Oh my gosh, folks, you did it! Thanks to your nominations, Tiny Glade is one of the finalists in the "Sit Back and Relax" Steam Awards category We can hardly believe it, this is already beyond what we've ever expected :DD if you'd like to vote for us in the finals too, you can do so in the box above. Thanks again, you're all awesome!
Lots of love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-12-19 18:00:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oops! We accidentally gave fish and birds too many treats and they were being extremely hyperactive This is fixed now! Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks to everyone who reported the bug (You might need to restart your Steam client to prompt the update) Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-12-19 16:22:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! This is just a small patch with a few fixes:

• Fix trees hovering above ground when grabbed from elevated terrain
• Add missing translations for the "Control Hints" sub-category in the settings menu
• Change settings menu overlay from green to white when in Winter glade during the day
• Fix volume of placing lanterns & flags into water
• Add a unique sound for placing arrow slits
• Tweak water draw and erase sounds in Winter glade
• Greatly reduce column sounds intensity to avoid the cacophony when they spawn and despawn in a quick succession
• Tweak raise building sounds and moving half-timbered buildings
• Fix water ambience being too strong dependent on where the camera is
• Add ray-traced occlusion for water ambience and duck landing & takeoff SFX
• Fix first person footstep sounds playing the water/path/garden when walking on structures

Have a good day! Love, Ana, Tom & Martin

[ 2024-12-19 08:42:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello! Hope you're well and feeling festive You might have noticed that we've been beta testing new features You might even have participated, in which case - wholeheartedly thank you We're happy to say that it is time to release this update into the wild!

Highlights

Movable clutter

First highlight of the update is the ability to adjust the automatically spawned clutter. You can now move, rotate, delete and clone it. I can't wait to see what you make - picnic spots, taverns, a hut where a hoarder of food baskets dwells? :DD

Many lights

build by Omayli You might have noticed that only 32 lights illuminated things before. Not anymore! We've cooked fancy lighting tech that has allowed us to remove the light count limit as well as adjust the intensity of lights. Just in time for the festive season :3

Daily themes + Winter music

We've prepared 7 festive daily themes that will run from Dec 19 until Dec 26. And we've also updated Winter music with new layers for the holiday season

New clutter objects

I couldn't resist a fantasy of making a market for the holiday season, so there's now a stall with bread and a stall with veggies. And then I thought a crate of fish would go well too. A few evenings later, there were also an anvil, fabric rolls (Tom says they look like bedrolls, heh), a rack with brooms, a door bell, a drrkrans and a new flower box. And then I thought, why not bring back Halloween clutter too (a barrel with candles, 2 variants of pumpkins, a cart with pumpkins, boxes with pumpkins). Hopefully these will be fun to play with, especially now that you can arrange them to your liking Okay, phew, this covers the highlights and below you can find the full changelog

Changelog

Major:

Automatically spawned clutter can now be moved, rotated, deleted and cloned

Light limit has been lifted from 32 to 32,768

Updated Winter music with more festive layers for the holiday season Minor:

Lantern light intensity can now be chosen among 3 values

Lantern light colors now have equal luminous power (so blue and purple look similar in intensity to other colors)

New clutter objects: anvil, fabric rolls, stall with breads, stall with veggies, crate with fish, rack with brooms, bench without basket, door bell, drrkrans, flower box + halloween themed clutter (barrel with candles, 2 variants of pumpkins, crate with pumpkins, boxes with pumpkins)

7 festive daily themes coming on Dec 19 - Dec 26

Birds can sit on bird nests, lanterns, flags, and some clutter objects

Sheep will now avoid clutter

Brick limit has been lifted from 1M to 2M

Roof tile limit has been lifted from 128k to 256k

F6 feedback tool can now also be used to send performance benchmarks to us

Lanterns and flags now ignore collision with fences when placed on terrain, so you can place them closer for neater arrangements

Holding a disable snapping key (LCtrl by default) while manipulating rotatable objects (ground flags, ground lanterns and clutter) will switch to rotation

In the main menu, there's a newsletter button now next to Discord

In the settings menu, Tutorials have been renamed to "Control Hints", and there's no longer "enable tutorial" button. Instead, there's "complete all" which will mark all hints as completed to hide them. This way, when a new feature arrives, you always get a hint about the new controls. Fixes:

Fixed incorrect handling of WinAPI display mode errors, which could result in a crash loop upon enabling Fullscreen.

Use "File::sync_all" / "FlushFileBuffers" before closing files to reduce save corruption risk on Windows (thanks, Notepad++ forums folks!)

Fix rogue underground floors and columns which sometimes were interfering with placement of objects

Fix NaN-related crash when looking perfectly down and placing lanterns

Fix water ambience attenuation in first person mode

Fix water ambience audio source to prioritize playing the source closest to the player camera

New tutorial additions will no longer reset the whole tutorial state (oops!)

Left-clicking on lanterns and clutter is now ignored, since they don't have a random seed that can be changed as a result of the clicking

Ground flags will change their pattern if you click on rotation gizmo too (not just the bottom white dot)

The crash reporter will now detect crashes caused by OBS, and provide workaround info

Big tree in Olden glade is now easier to grab, and when grabbing it, it will no longer jump

Fix settings menu overlay from purple to dark green when in Olden glade at night Aaaaand that's all for now. Thank you for reading :3 We wish you happy holidays!
Love, Ana, Tom, Martin & Oda

[ 2024-12-16 16:37:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! We're wrapping up the movable clutter and many lights that we mentioned in our last dev diary. We aim to make the update live next week, and we'd like to make sure that these new features work well in the wild

Testing this beta patch

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_11_0". The save files of this beta are separate from the main version of the game, and this is a beta rather than a regular patch. What does that all mean?

• When using the beta, you won't see the glades you've built in the default branch.
• We made beta saves separate from the regular saves because the beta branch contains new code unavailable in the default branch. Thus, the save files created in beta won't work in the default branch until we merge the beta into the default branch.
• You can however copy your previous saves manually into the beta if you like.
• Saves for the beta are in the "beta-saves" folder alongside "saves" in "C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID" ("~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID" on Linux)
• The beta saves are not synchronized to Steam Cloud.
• Some stuff might misbehave, and we might need to make changes if necessary. Beware that your beta builds might change
• After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the regular saves folder.
• Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves.

How to report a bug

If you encounter something broken, we'd appreciate an in-game report using the F6 key and there is also a beta testing channel on Discord you're welcome to join. Thank you! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-12-10 10:03:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh, hey, it's Steam Awards time :DD If Tiny Glade was your moment of zen this year, consider nominating it for "Sit Back and Relax" Thank you
Love, Ana & Tom
(I really wanted to use this GIF. Thanks to Onyxia for making it :3)

[ 2024-11-28 17:28:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! How have you been? Hope all is good? Seems like nothing has exploded while we were away *looks around*. Mostly intact I see! Phew, good Tom and I are finally back from our semi-break, and we continue tinkering with Tiny Glade. I say semi-break, because we still ended up doing some work stuff, just not coding. But now that the physical reality is taken care of, we can go back to our little dev cave and indulge in ALL the coding, hehe. We also synced with Martin & Oda, our audio peeps, and they will continue collaborating with us on Tiny Glade! Woo! Full steam ahead :DD So, what are we working on right now? Toms cooking fancy lighting tech that will let us remove the light count limit (you might have noticed that only 32 lights actually illuminate things around them atm). Its looking very promising so far, and Im personally brimming with anticipation for fully-lit towns and [strike]creepy[/strike] very wholesome dungeons
And Im looking into the ability to move the automatically-spawned clutter. The GIF below is a work-in-progress prototype, but I think its gonna be pretty awesome once its wrapped up :33 Finally, you will be able to put benches anywhere and end the tyranny of birdnests
Were planning to bundle those two into one update, along with some smaller fixes. We aim for the end of December, hopefully in time for the holidays Anyway, Ill be going back to my tinkering now. Hope youve enjoyed this little sneak peek, and thank you for reading & playing Love, Ana & Tom P.S: Tiny Glade won Coziest New Release of 2024 in the Cozy Quest Steam festival, and it was nominated for Gameplay Design in Indie Game Awards! P.P.S: You might have noticed familiar Daily Themes recently. Weve decided to start rotating them, since we want to fully focus on the upcoming update, and we figured not everyone has seen all the 50ish themes weve had so far. Let us know what you think!

