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Public roadmap

What's next.

No dates, no promises, just what is built, what is being worked on, and roughly where each piece sits today. The game itself is built. What is left is a short and specific list: the accessibility options, the score, an audit of every icon in the game, bug fixing, the legal and region work, and getting it in front of people. Nothing new is being added to reach 1.0. Everything on this board lands as a free update to the game you bought, and what comes after 1.0 is yours to steer.

Last updated: August 17, 2026 · v0.102.0 alpha

Completed

Breadth, in place.

Almost everything that makes the game wide is built.
Core loop

All 28 trades

8 combat, 7 gathering, 9 artisan, 4 wayfaring, each with its own actions, XP curve, and unlocks. The four Tidal Trades, Beachcombing, Scrimshaw, Chartwork, and Shipwrighting, were the last to land, each with its own art, colors, and progression arc. Depth and balance still get tuned build to build.

Offline

24-hour offline progression

Closed-form simulation. No throttle, no ads, no premium gate. Covers combat as well as skilling. Time away is reckoned from the most conservative clock available, so what you earn is honest and an honest player never notices the difference.

Modes

Modes that compose

Five ways to bind a run, and they stack instead of excluding one another, so a self imposed rule is something you build rather than something you pick off a list. Twenty one feats track them in the Runs tab, and the mode a keeper was made in stays with them for life.

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Mastery

Mastery for the combat trades

Eight combat trades gained a mastery layer, so the hours spent at arms accrue on the same footing as every gathering and artisan trade.

Almanac

An almanac that writes itself

Ninety four lines fill in from what you actually do, earned rather than handed out by a quest engine. The book is the record of your own run, and it fills as you keep it.

Quality of life

Kit that refills itself

The Quiver keeps an emptied ammunition slot topped up from the bank, the Rune Pouch refills a spent set from the bank's other set, and the Larder does the same for food once Vitality reaches fifty. All three work at the bench and while you are away, so a long watch no longer ends on the arrow you forgot to carry.

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Audio

The audio engine

The machinery the score will run on: cues that follow what you are doing rather than looping at you, crossfades instead of hard cuts, and a hard rule that the game stands down the moment another app is playing. Volume and mute live in Settings and reach a cue already playing. The music itself is still being written, and that card is below.

Combat

Combat, gear, and builds

Melee, ranged, and magic on a full combat triangle, with equipment, prayer and curses, spellbooks, and meaningful build choices that carry through both active and AFK play.

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Onboarding

First-run tutorial

Short, skippable, gather, process, fight in a handful of friendly steps. Built for the player who has never touched an idle RPG.

Game Center

Achievements, leaderboards & Challenges

Ninety four achievements with hidden surprises and a completion capstone, each one named and described in all fifteen languages and carrying its own art. Opt-in seasonal leaderboards reset for a fresh-start race, and Challenges are wired in. Share only what you choose.

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Accessibility

The whole game, by ear

Every skill screen, combat menu, location card and zone chip answers under VoiceOver with real names and honest values. A speech budget keeps the telling polite: live numbers wait in a rotor until you ask for them, and only a handful of moments have earned the right to interrupt you. The largest text sizes get their room, Smart Invert leaves the art its true colors, and ink reads in every light.

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Unlock

$9.99 one-time unlock wired in

The full-version unlock runs end to end, free for every alpha tester during testing. One purchase covers all six platforms, with Family Sharing on for the household. Beyond it you can buy cosmetics, a few profile icons and a card background, and nothing else. Every purchase is direct and one-time: a plain price, a thing you see whole, yours for good. No ads, no subscription, no loot boxes, no premium currency.

Idle

The Harbormaster's Forecast

The game answers the genre's oldest question before you walk away: can I leave this running? The Harbormaster dry-runs your current fight across the full offline window and tells you whether you hold or fall, the haul to expect, and how long the climb to your next combat level takes. It runs the same code that resolves the real offline fight, so the forecast cannot drift away from the game. Most idle RPGs send you to a third-party simulator for this. Here it is a screen.

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Language

Fifteen languages

English plus fourteen more, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, Hindi, Filipino, and Haitian Creole. Every line reads from a translation catalog, so each new tongue is a pass and not a rewrite. These shipped as careful first passes; native proofreading is below.

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Feel

Motion, juice, and framerate

Seventeen kinds of level-up and milestone celebration, then a performance pass that keeps every one of them smooth, no frame hitch when a toast lands or a turn resolves, on any device.

Sync

CloudKit sync, end-to-end encrypted

Saves move privately between your devices. No accounts, no servers of mine.

Privacy

Zero third-party SDKs

Pure SwiftUI. No analytics, no crash reporters, no ad networks. Full privacy policy on the site.

Platforms

Native on every Apple device

Pure SwiftUI runs everywhere, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. Native layouts, gestures, and shortcuts tuned for each. One purchase, all of them.

