Tiny Glade News

Hello-hello! I hope your Halloween was filled with just the right blend of chills, thrills, and pumpkin spice 🎃 Now as the crisp air settles in, it’s time to snuggle back into something cozy again... Although, wait, come to think of it, maybe there is a spooky-wholesome crossover somewhere 👀🤔 *scribbles in the heavy notebook of wild ideas* … umm, anyway, where were we? Ah, yes!..

Let’s discuss what’s new in the world of Tiny Glade!

Up until recently we’ve been prototyping and developing individual features. While those are certainly important, we really wanted to find out how the whole package might feel once finished. That’s why we’ve spent some time weaving it all together, improving the interface, adding menus, settings, saves, and so on. It would take too long to list it all… Luckily, they say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a video with 9,241 frames, worth 9,241,000 words! 🤓

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hopefully that gave you a glimpse of where we’re at! 👐

Right now, Tom and I are working on technical foundations to enable roof attachments, like dormers and chimneys, as well as gluing buildings together through additional architectural elements and cute clutter. We’re also tinkering with the existing tools to better support some types of builds we’ve spotted in playtests. All the while we’re also continuously evaluating potential release windows, when to run a demo, planning optimizations, testing on various hardware, etc., etc. So, in short - lots to do, as usual 😄

We will continue updating you as we go!


(The manor from the video in Autumn & Olden glades. I liked how different the moods felt, so I had to add some gifs ^^)

Thank you so much for reading, and we hope you have a great weekend!

Love,
Ana & Tom

Hello there, my favorite traveling companion! I hope I’m not interrupting your binging of Baldur’s Gate 3, as I bring forth news from the lands of Tiny Glade 🧙🏰 The totally-not-rigged dialogue options are “yesss”, “yes please”, and “show me naaaawww!” 😁

First and foremost, we have a shiny new trailer 🎬✨ If you’ve managed to catch it during the Future Games Show, thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it 💗 But if you haven’t seen it yet, worry not, here it is:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

(While the trailer was a combined effort of everyone in the team, we’d like to give a special shoutout to our music composer, Oda Tilset, for writing such a beautiful track 🎼)

Having finished the new trailer, we also had a quick look at our Steam page, and realized that it too needed some updates. It’s now full of fresh GIFs and screenshots for you to peruse, like thes ones below :3



If you look closely, you may notice that the game feels somewhat… refreshed. That’s because we’ve completely replaced the lighting code (haha, yes, again! 🤓). We now have ray-traced global illumination, which is a fancy way of saying that objects bounce light between each other 🏓💡🏓 (don’t worry, no fancy new graphics card required; our hardware requirements stay the same!)

This feature has been brewing in the background for over four months, but now that it has landed, we simply cannot go back :D Below is a comparison of old vs new lighting 😎



(The castle above was made by one of our playtesters.
Thank you so much, Sebastian! 💚)

Previously, we had three individual settings, which we hand-tuned to look OK: noon, sunset, and midnight. Now all times of day are consistent, and can even smoothly transition into each other! This means we can finally enable the passage of time, and let you raise buildings in the day, watch them bask in the last rays of the setting sun, and finally unwind to night ambience 💙 … or whatever works for you! 🧛



This is but one of the new features we’d love for you to try in our upcoming closed playtest in October! We will send out a signup form in the next newsletter, so keep your eyes peeled 👀

Aaaand, that’s all for now 👐 Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week!

Love,
Tom & Ana

Hello 👋 Hope you’re enjoying a lovely summer 🌞 We had a small holiday break ourselves, and took a trip to Sigtuna, one of the oldest Swedish towns with stone ruins dating back to the 11th century! We also visited a few nearby castles, and of course we took a million reference photos. Some people take pictures of beautiful sunsets or well-plated meals; our photo galleries are filled with walls 😆


(Totally normal holiday pictures)

It was a soothing change of pace from the intensity of the past few months. As you may have read in our newsletter, we’d been working hard to prepare Tiny Glade for the world, and just last month we had our very first closed playtest 🎮 We’d been mega nervous, but the vibes turned out to be the wholesomest! Every screenshot of what folks made was like opening a gift on Christmas morning 😄🎁

We were relieved by everyone’s positive reactions, and floored by the mountain of great feedback. The combined creative juices swirled into spicy new ideas, a few of which we’ve already started cooking 🍲👨‍🍳👩‍🍳 They will of course need to be tasted too, so we’re already planning the next playtest 🚀 As before, we will be recruiting from our newsletter!

Meanwhile, we’ve also been preparing a new trailer 🎬✨ The old one is no longer representative, and we’ve been itching to update it for a while. Then the perfect opportunity arose as we were invited to participate in the Future Games Show! 🎉 The new trailer is almost finished, and looks incredible if I may say so myself 😸 If you’d like to see it live, the show will be broadcast on Wednesday August 23, 2023 at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST.

The past few months we were busy with mostly “invisible” architectural work, so it’s been fun to switch to improving visuals :D Paths finally got some well-deserved love…



… we also added a flowery variant of ivy, and made it avoid growing on windows…



…and finally the plaster prototype is getting into the game alongside neater cornerstones.



