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Tiny Glade News

Dev Diary: 10 days until launch 🙌

Hello-hello, lovely people! I hope you’re doing well and you’re as excited for the release as we are. This is going to be the last dev diary before launch, and it’s a chunky one 😄 So, let’s dive right into it.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been testing the game to make sure it runs well, and that no nasty bugs plague our launch 🐛🔫🐑 We’ve shared a build with a few folks, aaaaand… well, I think I’ll just show you what they made 😁 To say I feel inspired doesn’t begin to express it - I’m brimming with anticipation to see what y’all're gonna build once the game is out 🤩


(Higher res version here)

You might notice that the water in some of the screenshots looks a bit different. That’s because it slightly changes its appearance based on the glade you choose - and even turns into ice in Winter. Here is the same build in different glades. It really changes the mood :3



Speaking of mood, we’ve added camera filters to the photo mode 📸 They can drastically alter the tone, and turn a cutesy house into a sinister manor 🦇 Here’s just a few of them:




(build by Private117)

In addition to the color filters, we’ve also added two artistic effects: “painterly”, which overlays brush strokes (similar to the main menu effect), and what we call a “sculpture” mode, which turns everything white, leaving only the interplay of geometric details and light.



Another thing we’ve been working on is Daily Themes 📅 Each theme is a short prompt and a starting build. Hopefully they will provide a fun little challenge, and inspire you to try something new. We’ve already prepared 30 for the launch month 🙌



Right now, we’re making sure everything is ready for the release day, and ironing out as many kinks as we can. While we’re actively playtesting the full version, it is with a tiny group, and you never know what kinds of quirks can pop up in the wild. We’ve been diligent with backporting engine changes to the demo version - so most of the big internal modifications will have been battle-tested by launch. Even then, during the launch week we’ll be obsessively monitoring our crash database and bug reports, and actively patching the game (if you were around during the Steam Next Fest demo, we’re probably gonna have a similar patch cadence ^^).

Once the first wave of patches is done, our next big step will be Steam Deck verification. While you can play Tiny Glade on the Deck at launch, we don’t really recommend it yet. We don’t have a proper control scheme, so unless you’re using a mouse and a keyboard, it will be quite clunky 😅

Oh, and last but not least, we’re releasing the soundtrack for Tiny Glade 🎶 It will be available on Steam on the 25th of September, and on Bandcamp on launch day, 23rd of September.

Okie-dokie, I think this is it for now 😄 I’m gonna go back to other launch preparations :3 Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing your creations!

Much love,
Ana & Tom

(small) Demo Patch 1.7.10a

Oops, looks like a crash has slipped past our testing. Here's a quick patch to address that.

* Fix crash if clicking to resize a wall, but not moving the cursor.

The engine was just a bit too paranoid, thinking the world was on fire, and intentionally crashing to avoid state corruption... Except the edge case was just fine ^^; Sorry about that, and thanks or the crash reports, so we could quickly identify it and fix it
Cheers,
Tom & Ana

Demo Patch 1.7.10

Good evening/morning/your-local-time, everyone! 👋 We're hard at work getting the game in shape for launch, and in the process we've improved a lot of stuff that also benefits the demo. And so we have another patch for y'all :3

Here's a couple of highlights!

[h2]🧵🔗 Fixed seams in gates[/h2]

We've fixed a long-standing bug where you'd sometimes get this odd seam in the middle of a gate or an arch. It was an artifact from the early times, as Tiny Glade started as just a toy for drawing wall segments. At some point we added support for gluing those together into closed shapes, but a lot of the underlying generators still couldn't deal with the concept of closed loops.

Now utilizing the breakthrough technology of Euclidean division, we bring you a fix. Behold! 🎉



[h2]🤖❄️ Reduced CPU utilization[/h2]

A few of you have reported excessive processor utilization while playing the game. Thanks for reporting it! This was due to a combination of a bug and optimization skewed in favor of performance over efficiency. We've now fixed the bug, and switched our task scheduler to let the CPU sleep more. The latter comes at a slight performance hit, so if you don't mind the extra heat, you can turn off "Eco mode" in the game's settings.

[h2]📑 The complete list[/h2]

* You might see two new tutorials: terrain steepness and roof shape profile
* The "move wall" gizmo is now scaled down if the wall is short
* Fix gaps in stone floor mesh on narrowest towers
* Fix excessive CPU utilization
* Add CPU "eco mode" setting (on by default)
* Misc color tweaks for roofs and walls
* Brick column sound cannot play more often than 40ms now
* New platform stairs indicator (instead of vertical lines, there is now a horizontal decorative element)
* Fix cottage dormer gap between roof tiles and window frame
* Fix for intermittent audio-related hard crashes that were not captured by our crash reporter
* Add shadows under main menu for better readability
* Fix brightness icon in photo mode
* Fix a bug where you couldn't create any more terrain strokes after doing 100 terrain operations
* Revamped tree see-thru; it should now work consistently regardless of camera position
* Fix camera viewfinder/focus rectangle glitches
* Fix toolbar button feedback loop
* Fix double expand/shrink sounds from toolbar autohide
* New instrument layers in music
* Tweaks in SFX & music
* FPS limiter shall no longer go brrr after restoring a minimized window
* Wall lanterns are slightly less restrictive with arches
* Fix the seam of doom that existed in enclosed shapes / buildings, splitting gates and arches in half
* Assorted crash fixes

And that's it for now!

Love,
Tom & Ana

(small) Demo Patch 1.6.12

Heyyyyyy folks! 👐 Just one thing here:

- Fixed a rare timing-sensitive crash when moving windows between buildings.

This one has been puzzling us for a while , but with enough data from y'all, we've managed to piece it together, and find a fix. Thanks for sending the crash reports our way! 💞

Love,
Tom & Ana

Demo patch 1.6.11 - Time of Day UI

Howdy folks! We continue focusing on wrapping up the full game, but we've accumulated enough fixes relevant to the demo, so here's another patch! 😊

We've also finally replaced the placeholder Time of Day UI. The new one comes with the space-age technology of circular sliders, allowing more precise control over sun angles 🧭🌞



And then there's an assorted list of tweaks and fixes:

* Allow a wider range of arch heights
* Fix lanterns glitching on & off when you have a lot of them
* Fix music looping glitches
* Misc audio & music tweaks
* Misc roof gap fixes
* A number of random optimizations

See y'all in the next one! 👐

Love,
Tom & Ana