We're here. It's 2026, a brand new year. While the world at large may look like a swirling whirlpool of despair as a dying imperial hegemon threatens to pull everything into its undertow, let's not look at that. Let's instead look at what Small Gray Games is currently doing.

First off, there's the big step that's taken up most of my time over the last month or so.

The Big Business Era of Small Gray Games

That's right, Small Gray Games is now an actual business, Small Gray Games LLC.

At some point down the line I may write in more detail about the process of setting this up, but in short, it's a kind of necessary step to keep making games the way I want to. It wasn't an issue for The Idle Class (other than my Paypal account apparently getting restricted for accepting donations as a non-business entity), but for The Salt Keep it's been increasingly problematic over the last couple years as the mainstream app stores become more and more hostile to "hobbyist devs." Paid app listings now require addresses and phone numbers, and prevent work-arounds like PO boxes. Apple would only allow me to publish as an individual under my own name, not as Small Gray Games. And for most of last year, The Salt Keep has been restricted in the EU because I didn't have the necessary information to enter a trader status. It's all been very frustrating.

I resisted the idea of forming an LLC for a while, because it kind of feels like overkill for what I'm doing right now. That said, I've already been hitting walls, and it seems like there are only more coming, especially as I move into more involved games. A lot of the conventional wisdom I've seen spread throughout various reputable sources of legal advice (some insane people on Reddit, Google preview text of a Quora post, some blog that seems like an ad for a scam, etc) seems to be that it's worth doing this before setting up Steam pages, which I will be soon for South of the March. It's very difficult to change later on, people suggest, and if my experience swapping my accounts for The Salt Keep over to the LLC are any evidence, they may be right.

So, there you go. It's finally happened. I am now the Roarkian ideal, a true titan of industry.

The Games That Already Exist

The Idle Class

I don't have major plans for The Idle Class for this year. There's at least one more significant update coming, hopefully in the next month or two, but it's focused largely on quality-of-life updates. It'll come with a handful of additional achievements and smaller features, plus a bunch of UI stuff, but it shouldn't change the gampeplay in any core ways.

There likely won't be any point where I'd consider the game "finished," but it's dense enough at this point that I really don't want to add things just to add things. So, a time may still come for bigger additions, but there's nothing on the immediate horizon there.

The Salt Keep

I also don't have immediate plans for The Salt Keep, but that may change. South of the March will be the next release, but depending on how getting set up with Steam goes (and how difficult developing for it ends up being), I may actually port The Salt Keep there as well. There are a lot of "ifs" to figure out there that I haven't yet touched at all, but it may end up being an in-between project to go along with some of the next things I talk about here.

The Games That Almost Exist

South of the March

South of the March is, as it has been for a while, teetering on the edge of completion. It's more put together than it is not, and it's been primarily real-life barriers slowing it down, but I do believe 2026 will be The Year of the March. The current plan is to release a demo first on itch.io, where I'll be able to get initial feedback on core functionality, accessibility features in particular. I may not release a demo on Steam at all, as there really won't be a whole of space between the demo and full version, so not long after that, we'll get the full South of the March on both platforms.

I've always intended for it to be a free game, which I feel a little weird about now, because it's become a much larger game than was initially conceptualized and taken much more time than expected. That said, it still is in many ways a prototype, given that some systems don't (and can't) really be fleshed out in the space of this game. So, I'm hesitant to charge for it, even though I myself have absolutely paid for games that have a lot less game in them than this one. I still don't entirely know what to do there. Maybe I'll just ask for tips. Or maybe I'll release a "Complete Edition" someday. Or maybe I'll release a Season Pass with tie-ins to every major media IP from the last 50 years. Who can say?

The Games That Don't Exist At All

The Untitled Full Game

When I say South of the March is in many ways a prototype, that's because it's meant to build out the skeleton of a much larger game, currently unnamed. There's a lot planned here, with a narrative that directly ties in to South of the March, but opens up into a larger cast of characters and gives all the aforementioned gameplay systems time to breathe. It's very much a long-term plan, with absolutely zero chance of seeing the light of day in 2026.

We've already learned a lot of lessons from the development of South of the March, which we should be able to use in streamlining work on this next game, not to mention the fact that the core mechanics and UI of South of the March will be used directly. But even in my most optimistic estimations, I'd expect this project to be years out.

An Exciting Secret?

With that time scale in mind, I've also been considering another project that could be developed at the same time. Yes, that's right: multiple projects at once. "You should develop a bunch of games simultaneously," people are always saying, "nothing will go wrong with that."

I don't want to go into much detail here until I have the bones of something working, but this idea has been germinating as a kind of alternative branch that could also sprout from South of the March. Where "Untitled Full Game" goes in a much deeper direction that will take multiple years to fill out, this could go in a different direction using that same skeleton, but one that is simpler and less reliant on art assets, which are by far the heaviest part of the workload. A project like that, I think, could be built out at the same time but release much more quickly. If it worked out, there could likely even be more than one before the other game was finished. We'll see.

I'll write about it in much more detail once I feel it out a bit, but I think it will be either "extremely cool and fun," or "not a good idea."

In Summary

There's a lot of new stuff coming in 2026! At a minimum, look out for additional Idle Class updates and the release of South of the March. Watch here for more updates on other possibilities (a release for The Salt Keep on Steam, and the announcement of new projects).