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Tiny Glade News

Demo Patch 1.7.17

Hullo everyone 👋🌊

We continue fixing bugs 🐞 and smoothing things out for the full game's launch. We still see a few reports of the demo crashing at startup, but we've hopefully just fixed one of the causes! 👨‍🔧👩‍🔧

TL;DR:
* Improved video memory management (less VRAM use, by around 700MB)
* Render scale now goes > 1.0 (higher quality image if you have GPU power to spare)
* Render scale is automatically clamped by your video memory (hopefully no more out-of-memory startup crashes)
* Optional image sharpening


[h2]Improved video memory management[/h2]
We've reduced the video memory requirement by around 700MB (around 370MB of that is moved to system memory instead). This should help the game launch on systems with low VRAM, such as GeForce GTX 1050.

On older systems, this may also have a positive impact on performance. In particular, the framerate on our test machine with a Radeon R9 270 has doubled. It's an outlier for sure, but a nice bonus nonetheless.

[h2]Automatic render scale clamp[/h2]
The primary means of controlling performance vs quality in Tiny Glade is the "Render scale" video setting. It changes the internal resolution that the game draws at, making the graphics cheaper at the cost of visual quality.

You could previously set it the [0.1 - 1.0] range. We've now unlocked the top end, so you can set it as high as your video memory allows. If you have the GPU power to spare, you can improve image quality this way. If your screen resolution is 1920x1080, and you set render scale to 2.0, the game will internally render at 3840x2160, and then shrink it down to 1920x1080. In the end you'll see the same number of pixels, but the image will be cleaner.

This automatic render scale clamp also means that if you have very little video memory but high screen resolution, the game will automatically reduce its internal resolution instead of crashing.

[h2]Optional image sharpening[/h2]
Tiny Glade's visual presentation is intentionally soft, but whether you like the softness or not is a matter of personal taste, display device, and visual ability. We've now added a simple contrast-adaptive sharpening filter to the game. It's disabled by default, but you'll find the tweaker in video settings.

[h2]Other stuff[/h2]
* Added sliders for path & garden brush size. Gone are the three separate buttons for path size.
* Tweaked music mix & instruments
* Fixed slightly excessive aliasing & flicker at low resolution scales
* Fixed a crash when splitting windows/doors while mashing clicks
* Fixed a crash when trying to split a floor hatch
* Fixed a crash when previewing a window placement, and then switching to bulldozer/hammer via the keybind, and using the tool in the very next frame
* Tweaked logic of tree canopy see-through (to make the full game's tree tool function better)

Love,
Tom & Ana

Tiny Glade review




Tiny Glade is a game about building rustic old abodes in idyllic pastorals. There are no challenges, there is no narrative, nothing is unlockable and nothing is at stake. This is a meditative digital play object made for tinkering. It's a creative sandbox with firm boundaries designed to make even the most perfunctory effort yield "beautiful" results...
Read more.

Tiny Glade review: lovely tools and procedural flourishes make building castles a treat


Tiny Glade has been a constant presence on TikTok for the last year or so. It's never far away. In between burrito recipes and hymns to the Fujifilm X100v, this gorgeous toylike art tool's gamely turning stretches of balmy meadow into semi-ruined castles, semi-ruined villages and semi-ruined citadels.


Dreamy and slightly haunted, it's conjured words like "bewitching" and "spellbinding" in the comments sections, too. It makes sense, really. Tiny Glade's a game about making rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It's not hard to imagine some exiled magical person might live in here among the rocks and reeds and wild heather.


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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