However, the shiniest improvement I’m keeping for the trailer 😁🤫

Aaand, that’s all 👐 Have a wonderful remainder of summer, and go get that vitamin D! 😄

Love,
Ana & Tom

Hello-hello there 👋 How are you? OMG so much sun, right? Is Vitamin D overdose a thing? 🤔 We’ve been talking to ducks lately (maybe that’s the overdose?), and watching Double Fine PsychOdyssey. Both are great! 😆

In the last update we gave you a peek behind the curtain at our early coloring prototypes and windows. This month, we've been forging ahead on that path, turning those prototypes into a colorful reality! ✨🦄

Below is an in-game replay of Ana’s test build showing the new color tweaking. Originally, she had planned to create a hobbit cottage, but somewhere along the way, it took on a bit of a grimsical twist. 🦇

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We still need to finish up our plaster experiments, as the walls currently only have four brick variants:



Still, even just the simple coloring is already a lot of fun 🥳 You’ll be able to make your dreams come true, particularly if they involve vampire manors sitting alongside cute fairytale castles 🧛🍵👀

Naturally, we ensured that the windows and coloring play nicely with the rest of the building tools 👨‍🔧👩‍🔧



We love tinkering with joyful interactions, so we couldn’t stop ourselves from letting windows gossip, hang out, and exchange handshakes 🤝 As it turns out, windows are peculiar little critters that communicate through clotheslines! 🧺 Who would have guessed?



And that's a wrap, folks! 🖖 Stay awesome, be healthy, and eat delicious edibles!

Yours truly, 💚
The tiny Tiny Glade team

P.S. If you'd like to follow the development of Tiny Glade even closer, and get those updates straight into your inbox along with a few extra personal bits, you're most welcome to join our newsletter 💌

Greetings! Has Spring already settled in with you? 💚 Our outside view is looking better and better, and even in the frosty Scandinavia, nature is awakening 🌷 Finally, lush meadow references for Tiny Glade will be just a short bike ride away! 📸

We have another update for you, and boy is it a lengthy one! There’s a lot to cover, from improvements and shiny new features to news about the release. Maybe grab some tea or coffee or any beverage of your choice, and get comfy. No rush, we’ll wait 🍵

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Tiny Glade is about to become a whole lot more colorful 🥰🎨 Our trusty beige bricks have served us well, but we’ve been itching to add some customization for a while. We think you’ll like the new possibilities ✨



Quick disclaimer: you’re looking at cherry-picked images from various prototypes. We’ve been too excited not to share these, but please keep in mind that it’s all an early work in progress, and we’ll be iterating on color schemes, windows, interface, code, and so on 😄



One of the things we love about Tiny Glade is the way elements play with each other: for example, how paths and walls come together to form arches, or that stairs appear when a path climbs a steep hill. The windows we’re adding will have the same kind of joyful chemistry.



Here you can see just some of the interactions between windows: they fuse, adapt, bloom with plants, and become adorned with miniature clutter.

Oh, oh, and we have *two* styles of windows: “cottage” (gif above) and gothic (gif below).



We’re also improving the existing building blocks and their robustness. We’ve recently finished a big rewrite of our procedural arch generator, which allowed us to address a few edge cases.

The arch algorithm was one of the oldest pieces of code in Tiny Glade, from back when the meadow was completely flat. Once we added terrain, the poor thing couldn’t handle elevation, and produced rather avant-garde results 😆🙈



We still have a few minor issues to solve, but the new version is looking a lot better now 😺 We’ve also implemented one of your suggestions: when the wall is raised high, the wooden lintels and posts turn into stone arches and pillars to support the additional weight.



We often get questions about what magical algorithm we’re using, and the real answer is: a lot of them! There are entire chains of bespoke procedural algorithms feeding into one another, creating the final experience that will (hopefully) feel easy to use, and look effortlessly beautiful.

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Now that the bigger pieces of the project are beginning to solidify, we could finally make a realistic attempt at planning the release of Tiny Glade.

Apart from wrapping up windows, doors, color customization, and adding some polish all around, there are still a few game features we want to prototype - continuous time of day, water, and plant brushes. There are many "invisible" things too, such as optimization, accessibility, localization, load & save & options menus, running playtests, and making it easy for you to send us bug reports.

That’s a lot of stuff, and when we arranged it on a timeline, no matter how we reshuffled the to-do stickies, the potential release ended up beyond the end of this year. We will refine the estimate as we go, but for now, we can say that Tiny Glade will ship in 2024.



We know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting the game’s release, and we’re truly humbled. Thank you for sticking with us so far, and following the development journey. Reading your messages, and seeing your posts and videos about Tiny Glade have all been tremendous motivation boosts.

Tiny Glade is a passion project for our small team, and we’re working our very hardest to make it into a lovable experience for you. We will continue sharing monthly updates, and keep you up to date.

With love 🧡,
Tom, Ana, Martin & Oda

PS: last month, we revealed our plans for a closed beta this Summer. Some of you have been asking how to participate. We will be sending a signup form with our newsletter closer to the first playtest. “First,” you say? Yes! We are thinking of doing multiple smaller playtests. We’re still figuring out the details! More info to come. Stay tuned! 😁