[ 2024-11-26 17:15:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey'all! We recently participated in the Save & Sound Steam festival celebrating audio & music in video games. As part of our participation, Oda shared a deep dive into the music system of Tiny Glade It was streamed on the first day of the event, and here is the recording in case you're curious: [previewyoutube=M4yNfh38luY;full][/previewyoutube] Have a good rest of the week! P.S. in case you're curious about the sound design, we wrote a blogpost about it last year Love, Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin

[ 2024-11-07 10:42:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! This patch is specific to the upcoming Daily Theme The next theme (going live at 4PM GMT Oct 28) is going to be a bit different, as it will not be a daily one, but will last for a whole week. So, a Weekly Theme It's also a bit special, because it has a slightly different ambience and selection of clutter including a few Halloween specific clutter pieces. Oh, and different flag patterns :3 These are only available with the starting build of that theme.
Happy Halloween! Love, Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin P.S.: also fixed a bug when a chimney had a wrong color when placed on a mid-grey colored wall P.P.S.: if you're still suffering from intermittent NVIDIA crashes, while we all wait for a new driver, try the "1_10_3-ssbo_constants" Beta in Steam (Right-click Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then go to Properties Betas Beta Participation, and select the beta)

[ 2024-10-28 14:43:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi y'all! Tom and I are still technically on a break, but we couldn't resist adding a few small fixes here and there: * Better naked tree creation for Olden & Winter glades: now every 2nd tree will be deterministically a naked one, no more randomness * Don't auto-delete nearby trees when editing or moving a sufficiently elevated shape (should be esp useful for the upcoming daily theme :3) * Wooden arches (when a paths meets a fence) now have collision of their upper beam so you can walk on top of them and use the color tool on them * Daily themes welcome message now will have a field with credits for the theme idea and/or inspiration And that's all for this one ^^ Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-10-23 11:15:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, folks! We have a workaround for the random crashes with NVIDIA GPUs If you haven't experienced those - nothing to see here, stay awesome, and have a good day! :3 ... but if the game's been crashing for you, and you have a GeForce graphics card, this should help. If you've read our previous posts, you may remember that we've been struggling with crashes that randomly start happening for some owners of NVIDIA GPUs, and then explode either at launch or a few minutes in. Sometimes it's just crashes, but sometimes it's reboots or other nasty stuff. Those turned out to be two separate driver bugs; one is already fixed in the 565-series driver, and a driver fix for the other one should be coming soon. Meanwhile, this patch implements a workaround on our side. Huge thanks to Piers & team from NVIDIA for their help And also thanks to everyone who sent us crash reports - they were essential in nailing this down We'll probably still have some random graphics-related crashes here and there (*cough* Intel iGPU owners, update your drivers *cough*), but between this and the Radeon 5000-series workaround, the vast majority should be fixed now ... and with that, I'm gonna have a drink and chill for a bit... Mmm, green tea with ginger & apple juice. Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-10-17 16:20:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone Patch 1.10.0 is now live on the default branch :3 it brings a few Quality of Life additions, such as:

Option to remove merlons and railings

There's a new option in the color customization wheel to remove merlons & railings - no more need to overlap two blocks to get rid of them

Your last color/style edit is remembered

Whenever you use color wheel, your color or style choice is remembered and applied to the next shape, wall, window, flag, etc you create. The choices are also saved together with your game session, so they will be preserved when you come back :3

Other small fixes

• when merging fences, inherit the color of the fence you're merging with
• when creating a shape A snapped to a shape B with a flat roof, shape A will also be created with a flat roof
• when roof is intersecting with half-timbered building, it will have a row of short bricks to outline the connection instead of merlons

Okie-dokie, I think this is it for this patch ^^ Thank you everyone who helped us test it when it was in a beta branch Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-10-11 14:38:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! Just like I mentioned in our previous post, I'm tinkering with two new Quality of Life additions If you'd like to help test them, I'd be very grateful I made a new beta branch called "beta-1_10_0". if you'd like to opt into the beta, go to Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then Properties Betas Beta participation Select "beta-1_10_0".

Option to remove merlons and railings

There's a new option in the color customization wheel to remove merlons & railings - no more need to overlap two blocks to get rid of them!

Your last color edit is remembered

Whenever you use color wheel, your color choice is remembered and applied to the next shape, wall, window, flag, etc you create.

Testing this patch preview

The save files of this beta are separate from the main version of the game, and this is a beta rather than a regular patch. What does that all mean?

• When using the beta, you won't see the glades you've built in the default branch.
• You can however copy your saves manually into the beta if you like.
• Saves for the beta are in the "beta-saves" folder alongside "saves" in "C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID" ("~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID" on Linux)
• Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves.
• The beta saves are not synchronized to Steam Cloud.
• Some stuff might misbehave, and we might need to makes changes if necessary. Beware that your beta builds might change
• We made beta saves separate from the regular saves because the beta branch contains new code unavailable in the default branch. Thus, the save files created in beta won't work in the default branch until we merge the beta into the default branch.
• After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the default branch.

Thank you! Love, Ana

[ 2024-10-09 14:19:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, yall! Phew, I dont know about you, but its been two crazy-hectic and overwhelming weeks I think its fair to say both Tom & I are feeling a tad exhausted, but its a very happy kind of exhausted ^^ Happy because every day were delighted to see that youre enjoying your time in Tiny Glade. Seeing your creations, both big and small, kind comments and excitement is pure joy wholeheartedly thank you for the amazing reception and support I cant fully express how much energy it gives us to watch your creativity and imagination come to life. More than 500k people have played the full version of Tiny Glade by now, and I believe the technical term for that is *bonkers* :D I was quite worried and stressed just before the release, since we already knew that we wanted to continue making Tiny Glade we just didnt know whether itd be viable. Well, now we certainly can, and we will!

So, whats next?

[gives the mic to Tom] Im happy to report that our inboxes, forums, pneumatic tube mail and homing pigeons are absolutely overflowing with feature requests and ideas Its lovely to see it all, and we try to read or at least skim them all ^^ Theres a ton of stuff yall would like us to add, and we certainly see patterns. Theres a lot of stuff that vibes with us too. So wheres the roadmap, and when are hedgehogs coming to TIny Glade? this is where we sneakily escape through the back door we do have a list of features that wed love to see in Tiny Glade, but that list is not a roadmap, and we dont really want to have a roadmap. Weve developed Tiny Glade organically, evolving and adapting the design as needed, driven by our own intuition as well as your feedback - we intend to continue doing just that. Its the only approach that works here really; Tiny Glade is in large part an experiment in procedural generation, and beneath the simple surface lurks devilishly complicated machinery that makes it all tick. To add or change a feature is to make all others work with it. Sometimes its a breeze, but sometimes it just doesnt click. We enjoy working on Tiny Glade, and keep brainstorming whats next, just like we did a year or two ago. Well keep tinkering - but were still a tiny team, and it is still a tiny game. New features will take time to design, develop and test - so please hold on, and keep your eyes peeled for our postal pigeons But before we jump into developing the Next-Big-Feature, Ana & I need to take a break. Weve been in a non-stop work mode for a really long time now, and we need a moment to breathe, pet grass, hang out with friends and family, and finish that nth Baldur's Gate playthrough. We still have a few things to wrap up though. So, before we disappear for a bit, here are the things that are happening this week:

The graphics crash hunt continues

If youre one of the unlucky players, or if youve been following our updates, you may have noticed Tiny Glade struggling with random graphics-related crashes. Most players arent affected at all, but some cant play for an hour without seeing five of those. Ive made it my personal quest to pinpoint those issues, and deployed workarounds in the previous patches: one for the Radeon RX 5x00, and another for an NVIDIA crash that we could reproduce. Still, the fixes resemble stepping over a hole in a road instead of filling it in, and theyre not 100% reliable. Ive reached out to AMD and NVIDIA as soon as we started seeing the crashes, and as far as I know, theyre investigating, but those investigations take time. Ive also spent several days trying to figure it out on my own, but the deeper I go, the less sense it all makes. In hopes that more data will help, Tiny Glades latest patch now integrates Nsight Aftermath whose job is to provide extra diagnostics when GPU crashes happen. Fingers crossed well see some useful clues. Programming is often a lesson in humility - if you blame someone else, most of the time youll eventually find that its been your own mistake all along. The odd behavior like PCs shutting down are driver and/or firmware bugs, and I could point fingers at them, but in the end, it is likely my own bugs that upset the drivers. Hopefully in a few days, Ill stare at the code, slap myself on the forehead, change one line, and the bugs will disappear. Or maybe the good folks and NVIDIA & AMD will come back with Tom, you forgot a semicolon here.

Two small QoL things

[Ana] Meanwhile, I have two Quality of Life additions coming: an option to remove merlons & railings (no more need to overlap two blocks to get rid of them!), and the game remembering your last color/style choice, and applying it to future shapes (so you can batch-place pink windows or straightened walls). I just need a few more hours of focus to wrap it all up, and then I'll prepare a beta branch for testing, which should be live tomorrow or a day after. By the end of the week it should make it into the base game, assuming no blocking issues are uncovered during testing :3 Aaaand thats it for now ^^ Thank you so much for reading and being awesome We wish you a lovely day! Lots of love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-10-08 21:55:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! Here comes another small patch with misc fixes:

• Unless you'd manually set a language in settings, our daily themes were being displayed in English (). That is now fixed, and the themes are properly localized!
• Fixed timeout errors when downloading daily themes
• Fixed "continue wall" gizmo being very hard to grab when underwater
• Added some more wood sounds when moving fences
• Fixed audio glitch when undoing a deletion of many flat roofs with merlons
• Bumped brick limit from 750,000 to 1 million
• Integrated NVIDIA Nsight Aftermath to help catch us more info about GPU crashes
• Slightly lowered min fence height for all the bench crafters among you :D

(before/after min height) That's it for this patch Love, Ana, Tom & Martin

[ 2024-10-08 21:55:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh my! We just found out that Tiny Glade has been nominated for Best Self-published Indie Game in the the Golden Joystick Awards 2024 It was totally unexpected We're so happy and grateful If you'd like to vote for us, you can do it here: http://goldenjoysticks.com/

[ 2024-10-05 16:35:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! After a few days of testing, no blocking issues were found, and the patch 1.9.0 is now live on the default branch This should hopefully address the last batch of critical fixes and we can take a breath :D So, here is what's new:

(our favorite) Graphics fixes:

* Workaround for crashes on the Radeon RX 5x00 XT series of graphics cards (for more info, see the patch preview post) * Memory optimizations, that reduce VRAM usage by some 100-200MB, which should help startup crashes that were due to out-of-memory conditions. * A few folks have run into window count limits, so we've bumped those.

New customization for freehand walls:

* The option tells the wall whether it should follow the terrain slope or whether it should maintain a constant max height.

