Tiny Glade News

Emerges from the familiar pile of TODO stickies. Oh, hello-hello! I hope you’re doing well, and have already had a chance to enjoy any hints of the upcoming spring 🌼 Spring *is* coming, right? 👀 Peeks outside the window to humid grayness and biting wind… Ehh! 🥶

Well, at least in Tiny Glade it’s always sunny 😄 Tom and I have been spending a loooot of time in it - this month has been an intense whirlwind of improvements, bug fixes, and preparations for a v0.1 demo build. The list of TODOs is still formidable, but so far we’re on schedule, and everything is going according to plan o7

There’s a million things to wrap up, but this month one of our main efforts has been completing the code for window interactions.



Windows can now be placed on roofs, on edges between roofs and walls, and they turn into doors atop a stone floor. Corner windows are also a thing now. We saw a few folks trying to attach windows to corners in playtests, so we made that a proper feature 👩‍🔧👨‍🔧

For now, we’ve wrapped up one window family: cottage windows, which we’ll have in the demo. It’s a thread that’s been in development for multiple months now, so we’re very happy it’s finally coming to fruition.

Changing the roof shape will make windows re-adapt as well. You can say our windows are like chameleons 🦎: very blendable with their environment!



Speaking of roofs, we’ve expanded rectangular roof controls, and added a new roof type where two sides are a wall - a so-called “gable”. (and yes, you can place windows on both the roof and the wall parts!)



Tom and I continue to optimize the game. Since one element in Tiny Glade often affects other nearby elements, the biggest improvement is doing computations only when and *where* necessary. In the GIF below, you can see a special developer view: drawing a path/terrain affects only some regions (highlighted as white squares), and then only those cause walls (red outlines) to recompute. It’s an ongoing effort to make every game system as sleepy as possible 🦥 so your computer stays cool and quiet.



Having done some preliminary optimizations, we’re even considering expanding the glade size from what we’ve shown. More on that in a future update 👀

There’s been a lot of other changes, small and large (for example, more music 🎵), but I shall keep this update short and sweet, for I must return to gnawing on my TODO stickies 🦝📄

As always, thank you so much for reading :3 I wish you a wonderful week full of warm thoughts. Until next time!

With love,
Ana & Tom

PS: Tom recently shared his thoughts on what makes a game cozy in this PCGamer interview. Check it out!

PPS: If you’d like to receive our dev diaries straight into your mailbox, we have a newsletter 💌

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Oh my, our first update of 2024. What is a rad way to greet folks in this new day and age? Hi, ahoy, salutations, sup choom! I hope you had a lovely winter break, with a belly full of deliciousness, surrounded by cozies and your loved ones. Even Tom and I broke our hermit mode for a bit, and re-emerged into society to join in on the festivities 🎆 But now, back to Tiny Glade 💪

Ever since the Autumn playtest, I wanted to add bridges (seeing as many people were trying to make them with varying degrees of pain 😅). It took some thinking and iteration on what kind of control scheme would work best, and the design eventually evolved into a more generic system for making buildings elevated!


(are those actually called overhangs? I dunno, but we needed some naming convention in code :D)

This opened up a whole new dimension, literally 😜 Here are some quick tests I did with the new system.



You can make way stranger things now 🧙‍♂️🤪 I’m sure y’all come up with something even crazier and cooler looking! Oh and look, bridges work too! (welp that was the motivation after all)



In Tiny Glade, we want the elements to look cohesive with each other, so adding elevated buildings meant additionally designing a set of systems that would “glue” the pieces together. Thus, we automatically place brackets, supports and stone pillars, which will re-adapt if you move the elevated pieces.



There will of course always be cases we haven’t thought about, considering the freeform nature of the game, but we try to address anything that stands out too much. For example, tiled roofs and flat roofs used to have an unsightly seam - now they will have a row of merlons ✨



The largest chunk of our time is now dedicated to preparing the game for release, as well as crafting a demo. We’re porting prototype systems into shippable code, and doing a lot of improvements across the board. Optimization is an oddly satisfying process, as you have a clear and measurable objective - make the (CPU/GPU) time necessary for a single frame go down. Tom made an automatic system that tracks performance for each of our builds, so we’re now addicted to watching this little crawly critter descend 🤓



Most of our days look something like this 😁👇 Investigating performance, analyzing debug plots, and optimizing the data flow between subsystems. Lots of code, lots of coffee, a touch of zen.