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Watch

A watch that plays, not just tells

A real fight on the wrist, both swing timers, your familiar beside you, the heal on the button. Take a quarry task, collect your offline haul, and tend the Watchfire, a watch-only hunt that burns with your phone in another room and can never cost you a character or a coin. Complications and Smart Stack included.

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Ambient

Widgets & notifications

The almanac reaches your home screen on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, every widget size, seven skins. Notifications can tell you when a run finishes, a crop ripens, or the reward bank fills, you decide what may speak at all, and quiet hours hold anything that comes due until they end.

Endgame

The deep-water arc

The Foundering, the Kingtide, and the Tolling crown the ladder now, each one clearable rather than merely survivable, with auto-eat honest enough to say which fights can truly run unattended. The fights are built and beatable; their art goes through the audit below with everything else.

Alpha

TestFlight alpha live on all six

Open invite, with active builds on all six Apple platforms at once. Active Discord feedback loop.

Marketing

The launch kit is shot

The trailer, native screenshots, and real-footage App Previews are shot and cut across all six platforms, with the listing and press kit ready. The storefront is waiting on us, not the other way around. Putting the kit to work is live below.

In Progress

Finishing, not widening.

The whole of what's left, and it is a short list.
Accessibility

More of the game, on your terms

The whole game already answers by ear. The work now is widening the options: more of the game's fixed assumptions becoming settings you control, and the remaining per-platform passes so the Mac, the TV, and the headset get the same care the phone did. Idle RPGs are an accessibility desert, and clearing the minimum was never the point.

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Audio

Writing the score

The engine is built and it behaves. What it is waiting on is the music. Composing the score, cue by cue, and the effects that sit under it, is live work, and until they land the game stays quiet past the opening. The sliders in Settings are already there, ready for something to carry.

Art

The icon audit

Every icon in the game, held up one at a time against the standard the best of them set, and redrawn where it falls short. Items, creatures, skill marks, the endgame bosses. A stand-in that has been quietly serving since the system it belongs to shipped is exactly what this pass is for.

Stability

Bug fixing

The unglamorous one, and the one that decides how your first hour goes. Reports arrive from the alpha through Discord and the in-app form, and they go back out in the next build. Most of the week lives here now.

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Feel

Playing it from scratch

A serious run from a blank save, at the pace a new player actually moves, start to finish. Curves, drop rates, and trade-to-trade pacing get tuned against what that run turns up rather than against a spreadsheet. Honestly, the last thing between us and launch is our own bar for how the game should feel.

Legal

The paperwork, and which countries open

Policies, storefront compliance, and the region question: which countries Tideward launches in, and what each of them asks for first. Fifteen languages open a lot of doors, and every door has its own rules behind it. Unglamorous, and it gates the launch.

Language

Native proofreading

Fourteen translations shipped as careful first passes. Native-speaker proofreading is the quality bar before any heavy push into a new market, and it runs alongside the region work above.

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Marketing

Finding the people who'd love it

The kit is shot; using it is the job now. Press, creators, and the long quiet work of a game with no publisher behind it reaching the players it was built for. It is a real part of shipping, so it sits on the board with everything else.

Coming Soon

Launch, then Game Center.

Ship the base game, then go deep.
Freeze

Feature freeze

No new systems past this point. Everything turns to balance, final art, and the last of the polish. Testing carries on where it already is; the only change is that nothing new goes in.

Launch

1.0 on the App Store

All six Apple platforms, one up-front purchase, priced like a premium app. It ships when the gameplay clears our own bar, not a date on a calendar.

Updates

The free update track

The work on this board lands as free updates to the game you already bought. No update will charge you to keep playing, and nothing you own stops working. That is the track, and it starts the day after launch.

Game Center

Maxxing the Game Center experience

The first big direction once the base game is finished. Leaning all the way in, weekly recurring leaderboards, a deeper achievement ladder, and Activities, so there is always a fresh race to run and a reason to come back.

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Future

What's next is yours.

After 1.0, the direction comes from the people playing it.
Community

You steer what comes after

There is deliberately no menu of forks here. Every hour is going into finishing what is already built, and we are not sitting on a secret list of what follows. Once 1.0 is out, what gets built next comes from what players actually ask for. If something is worth adding, it gets added, and the asking happens in the open.

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Multiplayer

Multiplayer is a different game

Tideward is single-player by design: a private, offline-first save with no server of ours behind it. A live layer would compromise the exact thing it is good at, so multiplayer is not an open question for this app. It is a separate game, built on the back of this one, penciled for roughly the first quarter of 2028. An intention, not a promise, and nothing about it changes what Tideward is or costs.

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Completed In progress Coming soon Future Vote on what's next? #roadmap on Discord

Want to influence the roadmap?

Alpha testers suggest features, vote on priorities, and see their ideas implemented. Hop into the build, then join the Discord to weigh in.