Transferring beta saves:

If you joined the beta branch to help us with testing, thank you so much Your beta saves are now compatible with the base game. You can find your beta saves at: Windows * C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID\beta-saves Linux * ~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID/beta-saves Simply move all the subfolders into `..\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID\saves` Thank you for reading, and I wish you a good day/evening :3 Love Tom & Ana

[ 2024-10-02 17:42:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello! We've added a simple backup system for save files, juuuuuuust in case. You never know when your computer decides to take an unexpected nap, or Steam Cloud goes out of sync If you ever find yourself in a situation where you need to restore a backup, we've added instructions in our troubleshooting guide. Another small thing: now when downloading a Daily Theme, the sheep will no longer look confused, but thoughtful -- it's thinking very hard on a prompt to give you That's all! Wishing you lovely day Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-10-01 17:05:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey y'all! We have some new flavors for you to sample today A sweet & spicy stew including a new feature and a dash of your favorite spice - graphics fixes. The current batch has a bit of a kick though, so unless you're in the mood for that, you might want to come back once we've refined the recipe. We've prepared a Steam "beta" that you can opt into if you'd like to preview this patch. There's also one more twist: the save files for this beta are separate from the base version of the game - but more on that in a bit.

New option for freehand walls

We've added a new toggle in the color customization menu for freehand walls. The option tells the wall whether it should follow the terrain slope or whether it should maintain a constant max height. This will hopefully eliminate the need to meticulously cut a wall into small chunks just to straighten it Additionally, if constant height is chosen, the top row of bricks will be filled-in and arches will also maintain constant max height.

Graphics fixes

This new branch integrates fixes from the "rad5k" beta, together with the "lower-gpu-mem-req" beta, and further includes some memory optimizations, that reduce VRAM usage by some 100-200MB. Together, those should also help startup crashes that were due to out-of-memory conditions. We've been struggling with the Radeon RX 5x00 XT (RDNA 1.0) series of graphics cards being just odd and crashing in mysterious ways. We still don't know the root cause, and it's proving difficult to find. Sometimes random poking at some of our rendering code seems to make it go away, only for it to resurface in a few minutes. AMD's public tools for investigating those issues require at least the RX 6000 series, but we verified our code on NVIDIA machines using their Aftermath SDK, and only spotted one benign issue. The workaround from the "rad5k" branch is the only consistent thing that resolves the crashes so far, which is why we'll be going with that. We're not integrating the "vk10" or "vk11" betas yet, as we haven't heard enough evidence that they actually helped anyone. If you're an NVIDIA user struggling from the "ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER", do give them a try, but if that doesn't help, the steps on our dedicated troubleshooting page might.

Misc

A few folks have run into window count limits, so we've bumped those.

Testing this patch preview

As mentioned earlier, the save files of this beta are separate from the main version of the game, and this is a beta rather than a regular patch. What does that all mean?

• When using the beta, you won't see the glades you've built in the default branch.
• You can however copy your saves manually into the beta if you like.
• Saves for the beta are in the "beta-saves" folder alongside "saves" in "C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID" ("~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/YOUR_STEAM_ID" on Linux)
• Please see our troubleshooting guide for more information about saves.
• The beta saves are not synchronized to Steam Cloud.
• Some stuff might misbehave, and we might need to makes changes if necessary. Beware that your builds might change ^^
• We made beta saves separate from the regular saves because the beta branch contains new code unavailable in the default branch. Thus, the save files created in beta won't work in the default branch until we merge the beta into the main game.
• After the beta is closed, you'll be able to just (manually) copy over your beta saves into the default branch.

With all that in mind, if you'd like to opt into the beta, and help us test this new batch of changes, go to Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, then Properties Betas Beta participation Select "beta-1_9_0". Thank you! Love Tom & Ana

[ 2024-09-30 17:48:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi y'all! Another day, another patch

• Fix crash when merging two walls whose points already share same position thus resulting in duplicate points and failing an internal assertion check
• Fix brackets gap in half-timbered jettying
• Fix audio not playing when adjusting wall or fence height when it's fully covered in arches
• Don't offer continue wall gizmo if in fence mode and vice versa
• Disable "Try new glade?" first-time menu in favor of classic main menu since it was confusing people
• Experimental camera keyframe controls: fix F8 not working. Turns out we were filtering it out as a developer hotkey. Oops! My bad ^^"

Thank you for reading and have a good day! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-09-30 17:48:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone! Hope you're having a nice weekend :3 We continue being mostly in bug hunting/support mode, while adding low-hanging additions here and there. We'll prepare a more comprehensive post in the coming days. Meanwhile, here comes a small update and a few fixes:

Switch glade type

In the gallery, there is now a new button on the bottom of the preview image. If you click it, it will let you switch the glade type of a save file or your current session

Fixes

• Fix distant grass being removed if a building touches the glade border
• Fix a jump when starting to move or edit a fence or a freehand wall underwater
• Add a temporary translation for deleting glades

Experimental

A few folks asked us about additional camera controls to allow for cinematic camera movement. While we currently don't have the time to make a fully-functioning keyframe editor, there are some tools that we wrote for ourselves when making trailers. These camera tools are now available under a tab called "experimental" in Settings -> Controls (last page). You'll need to bind a key to summon the in-game GUI. Note: these camera keyframes currently only work in build mode, not in photo mode. Please note on Linux, disk saving/loading of camera keyframes only works with Proton right now. Aaaand that's it for now! Thank you for reading Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-09-29 13:17:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day, lovely people :3 Here comes another patch

Fixes

• Fix rare save file corruption where brush size was saved as NaN and history could not be loaded
• Add additional check to catch rare cases where brush size could become NaN
• Relax constraints for creating balcony doors next to platforms (sometimes they wouldn't spawn even though it looked like they have enough space)
• Relax flag placement constraint when under merlons
• Rename the video setting "Render scale" to "Resolution scale"
• Nerf the footgun that Resolution scale turned out to be, and make the UI top out at "1.5". If you need higher values, the value is still unclamped in "settings.ron".

Ongoing issues

• We're still working on the crashes affecting Radeon 5000 XT-series graphics cards. If you're affected, try the "rad5k" beta in Steam.
• A few players with NVIDIA cards are facing "ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER" which prevents Tiny Glade from launching. If you're affected, there are two betas for you to try: "vk10" and "vk11". Failing that, if you have an AMD CPU, try installing the driver for its built-in graphics. Please let us know if any of that helps (or doesn't help).
• A few players with integrated graphics are experiencing out-of-memory errors at startup as a result of our own bug. If you suspect you might be affected, please try the "lower-gpu-mem-req" beta.
• To opt-in to a Steam beta, right click Tiny Glade in your Steam Library, and use Properties Betas Beta Participation.

Our next steps will be integrating all those individual fixes into the default build, testing it thoroughly, and deploying to everyone. We also keep updating out Troubleshooting guide with additional tips, so please check it out if the game doesn't work or misbehaves.

New stuff

To give ourselves some creative breaks from purely bug fixing and crash hunting, we've added a small additional thing:

Window lights

You can now choose which color the windows emit at night! (the secondary half ring). Shoutout to Brooke for sharing a sketch of how the UI could look like.

Arrowslit color customization

It turned out it was tricky to customize the light of arrowslits in code without giving them the full color customization, so... arrowslits can now be colored too :D
Aaaand that's it for now! Thank you for reading and have a good day/night :3 Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-09-27 13:25:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, everyone Here comes a small patch with a few fixes.

Fixes

* Potential fix for accidental enabling of photomode filters while you're in build mode * Fix haunted rocks in Olden (they were sometimes floating mid-air when you make a new Olden glade) * Fix crash when invoking focus mode with RMB on a wall that technically no longer exists * Add a link to troubleshooting guide in crash report window

Update on crashes affecting Radeon 5000 XT series

We're now in touch with AMD, and both sides are trying to figure it out. We've acquired one of the problematic cards, and could reproduce the issue locally. There's no proper fix for it yet, but we've created a temporary workaround that seems to fix it for at least for some people. See this post for details. We'll keep you posted This is it for this one Hope y'all have a good day! Love, Ana & Tom PS: If you see Steam cloud "out of sync" error, backup your saves! They are located in C:\Users\YOUR_USER_NAME\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\YOUR_STEAM_ID\saves. We've seen multiple players lose parts of their work because Steam proceeds to download an older save it has in the cloud and just overwrites the current progress without asking.

[ 2024-09-25 17:02:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi all Here comes our first patch for the full game. It's just a few quick fixes + we are adding a new door creation method.

More ways to create doors

Before, to get a door from a window, you needed a platform under it. Now, the window will turn into a door if it's close to ground, water or a bottom of a building Thanks to the community for the suggestion and to everyone who tried the `new-door-chemistry` beta branch yesterday. There were no critical issues, thus we decided to merge it into the main game, and the beta branch will now be closed.

