or so after that meeting because we're about to release our first demo. Of course, had we not tried to be aggressively small, Ballad would already have collapsed under its own weight.

We Brain Stromed using those requirements as a guide, and took about a month in full Pre-Production. For us, that meant a lot of mapping things out in Milanote (a rare *good* productivity tool), and meandering meetings at pricey local coffee joints. We ended up being pretty compelled by the idea of a Robin Hood story, which leant itself really well to an old party-based RPG. I will also fully admit to having been enchanted by New Frame Plus's write up on old Final Fantasy animation. Games from the 8-bit era had an innate limit to their scope (memory, mostly), so they seemed like a good template for us future people with a different limitation (staff hours).

So we headed out to "Make an Video Game"™. The art came along in a slow but steady clip, which it more or less would until today. The programming side was, as always, the far more tempermental beastie. The entire codebase was rebooted around April, left to rot in the Arizona desert some of us were visiting at the time. A great ammount of time was expended on tools that have been discarded by now, mainly a cutscene creation tool that I still *like*, but would have already eaten more time that it saved.

Beyond all that, our design sense was quite underdeveloped. I was around winter of this year that we looked up, and asked why we were spending so many resources and so much time making a game where the player can freely walk around a 2-D environment. Earlier the answer was "because it's how games in that Final Fantasy geneology do it". Now we were looking down the barrel of making all of the art to achieve that, and we needed a better reason to spend it. We didn't find one.

Not to mention, our programmer was also laid off halfway through the year, some of our team had to get married for insurance reasons, and the rest of the world contiuned it's slide into entropy. It really wasn't clear things were going to work out.

2025

Ballad of the Arrow, as we understand it today, really started to take shape this year. Most of our cast got their current characterizations locked in. The gameplay took on it's character as "a JRPG where you go on mini FTL-style adventures". It's the game that you can (or will soon be able to) play in our demo. When we talk about progress later into the year, we'll be backfilling you guys on what 2025 has brought.

Despite it all, we're still here. Better yet, we've got a game for you all to play. See you there!