Tiny Glade News

Hello-hello! Hope the season is starting to look festive where you are. If not, worry not, we’ve got a winter treat for you ❄🍬



We’ve been pondering for a while what the theme of our fifth glade would be. One day, while nature was still trying to make up its mind whether to shed its rusty leaf attire, a myriad of snowflakes blanketed the land, creating this delicious caffè-latte collage of white on orange brown ☕❄ We instantly went home to try it out in Tiny Glade, and we knew that was it 😄

We love how the colorful buildings really pop on the white canvas of snow, prompting you to build islands of warmth and coziness amidst the frosty landscape - an ambience distinct from the other glades (if you missed what those are, check out our previous “A lil’ sneak peek tour'' update).

Long winter nights can feel dark and gloomy, but that’s just an opportunity to cheer them up with some lights! 🕯 In Tiny Glade, you can now plop lanterns on walls, and if you move them on the ground, they will get wooden supports, and stand on their own.



Oh, and we have one more thing to share. I (Ana) am a fan of House Flipper, which - like Tiny Glade - is hugely about enjoying the experience of making something pretty. Our friends at Frozen District have just released the highly anticipated sequel - House Flipper 2! Here's a short message from them:

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Dear Tiny Glade fans! 🙌

We promised our players that House Flipper 2 would be their best holiday gift 🎁 And who knows, maybe you’ll like it too!

If you enjoy being creative (I know you do 😇), and you're into interior (and exterior) design, you might enjoy some house flipping! Take a look at the release trailer and decide for yourself!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1190970/House_Flipper_2/

Cheers! 💝

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Aaaand, that’s all for now! We've got much more to share, but that will have to wait until 2024 🤫

Meanwhile, from the frosty land of Sweden,
we wish you “God Jul!” 🎄 (and “Gott nytt år” 🎆)

Love,
Ana & Tom (and Oda & Martin pass their “God Jul” too 😊)

Hello-hello! Hope you’re doing well, and are settling into the snow-peppered winter moods. We (Ana & Tom) are deep in the woods of prototyping right now. We can't wait to show you all the specials we’ve foraged, but for this dev update, we're giving the mic to our sound designer, Martin Kvale! 🎤🙌

*Taps microphone* Hey folks, this is Martin speaking! I always feel warm on the inside whenever I notice people enjoying the soundscape of Tiny Glade, so I thought I’d share a bit of what goes into crafting the game’s audio!

Most of the sounds in Tiny Glade have been recorded out in the real world. Some of them come from actual bricks, doors, wood planks. But a fun little secret with audio is that things don’t always need to match reality, and there’s quite a lot of expression to be had from experimenting, and from finding odd sources for sound.

For example, I flip the pages of a small notebook for the flopping roof tiles as we change roof height.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

And I use my fingers to go tippy tappy on a table for fences.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Oh, and some sounds that fences make are from chess pieces from my grandfathers chessboard.

kudos to grandma for taking this illustration photo

Just like other aspects of Tiny Glade, designing sound is an iterative process. Initially we even had four bespoke audio themes that could be selected in the game, including an instrumental one, and one made with mouth sounds only 😆 Those were fun, but we quickly settled on the one rooted in the real world - there’s just something viscerally pleasant about hearing all the bricks, rocks and paths responding to you, and it helps sell the visuals too. It sorta makes you intuitively understand the texture and weight of the building blocks. Still, Tiny Glade is not about simulating reality - it’s about doodling charming dioramas. That’s why we blend the real with the playful - the subtle tippy taps, chess piece clacks, and the like 😄 When in doubt, we always let vibes lead the way!

If you are interested in the more technical details of our procedural implementation, I recently did a small showcase for the Save & Sound Steam festival to highlight a few ways we work the sounds into the game. You can see it, and more importantly, hear the examples in this YouTube video.

Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a great week!

Love,
💚

-Martin & the Tiny Glade team

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