(small) Fixes

* Fix camera rotation key bindings being reversed * Fix image corruption on Adreno (Snapdragon) * Fixed a crash when hovering over a 3d gizmo * Don't offer coloring menu for metal pipes since they don't have other colors

Current issues

We've seen a lot of crashes on Radeon 5xxx XT series. If you're experiencing them, here is a post with current updates and some potential workarounds. Meanwhile, we're talking with AMD and trying to resolve it as quickly as possible. We've also heard some reports of the game becoming black and white, or turning the "sculpture" mode on (the one that removes textures). It seems like photomode filters sometimes invade the building mode. We're currently investigating the cause. Meanwhile, if you restart the game, it should restore the correct colors. Aaand, thats all for now We continue to monitor our bug and crash reporting. Thank you for taking your time to submit a report Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-09-24 14:49:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tiny Glade is released! Well run a 15% launch discount until the 3rd of October, and you should be able to see the final price in your local currency below: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198150 We hope you have fun, and we cant wait to see what you make If you can, leave a review, even if its just a few words - it helps us a lot

Small changes from the streamer version

Of course, we continue tweaking things. You thought the launch would stop us? If youve seen early footage from streamers, Im happy to report that weve addressed the lack of pink color, improved flag placement, gothic door merging, and many other misc tweaks and fixes. (I totally did not binge-watch a dozen videos ) You might have also seen Daily Themes during streams and YT videos. We used the first 7 themes to give an early preview of what these themes could look like. Therefore, during the launch week you might see these themes again, but after, there will be new ones :3 We currently have 30 themes prepared
(the pink! how could I forget about pink? :D)

Beta branch

While some tweaks are easy to add, there are a few things that need a bit more testing. If you feel adventurous, Ive prepared our first beta branch. It has one new feature: windows that touch ground or the bottom of a wall will now also turn into doors Big thanks to our community for the suggestion. This new interaction has additional chemistry, like getting railings when elevated, or stairs when in water. If youd like to try it, the beta branch name is `new-door-chemistry` (how to switch to a beta branch). Otherwise, expect this new feature to come to the main game in a few days!

Wholehearted Thank You

Thank you so much for following the development and being so supportive of our little diorama builder. You might not know but Tiny Glade started as my escape hobby from a bad creative burnout. Without getting too sentimental, I just want to say - thank you for making me believe that I can make something worth sharing again, and I hope Tiny Glade can do the same for some of you too. As Im writing this, I have no idea how the release will go - someone from the future, please tell me haha :D All I know is that Im grateful for the chance to make Tiny Glade and share it with you. There is no concrete roadmap yet, but I really hope Tom and I (together with our audio duo, Martin & Oda) will be able to continue developing Tiny Glade further. Meanwhile, we do have a few little bits and bobs planned that will come your way soonish. Stay tuned!
Lots of love, Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin

[ 2024-09-23 15:56:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hullo again! Here's another small hotfix of a patch. If the game works for you, there's nothing to see here - carry on, have a good day, and don't forget to pet the floofs ... but if you're a user of integrated AMD graphics and the game fails to launch for you, this patch might help! Here's the extensive list of changes: * Add video memory fallback for integrated graphics chips. Nerd note: we've noticed that we were being too picky with what kind of memory we request for our buffers and textures, requiring DEVICE_LOCAL memory. But on integrated graphics, that memory may be absent or very scarce. We'll now always fall back to host memory. We got lucky/unlucky that all the integrated chips & drivers just happened to work in our internal testing, but that's certainly not the rule. P.S. We continue seeing crashes from owners of integrated Intel Graphics with outdated drivers. If you have Intel graphics and you ignore our driver version warning, you will almost certainly get a crash, and it's important that you update your drivers. Intel drivers were historically buggy in Vulkan, and only the recent versions work correctly. Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-09-19 16:37:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hullo everyone We continue fixing bugs and smoothing things out for the full game's launch. We still see a few reports of the demo crashing at startup, but we've hopefully just fixed one of the causes! TL;DR: * Improved video memory management (less VRAM use, by around 700MB) * Render scale now goes > 1.0 (higher quality image if you have GPU power to spare) * Render scale is automatically clamped by your video memory (hopefully no more out-of-memory startup crashes) * Optional image sharpening

Improved video memory management

We've reduced the video memory requirement by around 700MB (around 370MB of that is moved to system memory instead). This should help the game launch on systems with low VRAM, such as GeForce GTX 1050. On older systems, this may also have a positive impact on performance. In particular, the framerate on our test machine with a Radeon R9 270 has doubled. It's an outlier for sure, but a nice bonus nonetheless.

Automatic render scale clamp

The primary means of controlling performance vs quality in Tiny Glade is the "Render scale" video setting. It changes the internal resolution that the game draws at, making the graphics cheaper at the cost of visual quality. You could previously set it the [0.1 - 1.0] range. We've now unlocked the top end, so you can set it as high as your video memory allows. If you have the GPU power to spare, you can improve image quality this way. If your screen resolution is 1920x1080, and you set render scale to 2.0, the game will internally render at 3840x2160, and then shrink it down to 1920x1080. In the end you'll see the same number of pixels, but the image will be cleaner. This automatic render scale clamp also means that if you have very little video memory but high screen resolution, the game will automatically reduce its internal resolution instead of crashing.

Optional image sharpening

Tiny Glade's visual presentation is intentionally soft, but whether you like the softness or not is a matter of personal taste, display device, and visual ability. We've now added a simple contrast-adaptive sharpening filter to the game. It's disabled by default, but you'll find the tweaker in video settings.

Other stuff

* Added sliders for path & garden brush size. Gone are the three separate buttons for path size. * Tweaked music mix & instruments * Fixed slightly excessive aliasing & flicker at low resolution scales * Fixed a crash when splitting windows/doors while mashing clicks * Fixed a crash when trying to split a floor hatch * Fixed a crash when previewing a window placement, and then switching to bulldozer/hammer via the keybind, and using the tool in the very next frame * Tweaked logic of tree canopy see-through (to make the full game's tree tool function better) Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-09-18 18:49:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello, lovely people! I hope youre doing well and youre as excited for the release as we are. This is going to be the last dev diary before launch, and its a chunky one So, lets dive right into it. For the past few weeks, weve been testing the game to make sure it runs well, and that no nasty bugs plague our launch Weve shared a build with a few folks, aaaaand well, I think Ill just show you what they made To say I feel inspired doesnt begin to express it - Im brimming with anticipation to see what yall're gonna build once the game is out
(Higher res version here) You might notice that the water in some of the screenshots looks a bit different. Thats because it slightly changes its appearance based on the glade you choose - and even turns into ice in Winter. Here is the same build in different glades. It really changes the mood :3
Speaking of mood, weve added camera filters to the photo mode They can drastically alter the tone, and turn a cutesy house into a sinister manor Heres just a few of them:

(build by Private117) In addition to the color filters, weve also added two artistic effects: painterly, which overlays brush strokes (similar to the main menu effect), and what we call a sculpture mode, which turns everything white, leaving only the interplay of geometric details and light.
Another thing weve been working on is Daily Themes Each theme is a short prompt and a starting build. Hopefully they will provide a fun little challenge, and inspire you to try something new. Weve already prepared 30 for the launch month
Right now, were making sure everything is ready for the release day, and ironing out as many kinks as we can. While were actively playtesting the full version, it is with a tiny group, and you never know what kinds of quirks can pop up in the wild. Weve been diligent with backporting engine changes to the demo version - so most of the big internal modifications will have been battle-tested by launch. Even then, during the launch week well be obsessively monitoring our crash database and bug reports, and actively patching the game (if you were around during the Steam Next Fest demo, were probably gonna have a similar patch cadence ^^). Once the first wave of patches is done, our next big step will be Steam Deck verification. While you can play Tiny Glade on the Deck at launch, we dont really recommend it yet. We dont have a proper control scheme, so unless youre using a mouse and a keyboard, it will be quite clunky Oh, and last but not least, were releasing the soundtrack for Tiny Glade It will be available on Steam on the 25th of September, and on Bandcamp on launch day, 23rd of September. Okie-dokie, I think this is it for now Im gonna go back to other launch preparations :3 Thank you for reading, and we look forward to seeing your creations! Much love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-09-13 16:45:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oops, looks like a crash has slipped past our testing. Here's a quick patch to address that. * Fix crash if clicking to resize a wall, but not moving the cursor. The engine was just a bit too paranoid, thinking the world was on fire, and intentionally crashing to avoid state corruption... Except the edge case was just fine ^^; Sorry about that, and thanks or the crash reports, so we could quickly identify it and fix it <3 Cheers, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-09-11 21:10:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good evening/morning/your-local-time, everyone! We're hard at work getting the game in shape for launch, and in the process we've improved a lot of stuff that also benefits the demo. And so we have another patch for y'all :3 Here's a couple of highlights!

Fixed seams in gates

We've fixed a long-standing bug where you'd sometimes get this odd seam in the middle of a gate or an arch. It was an artifact from the early times, as Tiny Glade started as just a toy for drawing wall segments. At some point we added support for gluing those together into closed shapes, but a lot of the underlying generators still couldn't deal with the concept of closed loops. Now utilizing the breakthrough technology of Euclidean division, we bring you a fix. Behold!

Reduced CPU utilization

A few of you have reported excessive processor utilization while playing the game. Thanks for reporting it! This was due to a combination of a bug and optimization skewed in favor of performance over efficiency. We've now fixed the bug, and switched our task scheduler to let the CPU sleep more. The latter comes at a slight performance hit, so if you don't mind the extra heat, you can turn off "Eco mode" in the game's settings.

