Tiny Glade News

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! 😁

*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