Tiny Glade News

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 🏰🌿

Hello again! 👋😀

Welcome to our first developer update! In the month leading to the Steam page reveal we've been rather secretive, so as not to spoil any surprises 🤫 As such, we have a few features to show that premiered in the trailer.



We now have roofs which can be placed atop towers! What are towers, you ask? They're walls drawn in the shape of a circle: simply keep holding the mouse or controller button after drawing a loop, and the game will straighten it for you:



Once your tower is built, click its top, and a roof will pop up:



Just as walls are constructed from individual bricks, roofs are assembled from tiles, creating intricate and unique detail. Each roof can be tweaked, changing its profile and alignment.



Initially we didn't think roofs would be that big of a deal, but the moment we added them, they instantly changed the kinds of dioramas we build when playing the game. We would no longer just create ruins -- suddenly we were building cozy cottages and palaces. It seems like a promising direction, so now we really need to add doors and windows too 👀



We've recently added sheep to the game, and they were quick to make the meadows their own 😀 We plan to give them all slightly different looks and personalities, along with varying tones of "baaaaah". What role will they play in the game? Who knows! Will they secretly scheme to take over the world while looking all cuddly and adorable? We cannot say 🤭





You can't have a cozy game without cozy music -- and we shall have the coziest music! The trailer features an original score composed by Oda Tilset, who is also making music for the game. We're only just starting, but you can already find the work-in-progress soundtrack on Bandcamp. Be sure to check it out, and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your feedback!


...... aaaaand that's it for now, folks! We haven't covered all the new goodies yet, so pay us a visit again next month, in 2023! ✨🥳

Meanwhile, we'll be taking some time off to unwind and recharge during the holidays, so we can start the new year full of energy, and running full-steam ahead.

We wish you the coziest holidays 🎁🎄 and we hope you have a wonderful time with your loved ones 💖 Take care of yourselves, and we see each other again next year 🎆

XOXOXOXO,
Tom, Ana, Oda & Martin 🏰🌿

You've probably seen a few gifs of Tiny Glade at some point over the past year on Twitter or TikTok (though I'm not sure it had a name or Steam page until recently). Do you remember short clips of someone moving a mouse over green pasture and effortlessly drawing wooden fences, stone walls, castle towers and pointed rooftops, and then click-and-dragging to make little adjustments and tweaks and thinking "Oh my gosh, that looks divine."..
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