The complete list

* You might see two new tutorials: terrain steepness and roof shape profile * The "move wall" gizmo is now scaled down if the wall is short * Fix gaps in stone floor mesh on narrowest towers * Fix excessive CPU utilization * Add CPU "eco mode" setting (on by default) * Misc color tweaks for roofs and walls * Brick column sound cannot play more often than 40ms now * New platform stairs indicator (instead of vertical lines, there is now a horizontal decorative element) * Fix cottage dormer gap between roof tiles and window frame * Fix for intermittent audio-related hard crashes that were not captured by our crash reporter * Add shadows under main menu for better readability * Fix brightness icon in photo mode * Fix a bug where you couldn't create any more terrain strokes after doing 100 terrain operations * Revamped tree see-thru; it should now work consistently regardless of camera position * Fix camera viewfinder/focus rectangle glitches * Fix toolbar button feedback loop * Fix double expand/shrink sounds from toolbar autohide * New instrument layers in music * Tweaks in SFX & music * FPS limiter shall no longer go brrr after restoring a minimized window * Wall lanterns are slightly less restrictive with arches * Fix the seam of doom that existed in enclosed shapes / buildings, splitting gates and arches in half * Assorted crash fixes And that's it for now! Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-09-11 20:06:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heyyyyyy folks! Just one thing here: - Fixed a rare timing-sensitive crash when moving windows between buildings. This one has been puzzling us for a while , but with enough data from y'all, we've managed to piece it together, and find a fix. Thanks for sending the crash reports our way! Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-08-28 11:12:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Howdy folks! We continue focusing on wrapping up the full game, but we've accumulated enough fixes relevant to the demo, so here's another patch! We've also finally replaced the placeholder Time of Day UI. The new one comes with the space-age technology of circular sliders, allowing more precise control over sun angles
And then there's an assorted list of tweaks and fixes: * Allow a wider range of arch heights * Fix lanterns glitching on & off when you have a lot of them * Fix music looping glitches * Misc audio & music tweaks * Misc roof gap fixes * A number of random optimizations See y'all in the next one! Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-08-27 11:38:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! Hope you are having a good weekend We are mainly focusing on the full version of the game right now, but whenever there're small fixes that we can easily add to the demo, we will. So, here are a few: * Fixed a gap between roofs and walls visible from low angles * Fixed a rare crash when editing terrain * Halved the minimum wall length requirement when editing points of freehand walls (for those of you who enjoy making furniture out of thin wall pieces ) * Added extra CPU & GPU info to our crash reporting, to help us catch some voodoos Aaaand that's all for now Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-08-17 10:55:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! We have some big news - Tiny Glade has a RELEASE DATE! It launches on...

September 23

on Steam for PC (Windows & Linux) To celebrate, we've prepared a shiny trailer that gives you a glimpse of new glades, new tools, ducks and how large you can build in the full version. [previewyoutube=CdWpq2efN8Y;full][/previewyoutube] But wait! There is MORE As a part of Wholesome Games Festival, we're bringing the DEMO back It will stay up all the way until the release :3 This will hopefully sweeten the wait :D Even for myself, as I've really been missing your creations The demo has been updated with small birdies, trapdoors, ability to move freehand walls, color lanterns, and many other tweaks across the smrgsbord. Okie, *checks her notes* I think that's all for now~ We hope you have fun, and are as excited for the release as we are!
Love, Ana, Tom, Martin & Oda

[ 2024-08-15 16:00:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey folks! Hope you're all well, and get to enjoy some summer lazies We're meanwhile laser-focused on preparing the game for its release. While we were making intense keyboard typing sounds, the good folks at The Yogscast selected Tiny Glade to participate in the Tiny Teams festival they host If you've never heard of it, Tiny Teams is an annual indie festival celebrating games created by a core team of five devs or fewer. It's quite fitting that Tiny Glade has a tiny team too - our full-time crew is just me (Ana) & Tom, although Tiny Glade certainly wouldn't be what it is without the phenomenal contributions of our audio duo, Martin & Oda.
We're also preparing a BIG announcement, dropping next week! Ok, ok, I'll say mid next week, but that's all you're getting out of me Have a lovely day! *runs off* Love, Ana (&Tom)

[ 2024-08-08 19:31:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

*Peeks out of the dev cave* Hello-hello! Hope youre well and the sun has been kind to you Luckily for us, summer in the North has been very mild so far, and we can engage full vampire mode with only slight help from our thick curtains. Fueled by the grace of the Coffee Goddess (may her reign be long and prosperous ), we bring your another dev diary Even in our early playtests, some folks have attempted assembling half-timbered buildings. The methods have been creative, inventive, outright mad-scientist-like, but the demo players have really raised the bar! We got so inspired that we figured we have to find time and make them real. And so we did [previewyoutube=987859XIEiY;full][/previewyoutube] The half-timber pattern adapts to where you place windows, and the flat roof gets framed with wooden railings instead of battlements. The trickiest part was making the gable roof - since our generators assemble things brick-by-brick, cutting them into the right shapes was hard work; I feel like I can put digital mason in my CV now With half-timbered buildings, Tiny Glade has such a village vibe now. I never thought wed get here when we were starting out I feel like its a whole new fantasy available in the game now. I can't wait to see what yall do with this! Another thing weve been working on is the flag tool. You can place flags on walls, roofs and terrain, and you can also change their patterns and colors When two wall flags are close to each other, they will connect into a series of smaller flags. Village fair, anyone? :D
(flag maker lives here ) Okay, what else *checks her list* Oh! A very important announcement: the most critical bug has been fixed - the sheep heart is now visible in screenshots taken with the first person camera
Anyhoo, I think that should be it when it comes to visual things ^^ Our composer Oda Tilset is wrapping up the music for the new glades, theres been more optimization and SFX work, and more updates are coming Thank you for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day Love, Ana & the tiny crew

[ 2024-07-15 12:42:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone! The demo period has come to an end, and the demo is now closed (see a note about what that means & how to backup save files here). Weve received over 12k in-game feedback reports, on top of comments in Steam and Discord. So many of them were super heartwarming, and had great suggestions and points to consider (and someone even got our Monty Python reference about a castle on a swamp, tee-hee). Once again, a huge thank you for the incredible reception and support. We are the happiest devs ^^ Over the past two weeks weve been reading your feedback, and doing initial rounds of prioritization. Our plan is to finish the features wed already planned, add & tweak some things based on your feedback, and do a ton of optimization (weve measured the full game area, and it is 23.9x of the demo - Im totally not sweating having seen some crazy builds yall have squeezed into the demo area!). While the upcoming months are going to be intense, we want to continue posting dev diaries to give you a sense of how things are progressing. Soooo, let me show you what weve been up to recently ()
During the demo, we saw some very inventive approaches to creating chimneys They looked so good that weve decided to add a chimney tool right away. You can place them on walls and roofs, and if there isnt enough space, they turn into small vent pipes Many of you were asking for the ability to build smaller shapes. The previous minimum sizes were calculated so that you could always make a gate, but the narrowest gates were still rather chonky. Weve rejigged the geometry, making gate widths adaptive, so you can build slightly slimmer turrets and towers now.
We also saw that freehand walls could use a bit more control, so now when you right-click them, you can move them around, and edit individual control points.
Aaand last but not the least, weve wrapped up the fence tool. Fences have the same controls as freehand walls, and leading a path through them will make a wooden arch.
Thats all the visuals :D There's also been some optimizations and engine plumbing work and were wrapping up other features that we cant wait to show you (0) Oh, and we are still figuring out the release schedule: while the exact release date is still up in the air, Q3 2024 is still our target. Thanks for reading, and stay awesome Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-07-01 20:02:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey, y'all! Just a quick heads-up: we'll take the demo down today at 22:00 CEST / 13:00 PT / 16:00 ET. What will happen then? We'll press the big "De-Activate Demo" button in Steam's secret control center. According to that button's bio, this will prevent new downloads, and also prevent existing players from launching the demo. If you have any builds to finish or sheep to pet, there's still a few hours left The demo will disappear, but your builds (save files) will stay on your computer, and you'll be able to load them into the full game once it releases. If you don't plan to reinstall your system or switch computers until Tiny Glade ships, all shall be fine. Otherwise, read on: Your saves also exist in Steam Cloud, and would normally work in the full game even if you change computers or delete your local files, but there's a gotcha. The demo relies on Steam's automatic cloud storage solution; we've run into technical issues with it, and will reimplement the functionality ourselves (by manually using Steam Cloud APIs). We'll do what we can to make the transition seamless, but it's not fully under our control. If you'd like to back up your save files manually to feel extra safe, they're located at:

• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Saved Games\Tiny Glade\Steam\[your steam ID]\saves
• Linux: ~/.local/share/Tiny Glade/Steam/[your steam ID]/saves

In case of Windows, if you enter %USERPROFILE% into File Explorer, it should expand into something like C:\Users\yourname. On Linux, "~" is your home directory. That's it for now - we'll post a larger update (very) soon Cheers, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-07-01 10:27:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey y'all, We've noticed that a lot of players are still discovering the demo, so we've decided to keep it up for another week We ourselves are now fully focused on 1.0 P.S. you might see that the demo build has an update - we've simply removed the Daily Theme button from the main menu (since it was updated only during the Steam Next Fest ^^) Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-24 12:57:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

(screenshot by pewpew ) As Steam Next Fest is coming to a close, we just saw this morning that Tiny Glade has passed 1 million wishlists We dont know what to say! Honestly, this is crazy and unbelievable and mind-boggling Tom & I always thought that Tiny Glade would be a -very- niche game, a little thing to enter the indie games scene with. Were continuously surprised by the love & attention, and were over the moon that Tiny Glade has found its audience in so many of you (or, should I say, that youve found Tiny Glade!)

Thank you.