We have a few more shiny gameplay additions, but we want to avoid the remainder of our updates looking programmery like that 👆 So we won’t spoil them all, and instead, pace the new things throughout the future write-ups :3

That brings me to the topic of the release. We said we’d ship in 2024, and it’s 2024, right? Let me just put on my Production Lead hat for a moment… ok, all set 🎩 We have a plan and a launch window in mind. Woo! So, here’s the plan: we know we want to have a demo, so people can try the game, and see if it’s their cup of tea. Since we’ll have a demo, we will want to participate in a Steam Next Fest. The February one is too soon, so we’re aiming for the next one, in June. We want to launch shortly afterwards. Thus, our current guesstimate for Tiny Glade’s release window is Summer 2024. The exact release date will depend on whether we have any major issues to patch, or whether there’s a large game launching next to us, and possibly other factors: maybe we get lucky, and Steam offers to feature our launch on a specific day (anyone from Valve reading this? :D). So yeah, we’ll see how our plan survives contact with reality, but we have a decent degree of confidence (or yolo’ness). We’ll keep you updated!

With all that said, it’s time to wrap up this update. I wish you a beautiful day, and thank you for reading~

Love,
Ana & Tom

Hello-hello! Hope the season is starting to look festive where you are. If not, worry not, we’ve got a winter treat for you ❄🍬



We’ve been pondering for a while what the theme of our fifth glade would be. One day, while nature was still trying to make up its mind whether to shed its rusty leaf attire, a myriad of snowflakes blanketed the land, creating this delicious caffè-latte collage of white on orange brown ☕❄ We instantly went home to try it out in Tiny Glade, and we knew that was it 😄

We love how the colorful buildings really pop on the white canvas of snow, prompting you to build islands of warmth and coziness amidst the frosty landscape - an ambience distinct from the other glades (if you missed what those are, check out our previous “A lil’ sneak peek tour'' update).

Long winter nights can feel dark and gloomy, but that’s just an opportunity to cheer them up with some lights! 🕯 In Tiny Glade, you can now plop lanterns on walls, and if you move them on the ground, they will get wooden supports, and stand on their own.



Oh, and we have one more thing to share. I (Ana) am a fan of House Flipper, which - like Tiny Glade - is hugely about enjoying the experience of making something pretty. Our friends at Frozen District have just released the highly anticipated sequel - House Flipper 2! Here's a short message from them:

◇─◇──◇────◇ ◇────◇──◇─◇

Dear Tiny Glade fans! 🙌

We promised our players that House Flipper 2 would be their best holiday gift 🎁 And who knows, maybe you’ll like it too!

If you enjoy being creative (I know you do 😇), and you're into interior (and exterior) design, you might enjoy some house flipping! Take a look at the release trailer and decide for yourself!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1190970/House_Flipper_2/

Cheers! 💝

◇─◇──◇────◇ ◇────◇──◇─◇

Aaaand, that’s all for now! We've got much more to share, but that will have to wait until 2024 🤫

Meanwhile, from the frosty land of Sweden,
we wish you “God Jul!” 🎄 (and “Gott nytt år” 🎆)

Love,
Ana & Tom (and Oda & Martin pass their “God Jul” too 😊)

Hello-hello! Hope you’re doing well, and are settling into the snow-peppered winter moods. We (Ana & Tom) are deep in the woods of prototyping right now. We can't wait to show you all the specials we’ve foraged, but for this dev update, we're giving the mic to our sound designer, Martin Kvale! 🎤🙌

*Taps microphone* Hey folks, this is Martin speaking! I always feel warm on the inside whenever I notice people enjoying the soundscape of Tiny Glade, so I thought I’d share a bit of what goes into crafting the game’s audio!

Most of the sounds in Tiny Glade have been recorded out in the real world. Some of them come from actual bricks, doors, wood planks. But a fun little secret with audio is that things don’t always need to match reality, and there’s quite a lot of expression to be had from experimenting, and from finding odd sources for sound.

For example, I flip the pages of a small notebook for the flopping roof tiles as we change roof height.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And I use my fingers to go tippy tappy on a table for fences.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Oh, and some sounds that fences make are from chess pieces from my grandfathers chessboard.

kudos to grandma for taking this illustration photo

Just like other aspects of Tiny Glade, designing sound is an iterative process. Initially we even had four bespoke audio themes that could be selected in the game, including an instrumental one, and one made with mouth sounds only 😆 Those were fun, but we quickly settled on the one rooted in the real world - there’s just something viscerally pleasant about hearing all the bricks, rocks and paths responding to you, and it helps sell the visuals too. It sorta makes you intuitively understand the texture and weight of the building blocks. Still, Tiny Glade is not about simulating reality - it’s about doodling charming dioramas. That’s why we blend the real with the playful - the subtle tippy taps, chess piece clacks, and the like 😄 When in doubt, we always let vibes lead the way!

If you are interested in the more technical details of our procedural implementation, I recently did a small showcase for the Save & Sound Steam festival to highlight a few ways we work the sounds into the game. You can see it, and more importantly, hear the examples in this YouTube video.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great week!

Love,
💚

-Martin & the Tiny Glade team