Tiny Glade News

*Emerges from a pile of TODO notes* 👀 Hi there! 👋 *Takes a sticky off of her forehead* What a busy month! We've been deep in focus mode with numerous UX improvements for the upcoming beta.

This is going to be a long post, so before we go into too much bla-bla, let me first show you what we have right now 🔍 Keep in mind that everything is a work in progress, and still subject to change (I mean, look at that beautiful UI on the left 😆).

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We originally envisioned the game being mostly about tiny castles & ruins. However, during the early playtests we saw that grander castles, countryside manors, or even small villages were a fantasy that the game naturally gravitated towards.

Making those larger builds wall-by-wall was pretty cumbersome and time-consuming though. Thus, we set out to design additional tools that would make it easier to create architectural structures, while keeping the playfulness of our gridless drawing.

Five discarded prototypes later (😅), we now have dedicated circle and rectangle shapes! ⭕🔲



...as well as alignment and snapping helpers for the freeform walls...



...and for the new shapes.



Those additions really expanded the variety and complexity of builds! 🏰✨ At the same time, the game still plays like doodling 🖍 It's just easier and quicker to build something larger now.

We've also been working behind the scenes to improve the game's robustness, and make sure it survives whatever you throw at it. For example, wall pasta! 🍝



Our next planned additions are doors & windows 🏠 We'll keep you posted on their progress!



I mentioned a beta earlier, so let's talk about that! 💆 When is it happening? For now we'll just say "Summer" 😄 We don't yet know how big the (closed) beta will be, but our newsletter will be the main source for recruiting for help 🙏 If you are interested (or simply would like to keep up-to-date), you're welcome to join our mailing list 💌

Aaaaand, that's all for now, folks 👐

Thank you for reading all the way here, and have a lovely rest of the week 😊

💚

-Ana & the Tiny Glade team

Good day! Or evening, or afternoon. Whichever phase of our planet's rotation you’re currently in 🌎🌍🌏

I hope you had a charming Valentine's day 💝 Tom and I made a carrot cake 🍰 and had a long walk in a forest 😌 Oh, wait, that was yesterday... Ah, right, we were fixing bugs on the 14th of Feb, very romantic too 😂🥰

Fixing bugs, you ask? Yes! We've been hard at work preparing our codebase for the upcoming features. So, refactoring, cleanups, optimizations. All the good but invisible work 😅

We’ve ported our graphics engine from OpenGL to Vulkan, finally catching up with the times, and getting some sweet performance improvements. Grass in particular is now twice as fast, and with a screen full of it on the Steam Deck, Tiny Glade runs at around 84 FPS 🥳 That still drops to 30 FPS in a complex build, but we’ll be optimizing some more 💪

We made walls respond to how quickly they’re being drawn, so you easily get both smooth and sharp corners (we also reduced input latency, so drawing feels good even at lower framerates).



And most importantly, we made sure sheep cannot get stuck on rocky terrain 🐑🌂



We also had our very first super tiny playtest with close friends and family. We’re learning how to run playtests in preparation for an eventual beta, and this gave us a chance to dip our toes in the water 🧜‍♂️

While the game is still feature-incomplete and rough around the edges, it was fun to see the vastly different things everyone made: castles, cottages, ruins, wizard towers. The craziest and most intricate build was made by my mom. I love seeing her creative process reflected in this in-game timelapse!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Aaaaand, that's all for now, folks 👐

Have a delightful weekend, and we'll see each other again soon 😊

Ana & the Tiny Glade team

Hello there again~ We're back with a new update. Freshly out of the oven! 🥐👩‍🍳👨‍🍳 We've been hard at work revamping terrain systems in Tiny Glade.



If you've been following us for a while, you might remember these early prototypes.



Landscaping has always been a key feature we wanted in the game, as it adds a lot of variety and storytelling to castle designs. However, with so many other things asking for our attention, the terrain has been somewhat neglected. This month we've finally rolled up our sleeves, and gave the terrain some well-deserved love! 💪😘🌄

The terrain is drawing-based, just like paths and walls. Each stroke creates a hill with its own height...



... as well as steepness that you can edit at any time. The steeper the hill, the rockier it is.



If you lead a path through the rocks, the path will turn into stairs.



By layering a few hills, you can create more complex shapes. All hills stay editable, can be changed at any time, and the affected structures will adapt on the fly.



We don't know how we've lived without proper terrain all this time! 🤯 It adds so much, and we can't wait for you to try it! 🤩 There're still a few kinks to iron out, such as making sure that arches and pillars look good on steep hills, but overall it's coming together better than we hoped for! (a very welcome surprise 😋)

Aaaaand that's all for this update.

See you later 👋 Take care of yourselves! 👐

Best wishes.
Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin

City builders are so often serious business with their resource management and tech trees and threats of impending starvation via overpopulation. I'm happy to get into the weeds on occasion, but sometimes I don't want to survive. I do not want to manage. I just want to vibe and build in peace, please...
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Happy New Year, and welcome to our first post of 2023! 🥳 We hope you had a wonderful holiday and plentiful cozies. We ourselves took some time to recharge, and we're now getting back into focus mode 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Hopefully you are itching for more Tiny Glade news, since we have a couple remaining features to cover from the trailer 🙏 (and a little something on top 🍒)



As you've probably noticed from our screenshots, Tiny Glade has different times of day: noon, dawn, and night. Right now those are just presets, but we're planning to add smooth time passage.



This is a part of a larger theme in the game: you can directly sculpt human-made structures like walls and paths, but the glade is home to animals and plants, and nature has its own ways. We want the world to have natural cycles, to give you moments of focus and building, but also times when you can take a break and relax.

We also have some plans for making each day and night feel a bit different, but more on that another time 🤫



If you followed our game just before its Steam announcement, you might notice that it looks smoother and more visually cohesive than before. That's because we've rewritten most of the lighting code 😀



Previously everything had its own lighting calculations, so the planks in a fence reacted to light differently than the pillars, the bricks, and so on. They all lived in their own tiny universes with different laws of physics 😅 This gave us control in a single lighting situation, such as noon, but made it hard to achieve a pleasing look across all times of day.

We've since unified all the lighting, and moved to deferred shading. The latter also allowed us to switch from multisample anti-aliasing (MSAA) to temporal anti-aliasing (TAA). The result is a game that looks better _and_ runs faster 🤓 Just the way we like it!





Of course we couldn't keep ourselves away from Tiny Glade for long, so during the Christmas break we did a bit of cleaning, refactoring, and added a few small things here and there. Not all of them are visual, but this one is pretty fun - now if you raise a tower quickly, a few roof tiles will bounce up 😋



Aaaand that's all for now. Thank you for reading, and for the overwhelmingly positive response so far 💘 Many of your comments have put gigantic smiles on our faces 😁 We aim to return the favor once the game is in your hands :3

Until the next update 👋
Ana, Tom, Martin & Oda 🏰🌿