Weve decided to keep the demo live for another week until June 23rd - just in case anyone missed Steam Next Fest. However, we wont be as active here anymore. There will be no more demo patches, and Martin & Oda are also wrapping up the Tiny Dailies today. Whats next, you might ask? Weve been in non-stop demo mode for about a month now, so next for us personally is a well-needed break Perhaps we can even finally clean our kitchen *glances at the ominous tower of plates*. And then? Then we will read the mountain of your lovely feedback, and enter goblin mode to finish the game :D We will continue sharing dev updates here on Steam and via our newsletter, so stay tuned :3 Thanks again for the most wholesome vibes, and stay awesome! Lots of love, Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin

[ 2024-06-16 16:00:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day everyone! Wow, it is already almost the end of Steam Next Fest, huh? For our last #TinyDaily, we figured it would be nice to go somewhere where we can celebrate all the wonderful demos that have been featured this week. And where better to share stories about adventures past than at

A Tiny Tavern

...bursting with good vibes and lively music to dance to Thank you everyone for sharing your builds this week, its been crazy inspirational to see! Hope youve enjoyed these little challenges, and that youll share what you build today as well. This is the last daily prompt we're hosting for the demo, but we'll see each other again for full game! Lots of love, Oda and Martin

[ 2024-06-16 13:58:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hiya everyone! A new day dawns upon us, which means its time for yet another #TinyDaily! As were getting close to the end of Steam Next Fest, we thought it would be nice to spend some time remembering and appreciating whats been, and our theme today is Mysterious Ruins As always, we hope you will share what you create in the replies, or if you share on Twitter , make sure to add #TinyMysteriousRuins It really warms our hearts to see all of your wonderful builds With love, Martin and Oda

[ 2024-06-15 14:00:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all Small hotfixes: * We had an oopsie, patch 1.5.1 broke the ability to place lanterns on flat roofs since we changed how the collision geometry was generated. Sorry about that! This is now fixed. * We got reports that if you walk to the edge of the map, you can fall under. Turns out we only had a soft constraint that was pulling you back in, like a rubber. In FPV mode, the constraint is now a hard one, preventing you from exceeding the walkable map bounds. Thank you for reporting these to us Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-15 11:55:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! Another small patch is coming your way :3 * Tweaked global illumination. Light now bounces more naturally, and has less noise, especially in the shadows and on grass. * Fixed a bug when the "continue wall" gizmo would pop up even if you're holding the "disable snapping" key * Fixed a bug where placing a wall lantern on an invalid location would delete all terrain lanterns * You can now enjoy the views from your windows when inside a building! (no, we're still not adding interior decoration ) * The first person camera now correctly collides with columns and freehand walls, and can fly through roofs in ghost mode (LCtrl)
Cheers, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-06-14 13:52:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day folks! Its another day of Steam Next Fest, which means a new #TinyDaily Todays theme is

Wizard Tower

Please share your magical builds in the replies or, if you share on Twitter, mention #TinyWizardTower so we (and others) can find them Cheers, Oda and Martin

[ 2024-06-14 13:51:51 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! A small patch again, but potentially huge for owners of older NVIDIA cards.

• Improved rendering performance on NVIDIA GTX-series graphics cards

We had an oopsie. Somewhere in the middle of last month's optimizations, we missed a performance regression on pre-RTX cards. As a result, owners of e.g. GTX 1080 Ti have been getting terrible performance, in the ballpark of 40 FPS, and it would not get better with lower screen resolutions. That should be greatly improved now. Older GTX cards should see a boost as well. This required some plumbing work, so please let us know if you experience any new graphical errors or corruption. FWIW, we've tested on RTX 3080, RTX 2080, GTX 1060, GTX 760, RX 6800 XT, Vega 5, R9 270, Arc A380, and UHD 630, so it should be fiiiine. Notes for nerds: turns out that if you use "vkCmdDrawInstancedIndirectCount" on pre-RTX NVIDIA hardware, you'll be paying a hefty price for that "maxDrawCount" parameter. Wish I had known before changing most of our rendering to use it RTX, GCN-generation AMD hardware, and even Intel UHD were all fine with it, but we've failed to benchmark older NV. Cheers, Tom P.S. Thanks to LordMustang for help tracking this down

[ 2024-06-13 20:59:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi, y'all! This is a very tiny patch

• Added option to save screenshots as PNGs (in Settings->Game)
• Brought back `H` key to hide Photomode UI (you can rebind it in the Settings->Controls)
• Swapped order of pages in Controls tab to show the key rebinding options right away, since reading through feedback it seems some were missing that it was possible. Hopefully, it's more discoverable now ^^
• Added some additional checks to help us catch the cause for a crash when splitting compound windows

Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-13 14:38:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Wow, we are already halfway into Steam Next Fest, time sure flies! We all love the little fluffy friends who wander around in our glades. Theyve been very busy receiving all the pets and now they need a rest Lets see if you can make them a sweet little spot for a nap. Todays #TinyDaily is

Where the sheep go to sleep

As always, we would love to see what you come up with, so make sure to share in the replies or mention #WhereTinySheepSleep on Twitter! PS: a pro-tip, sheep follow you for a bit after you pet them :3 Love, Martin and Oda

[ 2024-06-13 14:38:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello Here comes another patch:

First person mode

* We added collisions So you can now walk up stairs and platforms :3 * Hold LCtrl to disable wall collisions (in case you get stuck or wanna fly up to the tallest tower )

ReShade compatibility

* We've identified the code that was upsetting ReShade, and implemented a workaround. * ReShade is no longer blocked by default

Misc

* Small audio fix: 1st person audio mix snapshot is now only active while actually in that camera mode, rather than constantly Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-06-12 14:22:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Heya! We hope youre having a good time with all the cool demos at Steam Next Fest and are ready for day three, we sure are! Were so impressed by everything youve been sharing with us so far, and we love how you interpret the prompts so differently We cant wait to see what you come up with today - without further ado, todays #TinyDaily is

Tiny Neighborhood

Dont forget to share your builds in the replies, and mention #TinyNeighborhood if you post on Twitter Love, Martin and Oda

[ 2024-06-12 14:22:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello hello! We hope you all had a great first day with Steam Next Fest. It was wonderful seeing your hilltop houses yesterday. Today we bring you a new #TinyDaily theme, which is

Secret Garden

We look forward to seeing what you all create! Share your builds in the replies, or if you share on Twitter, mention #TinySecretGarden so we (and others) can find it Cheers, Martin and Oda

[ 2024-06-11 13:56:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

We know from personal experience that sometimes you need a bit of inspiration to get doodling, and so we thought what a better way to kick off Steam Next Fest than to introduce some daily building themes! Each day of the festival we will share a new prompt, which will hopefully awaken that dormant creativity in those of you who struggle with a builders block (or perhaps youre just looking for a fun challenge ) Our very first theme for #TinyDaily will be

House On A Hill

Share your build in the comments If you share your builds on Twitter, make sure to mention the prompt #TinyHouseOnAHill so we (and others) can find them! We look forward to seeing your creations and well be keeping a close eye on what you all post. Lots of love, Martin and Oda

[ 2024-06-10 14:01:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day, folks! Its been slightly over a week since we released the demo, and weve had an absolute blast seeing your creations, reading your messages and investigating bugs and crashes (wait, mmm, maybe a teeny bit less of a blast with that last part ). Thank you for being such a wonderful community and infusing us with a ton of positivity and inspiration As a lil thank you weve decided to add a new feature to the demo - a first person mode Its still a work in progress, and we dont check for collisions with what youve built - so be careful walking through walls But we made sure you can still pet the sheep, walk up the hills, and our sound designer Martin even added footstep sounds on a short notice (thank you, Martin!) [previewyoutube=rUOrRhSX9Vs;full][/previewyoutube] You can find this new mode in the toolbar, under photo modes camera categories:
Another lil announcement is that our audio duo Oda & Martin are organizing #TinyDaily - a daily building theme for yall Each day of the Steam Next Fest they will share a new prompt. The prompt will be shared in Tiny Glade Steam News Hub, and also displayed in the main menu in the bottom right corner. The very first theme is House On A Hill Share your creations here.
What else *checks her notes* Oh yes! Weve partnered with other indies for the duration of Steam Next Fest, and we made a small section on our Steam page called Check out our friends games. If you liked Tiny Glade, chances are you might like these too!
(House Flipper 2, Airborne Empire, Minami Lane) Okie dokie, I think that is it for now Thanks again for all the good vibes, and we wish you happy building!
(screenshot by Charlietzen ) Love, Tom, Ana, Oda & Martin

[ 2024-06-10 14:00:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, lovely peeps! Here comes another patch:

Shiny new stuff

* First person mode! You can find it in photomode toolbar, next to other camera modes. * Daily theme button in main menu (for more info, check out our recent blog post) * Ported our crash reporter to the Rust `iced` GUI toolkit, and gave it some emoji sparkle

Nerdy technobabble

* (Windows) Fixed crash on AMD graphics cards when entering exclusive fullscreen mode * (Windows) Fixed unusable display adapters being shown if Parsec's virtual display driver is installed * (Linux) Removed a number of shared library dependencies * Fixed glitch characters being displayed in the driver selection screen in some locales * Fixed Vulkan layers being forced on instead of allowed Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-06-10 14:00:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, folks! In this update we're deploying a whole rainbow of changes, primarily focusing on startup crashes due to other apps interfering with Tiny Glade's rendering. See here for some background. There's also a few fixes of our own bugs, and a handful of improvements too

A gentle cleanse of "implicit Vulkan layers"

* Automatically prevent graphical overlays, FPS counters, ReShade-likes, etc. from injecting themselves into Tiny Glade. This should fix a bunch of startup crashes. * Added a "Vulkan extension settings" launch option in Steam, so you can re-enable anything you need. OBS and Valve stuff are allowlisted by default. * Added a "Graphics card selector" launch option in Steam, which causes the graphics card/driver screen to pop up. Please let us know if you encounter any new graphical issues, or whether this fixed the startup crashes for you Just in case, the previous version is available under the "1_3_1" beta in Steam.

