Tiny Glade News

v.1.12.0 Update - Controller Support

Hellowdy there, how are thee? I hope the frosty season is treating you well 💙 Here in the land of fika, the sun is slowly awakening from its nap, and the cold will only last three more months 🤭

While not great for vitamin D, the darkness does align with productive game development. We've finished conjuring the ancient incantations of Steam Input, infused the magicks of VDFs and action glyphs into Tiny Glade, and the tickbox of "Controller Support" is now officially ticked! Thanks to everyone who helped us test the beta :3

[h3]Your Steam may need booping[/h3]
Steam sometimes caches old controller layouts, and you may need to restart it and/or reapply the official layout. Otherwise it might end up being an odd crossbreed of our new one and something from the before times.

[h3]Control hints[/h3]
If you'd like to see the control hints/tutorial again, make sure to click Settings -> Game -> Control Hints -> Reset.

[h3]What's there[/h3]

All the menus and UIs can now be navigated using controllers: DPad/Left Joystick, A/B, L1/R1.
The same is also true for the keyboard: Arrow keys, Enter/Esc, PgDown/PgUp.
There's now two action sets in Steam Input: one for gameplay, and one for the menu.
Action sets expose a whole bunch of extra controls useful for custom layouts.
Tutorials/input hints in the game show controller glyphs.
The game will dynamically detect any connected controllers, and seamlessly read input from all of them and/or keyboard + mouse.
On Steam Deck, the folder icon in photo mode now shows an info screen for where to find screenshots in SteamOS's menus.
There's now a "Controller Bindings" button in the Controls menu (only shows if you have a controller connected).
Ditto for key bindings; they have been moved to their own sub-screen.
You can now draw walls & fences by clicking and moving the camera instead of the cursor.

[h3]What's not there yet[/h3]
There's a few things that we'll address in future patches:

There's a bunch of new strings that we haven't yet localized to other languages.
If you change the toolbar alignment in settings, you'll need to restart the game, or controller mapping will be all borked.
Our graphics driver warning/information screen doesn't support controllers yet.

[h3]What's next[/h3]
Our next step in controller land is to fix a few small things, and then ask Valve to have another look at our Steam Deck support. Then we can hopefully get "Deck Verified" soon :3

Beyond that, we have a few updates cooking, ranging from optimizations to gameplay features, but more on that soon, so make sure to keep those radio receivers well tuned 📻🧓

Stay awesome!

Love,
Tom & Ana

[BETA] Controller support

Hey y'all! 👋 You may remember that we've been working on proper Steam Deck support. As a side effect of that, we're adding general controller support too 🤗🎮️

Before we make it official, we'd love to hear from you. While we do have hands, and we did our best to roll, boop, and pat them all over PS4, Xbox and Steam Deck controllers, we trust that you'll do that more expertly.

Let us know what you think about the default controller mapping, and please poke us if you encounter any usability issues 📝

[h3]Note on left vs right triggers[/h3]
A likely thing that might throw some folks off is that we've put the primary interaction ("left mouse click") on the left trigger, while it might be expected on the right. We found it physically tricky to use the right joystick for precise manipulation in the game while also holding the right trigger at the same time, so we put them on separate hands. If you find that a different configuration works better for you, let us know!

[h3]Testing this beta patch[/h3]
If you'd like to help out and opt into the beta, go to Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then Properties → Betas → Beta participation → Select "beta-1_12_0".

Unlike some of the other betas, no shenanigans are needed with save files.

Please note that if you've previously played using the controller, you may need to switch to the new official layout.

[h3]What's there[/h3]

All the menus and UIs can now be navigated using controllers: DPad, A/B, L1/R1.
The same is also true for the keyboard: Arrow keys, Enter/Esc, PgDown/PgUp.
There's now two action sets in Steam Input, one for gameplay, and one for the menu.
The action sets expose a whole bunch of extra controls.
The default controller layout uses those actions instead of emulating mouse/keyboard interactions.

[h3]What's not there yet[/h3]
There's a few things that we'll address in future patches:

Tutorials still only show keyboard/mouse controls. We still need to extend our code to add support for acquiring the correct icons from Steam. Meanwhile, you can check the bindings in Steam's own controller mapping menus.
There's a bunch of new strings that we haven't yet localized to other languages.
If you change the toolbar alignment in settings, you'll need to restart the game, or controller mapping will be all borked.
Hot-plugging of controllers doesn't work, and if you have multiple controllers attached, only one is recognized.