Misc

* We'd heard reports that ivy was still levitating inside arches, so we've done some additional gardening * Added a time of day speed setting You can now have very long or short day cycles! (You can find it in Settings -> Game) * Doubled firefly count at night because who doesn't want more fireflies! * Making a new glade will now load the starting glade instantly (instead of showing a super quick creation process which can look noisy) * (Windows) Enanced our crash reporter to also catch heap corruption errors

Fixes

* (Windows) Fixed the game window not showing on old graphics cards/drivers. Tiny Glade still won't work on those, but at least now you'll get an information screen. * (Windows) Fixed a crash when a monitor's ICC profile path contained invalid Unicode characters. * Fixed a crash when loading odd font files from the system. We now bundle our own fonts, and only use those. * (Linux) Fixed a bug where the graphics card selection screen would be black until you moved your mouse. Thank you for sending us crash reports! They've been very helpful in identifying these issues. PS: aaaand we're also preparing a small feature update for the upcoming Steam Next Fest Stay tuned! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-08 21:24:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Beep boop apparently we need an event to add side banners to our stream The footage is a pre-recorded loop of me (Ana) building two 15-minute'ish dioramas, where I show the tools and some building tips & tricks. I hope you like it and maybe pick up a few techniques These are the two scenes

We will be available in chat for questions during the Steam Next Fest stream. See you then! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-07 18:41:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

TL;DR: Help us test a beta that might fix startup issues. Beta: "graphics-init2". Let us know if this fixes/introduces startup crashes or issues with other apps Hey y'all! Some of you have been unable to launch Tiny Glade due to startup crashes Many of those were due to outdated or faulty drivers, and reinstalling the drivers helped We've been chasing the other crashes, and very often it turns out to be some overlay application, FPS counter, or video capture thing. Those apps inject themselves into Tiny Glade, and cause crashes. Due to buggy uninstallers, sometimes they break our game long after they've been uninstalled from your systems. Other games might still work for you, but games using Vulkan are likely all affected. We've been selectively blocking those rogue apps, but their list just keeps growing, and we can't keep up This is why we've decided to block everything by default, with the exception of OBS and Valve's software. Worry not, you'll still have the option to re-enable what you need. (Also please note that we're not modifying any of your programs - we're only asking the graphics driver not to inject all those extensions into Tiny Glade) We're going to roll this out soon, but we'd love if you could help us test it. What we're looking for is whether this helped you with any crash. And if the default demo runs for you, but this beta crashes, please let us know as soon as possible Oh, and please also poke us if this causes Tiny Glade not to cooperate with some major video recording or broadcasting software. To opt in to this beta, right-click Tiny Glade Demo in your Steam Library, select Properties, and then under Betas, choose "graphics-init2 - test blocking Vulkan hooks". If the beta is not visible, you may need to restart Steam. You should see "DEMO v.1.4.0 BETA" in the top-right corner of your screen while running this beta. Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2024-06-06 15:15:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! Here comes a tiny patch: * Undo/redo tutorial popup now goes away after 10 seconds * Tutorial popups are now hidden when in photo mode * Discord button should now correctly appear next to the Wishlist button in the main menu once you've reached 10 minutes of active playtime. (the bug was very embarrassing, I was accidently counting the duration of -tutorials- being displayed to you, not how long you've been playing. Apologies! - Ana) Aaaaaand we continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if the game still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-06 14:58:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, lovely tiny gladers! This time we're adding some improvements to our game onboarding experience

Onboarding

* Added a contextual hint about undo/redo. Now the first time you erase or bulldoze a wall, a small hint will pop-up telling you the key bindings (to make it go away simply press undo to complete the tutorial). * Changed slightly the starting build in Summer glade, and added two new starter build variants. Each acts as a collection of hints of what's possible inside the game. Now whenever you make a new glade, you will get one of these (rather than always a wall with archways). Hopefully this will spark a chain of delightful discoveries, or serve as a starting point for a new build :3

Misc

* (Linux) Fixed camera rotation bug (where the camera would rotate in an unpredictable way) Aaaaaand we continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if the game still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-05 17:51:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi folks! A [strike]small[/strike] follow-up patch fixing a few crashes and streamlining graphics error reporting Fixed game crashes:

• Rebinding to a key we didn't have a string for. Now, instead of crashing the game, rebinding to a non-recognized key will display "???" (but will still allow you to rebind to it).
• Sometimes going to the main menu while hovering over a gizmo was causing a crash.
• Sometimes when placing a window or a lantern, the dormer roof assembly system couldn't get information about how that window or lantern was being transformed, given the context of its environment, and it made it everyone else's problem! How inconsiderate!

Clarified graphics initialization error reporting:

• The graphics initialization error screen now uses the same format as the graphics card selection screen, and is easier to read
• Graphics initialization failure is no longer reported as a crash, but instead includes a few troubleshooting tips.

Improved graphics card selection screen

• (Windows) The missing NVIDIA graphics cards have been found. We've noticed that sometimes players have faulty Vulkan graphics drivers. When this occurs, other games might work fine if they use Direct3D, but Tiny Glade couldn't see any cards using those drivers. We now use DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure) to find the missing cards, and report that their drivers need to be reinstalled.
• Replaced the thinking sheep emoji with a game banner, as some players reported the that the sheep looked shady

(and yea, we've just noticed the "your your" here ) Thank you for sending us crash reports! They've been very helpful in identifying these issues. P.S. We've noticed that Twitch Studio overlay prevents the game from starting on some Intel cards. We're still figuring out a workaround, but meanwhile, disabling the overlay or uninstalling Twitch Studio should help. Aaaaaand we continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if the game still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-04 22:20:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

(photo by Lian @Aikebert) In celebration of our Steam Next Fest participation, we will be streaming Tiny Glade on the store page and answer questions about the game. Join us for some cozy diorama building Stream starts 06/11/2024 6:00 PM CEST / 12:00 Noon ET / 9:00 AM PT See you there! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-06-04 12:20:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Here comes another patch, this time addressing a few building bugs

Building:

* Placing windows & lanterns next to stone columns is now less restrictive. This should also address not being able to place a window if there is a hidden column on the inside of the building * When a flat-roofed shape is fully inside another flat-roofed shape, the merlons are now correctly removed (just like they would be, if the shapes were only intersecting). This should make platform stacking easier and discovering it more intuitive ^^
* When erasing a wall, ivy is now more eagerly removed to prevent leftover bits left hanging mid-air * Speaking of ivy, ivy is now properly removed from inside tall arches

Misc:

* We heard that the in-game Discord button wasn't working for some of you. Hopefully it will now correctly redirect you! We continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if the game still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-03 21:28:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Aaaand another follow-up patch addressing gameplay crashes this time Fixed gameplay crashes: * Splitting a freehand wall with an eraser would sometimes result in an invalid state. * Placing a corner window would sometimes result in a negative wall hole dimension, thus breaking the laws of the Tiny Glade universe! Thank you for sending us crash reports! They've been very helpful in identifying these issues. Quality of Life improvements: * When panning the camera with keyboard keys in tilt-shift photo mode, it is 4x slower now. This should hopefully make it easier to frame your shots. The speed when panning with mouse MMB hasn't changed. * Graphics card selection screen now says "Ignore & Play" instead of "Continue" to make it clearer that launching the game will not forcefully update your drivers. We continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if the game still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-02 18:05:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Aaaand another follow-up patch addressing startup crashes (Some) startup crash fixes: * (Windows) Try harder to create the "Saved Games" folder. If the "Saved Games" folder is missing and Windows doesn't tell us where it should be, we'll now create it in the %USERPROFILE% folder. Improved error reporting * If anything goes wrong in the early stages of the game while we don't have logging or crash reporting initialized yet, we'll now show a message box with the error. This will hopefully catch any errors that we've been missing. We continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-01 21:58:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello again Here comes a follow-up patch, right after the first! Its a small one this time. (Some) startup crash fixes: * Disable AMD switchable graphics. This will hopefully fix startup issues for many players with AMD processors and NVIDIA graphics cards. This functionality seems to be broken in drivers, and we found out the hard way We continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-01 17:28:15 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, everyone Here comes our first patch of the demo build When you launch the game, you should now see "Demo v1.1" in the top right corner (you might need to restart Steam client to prompt the update to load).

(Some) startup crash fixes:

* (Windows) Vulkan is now statically linked into Tiny Glade, which should fix Vulkan driver loading errors. * Tiny Glade now temporarily disables ReShade and a few HUD/overlay applications, which weve found to sometimes interfere with our rendering. Well relax this later, after weve identified the root causes.

Improved crash reporter:

* Weve added a unique ID for every crash report, which you can copy and reference to us This will make it easier to discuss your specific crash, and make it quicker to investigate!

Bug fixes:

* Stone columns now properly recalculate if you change terrain under them. No more anti-gravity! * Fixed texture seam in path texture * Removed an unused keybinding for hiding UI in photo mode. That was a legacy leftover. The UI is auto-hidden when you take a screenshot. * Freehand walls that form a closed loop can now be cut with scissors upon right-clicking the wall (just like their non-closed siblings). * The game now correctly fetches your Steam language and will use it as a default (you can overwrite the language in Settings) Aaand, thats all for now! We continue to investigate startup crashes. If youre still experiencing issues with the game crashing for you on launch, please check our troubleshooting guide and if still doesn't work, please let us know!

[ 2024-06-01 14:25:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tiny Glade Demo has now been out for about a day and we'd like to thank you all for such a heartwarming reception Were inspired, touched, grateful all at once! and were absolutely floored by the beautiful dioramas youve been creating. THANK YOU for being such a wonderful community!
The demo will be stay up throughout Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration and Steam Next Fest. So at least until June 17th!