[h3]Feedback[/h3]
You're welcome to share it in this post's thread 💛 Thanks a lot :3

Love,
Tom & Ana

Popular diorama builder Tiny Glade is getting better Steam Deck support

Tiny Glade is a gorgeous and relaxing diorama builder about doodling castles and all sorts all over the screen, it's seriously impressive and they've announced work is ongoing for improving it on Steam Deck.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/01/popular-diorama-builder-tiny-glade-is-getting-better-steam-deck-support/

Patch 1.11.2 - alternative camera rotation & zoom modes

Hi everyone! Here comes the first patch of 2025 :3 As you might have read in our latest dev diary, we're currently working on improving the Steam Deck experience, and this is the first patch towards that goal!

[h2]New camera options[/h2]

[h3]Rotation[/h3]

Rotation around the cursor (PC Default)
Currently, when holding RMB, the camera rotates around the point under the cursor. Conceptually, you can think of the cursor "grabbing" the point. For example, in the gif below, because the cursor is over the pumpkins, the camera rotates around them.

Rotation around the center (New option, Steam Deck default)
The new option allows to rotate around the center of the screen instead. Thus, in the example below, even though our cursor is over the pumpkins, the camera will rotate around the house.

This mode should improve the Steam Deck experience, and if you’re on PC, and you’ve been struggling with the camera suddenly yeeting itself as you try to rotate, we recommend checking it out too! You can switch the mode in Settings ➡ Controls ➡ Camera (2/7) ➡ Camera Rotation Pivot ➡ Center Region.

There's two variants of this: "Center point" and "Center region". The former rotates around the point that is directly in the center of the screen. While precise and easy to understand, it is often surprising, especially with tall builds -- you might want to rotate around a tower, but the screen center is just to the side of it, causing the rotation to be anchored on the background. The "Center region" variant aims to address that by considering points in a square around the screen center, and finding the most promising rotation pivot within it.

Tiny Glade on Steam Deck will now use the "Center region" variant by default. If you'd like to switch back to the old default, select "Cursor point" in the settings menu.

[h3]Zoom[/h3]

Zoom towards the cursor (PC Default)
Same applies to the zoom. By default, the camera will zoom in/out the point under the cursor.

Zoom towards the center (New option, Steam Deck default)
The new option allows to remap the camera to zoom in/out the center of the screen instead.

You can switch the mode in Settings ➡ Controls ➡ Camera (2/7) ➡ Camera Zoom Pivot ➡ Center Region.

Tiny Glade on Steam Deck will now use the "Center region" variant by default. If you'd like to switch back to the old default, select "Cursor point" in the settings menu.

[h2]Misc[/h2]
Aaaand we also did a few miscellaneous fixes, here is the full list:

✍ Toolbar will no longer exceed the bounds of the game window
✍ Toolbar's subcategories are now correctly sorted when cycling through them by repeatedly clicking the main category buttons
⚙️ Default resolution scale to 0.7 on the Steam Deck (the game might look blurrier on Steam Deck, but will run considerably faster)
🔊 Iteration and small fixes for clutter SFX
🐛 Fix a potential synchronization bug in presenting rendered images to the screen (another wild guess that might help with NVIDIA crashes)
🐛 Fix resolution scale shrinking and staying low upon alt-tabbing in memory-constrained conditions (the game will attempt to restore the desired resolution scale once VRAM is available again, and will no longer save the automatically-reduced scale to settings)
🔬 Add more graphics troubleshooting options to "Vulkan extension settings"

That's all for now. Thank you for reading, and stay awesome!

Love,
Tom & Ana

Dev Diary: Steam Deck progress 🎮

Hello-hello! We hope you had a lovely winter break, and the new year had started with a good dose of fun hobbies, warm beverages and baked goods 🥧

We’re baking something too, and though not edible, it will be a good contribution to the cozy evenings. We’re working on controller support & improving the experience on Steam Deck 🎮

A good chunk of this work will be general QoL improvements and fixes, so we’ve decided to break the work up into multiple smaller patches, and make them live as soon as they’re ready in the coming weeks. One such update is already available, where we’ve added an alternative mode for camera rotation and zoom. This mode should improve the Steam Deck experience, and if you’re on PC, and you’ve been struggling with the camera suddenly yeeting itself as you try to rotate, we recommend checking it out too! See here for the full patch notes.

We expect that these patches will take our time until early February(ish). Afterwards we plan to switch to improving more gameplay stuff.

Aaaand that’s all for this short dev diary. Thank you for reading and hope you have a good day 🧡

Love,
Ana & Tom

P.S. we’re also preparing a batch of 30 new daily themes, and they will start on January 22 📅