Next steps

Our plan is to continuously patch the demo while its live, mainly focusing on crashes and bug fixes

Startup crashes

Right now, our top priority is investigating startup crashes that prevent folks from getting into the game. It's the first time we release a build to a large number of people, so there is bound to be some issues. Thank you for reporting these to us and bug kudos to those who helped us debug them Theres a range of potential causes and were looking into them. Meanwhile, here are potential solutions that might help (thanks to kaceby and BasicallyRybread for finding some of the workarounds!). Vulkan-related errors or crashes Weve seen issues where the game fails to load the Vulkan driver even though its available in the system (Tiny Glade uses Vulkan for rendering). Weve also noticed that ReShade messes with Vulkan - if youve ever used ReShade, it may have left registry entries that now cause Tiny Glade to crash. Tom has just pushed an experimental build that might help with both of those issues; If you'd like to give it a try, it's under the "static-vulkan" beta. In your Steam Library, right click on Tiny Glade Demo, select Properties, then under the Betas tab, to the right of "Beta Participation" select "static-vulkan". Windows 11 & HDR Weve heard reports that HDR on Windows 11 causes the game to crash. Here is how you can disable it. Laptops with an AMD processor and an NVIDIA graphics card If you have a laptop with an AMD processor and an NVIDIA GPU, these are the steps you can try to work around the crash. We will look into ways of simplifying/automating these steps. Meanwhile, please let us know in the comments if any of these worked for you

Feedback

While we are mostly focusing on bug & crash fixes in the upcoming weeks, please keep the feedback and suggestions coming! Hearing your thoughts really helps us know what to prioritise (or de-prioritize) and what rough edges are the most prominent For example, we have plans to change the Time of Day UI, but it's great to hear the same desire voiced by the players.

Building tips & tricks

If you havent yet uncovered all the little interactions between the building elements in Tiny Glade, may I recommend this tutorial/guide by freakout3516 Concise, to-the-point and wonderfully put together! [previewyoutube=fm17yiDKTzs;full][/previewyoutube] Okie-dokie *checks the notes* I think that is all for now Thanks again, folks! Hope you have a wonderful day! Love, Ana, Tom, Oda & Martin PS: anyone else getting photobombed by sheep?
(photo by ovolord )

[ 2024-05-31 13:20:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Tiny Glade Demo has been released into the wild and is now available for everyone to try! We couldnt resist, and we've revamped the photo mode UI for mooarrrr pretty pictures ) Weve also added a mode that makes everything look suuuuper tiny
(new photomode UI) Small note about fences: you might have seen our old GIFs where brick walls turn into fences when intersected with paths. During our playtests we noticed it was hard to use, thus we have moved fences into their own tool and are still iterating on the design. They will come back in the full version of the game! Bug reports * Since were still actively working on the game, you likely will encounter bugs here and there . Hopefully most major things weve caught during the playtests, but if you notice anything weird, wed be grateful if you report it via our in-game feedback tool summoned with F6 or an icon with the exclamation mark in a speech bubble Feedback * You are also welcome to share your thoughts and suggestions via our in-game feedback tool (same as with bug reports). Please bear in mind that we probably wont implement your suggestions literally, as were always balancing many factors How long will the demo last? * The demo will be up throughout Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration and Steam Next Fest. So.. *checks calendar* at least until June 17th! Can I play on my Steam Deck? * Tiny Glade Demo doesnt have controller support. While you technically can launch the game, it will be a very clunky experience and we recommend waiting for official support. Does it run on Linux? * Yes! If youre a Linux user, we recommend disabling Proton, as we ship native builds. Wayland on Linux is not supported yet. Apple Silicon support * Right now, Tiny Glade is planned for Windows and Linux. We've done some early tests of the game running on a MacBook Pro M1, but it needs a lot more work, and since neither Tom or I are proficient with the Apple development, we've decided to revisit it after the 1.0 launch on PC. Streaming * Quick tip: if you're streaming or making a video, you don't have to mute the music Since were a very small team handling all the things (Ana & Tom + our lovely composer Oda and sound designer Martin), our responsiveness might be limited based on how many things we're juggling at the moment However, we try to read every comment and we will definitely be spying on all of your creations If you post on Twitter, feel free to tag us @PounceLight or mention #TinyGlade. We'd love to see what you make! Anyhoo, I think thats all! We hope you have a good time with the demo and it brings a smile to your face. PS: if you're experiencing issues with launching the game, please check this troubleshooting guide. Love, Tom, Ana, Oda & Martin

[ 2024-05-30 16:58:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello, folks! I just wanted to update you that we now have a time for when the demo will be out It's gonna go live tomorrow May 30th at 7pm CEST (Central Europe) / 1pm ET (East USA) / 10am PDT (West USA) [url=https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20240530T170000&p1=tz_cest&p2=tz_et&p3=tz_pdt] Check for your local time with a time zone converter We will also be part of the Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration festival on Steam which goes online at the same time If you'd like to be extra prepared, please make sure you have the latest drivers for your graphics card (note: Windows doesn't keep your drivers up-to-date). Tiny Glade uses a few advanced graphics effects, and older drivers aren't kind to us which can cause the game crashing for you on start . You can find the latest drivers here for NVIDIA, AMD and Intel Arc & Xe. Please note that we don't support Intel (U)HD Graphics (but if you reeaally want to try it, here are the drivers). Aaand that's all. Hope to see your creations very soon! Meanwhile, here are three small timelapses to spark some ideas [previewyoutube=zy0j92C3sKc;full][/previewyoutube] Love, Ana, Tom, Martin & Oda

[ 2024-05-29 09:19:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day, folks! Its time to bring a new update Weve been hard at work prepping the demo of Tiny Glade, and Im happy to say that it will be available on May 30th Wooop! Itll stay up throughout Steam Next Fest in June, and perhaps for a week or two after - we shall see once when we get there Meanwhile, let me show you a sneak peek: In the demo, you will be able to play in the summer glade - one of the five glades well have in the final version, and this is the toolset that will be at your disposal
The demo will be accompanied by four beautiful tracks composed by Oda Tilset. The tracks adapt to time of day, and how built-up your glade is (You can listen to the WIP album on bandcamp for free). Below you can see the area that will be available in the demo (the circle in the middle where the yellow cottage is) VS the full games buildable space (dashed white line):
Thanks to the optimizations that Toms been doing, weve actually increased the total buildable area by almost 2x from what weve been showing before (not so tiny Tiny Glade anymore? ). After weve expanded the map boundaries, the scenery started to feel a tad empty on the borders. So we added distant hills, clouds , sun , and a dramatic moon (vampire castles on cliffs anyone?)
Building grander castles is definitely a possibility now
Weve also added a highly-requested feature: photo mode - making it easier to take dramatic or close-up shots, or position your camera juuuuust the way you want it :3
The photo mode also prompted us to update our Steam page with new screenshots
(Shout out to pewpew and Ana's mom for three of these images ) We cant wait for you to sample what weve been cooking 30th of May, lets do this! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-05-02 08:46:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Emerges from the familiar pile of TODO stickies. Oh, hello-hello! I hope youre doing well, and have already had a chance to enjoy any hints of the upcoming spring Spring *is* coming, right? Peeks outside the window to humid grayness and biting wind Ehh! Well, at least in Tiny Glade its always sunny Tom and I have been spending a loooot of time in it - this month has been an intense whirlwind of improvements, bug fixes, and preparations for a v0.1 demo build. The list of TODOs is still formidable, but so far were on schedule, and everything is going according to plan o7 Theres a million things to wrap up, but this month one of our main efforts has been completing the code for window interactions.
Windows can now be placed on roofs, on edges between roofs and walls, and they turn into doors atop a stone floor. Corner windows are also a thing now. We saw a few folks trying to attach windows to corners in playtests, so we made that a proper feature For now, weve wrapped up one window family: cottage windows, which well have in the demo. Its a thread thats been in development for multiple months now, so were very happy its finally coming to fruition. Changing the roof shape will make windows re-adapt as well. You can say our windows are like chameleons : very blendable with their environment!
Speaking of roofs, weve expanded rectangular roof controls, and added a new roof type where two sides are a wall - a so-called gable. (and yes, you can place windows on both the roof and the wall parts!)
Tom and I continue to optimize the game. Since one element in Tiny Glade often affects other nearby elements, the biggest improvement is doing computations only when and *where* necessary. In the GIF below, you can see a special developer view: drawing a path/terrain affects only some regions (highlighted as white squares), and then only those cause walls (red outlines) to recompute. Its an ongoing effort to make every game system as sleepy as possible so your computer stays cool and quiet.
Having done some preliminary optimizations, were even considering expanding the glade size from what weve shown. More on that in a future update Theres been a lot of other changes, small and large (for example, more music ), but I shall keep this update short and sweet, for I must return to gnawing on my TODO stickies As always, thank you so much for reading :3 I wish you a wonderful week full of warm thoughts. Until next time! With love, Ana & Tom PS: Tom recently shared his thoughts on what makes a game cozy in this PCGamer interview. Check it out! PPS: If youd like to receive our dev diaries straight into your mailbox, we have a newsletter

[ 2024-03-14 12:42:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Oh my, our first update of 2024. What is a rad way to greet folks in this new day and age? Hi, ahoy, salutations, sup choom! I hope you had a lovely winter break, with a belly full of deliciousness, surrounded by cozies and your loved ones. Even Tom and I broke our hermit mode for a bit, and re-emerged into society to join in on the festivities But now, back to Tiny Glade Ever since the Autumn playtest, I wanted to add bridges (seeing as many people were trying to make them with varying degrees of pain ). It took some thinking and iteration on what kind of control scheme would work best, and the design eventually evolved into a more generic system for making buildings elevated!
(are those actually called overhangs? I dunno, but we needed some naming convention in code :D) This opened up a whole new dimension, literally Here are some quick tests I did with the new system.
You can make way stranger things now Im sure yall come up with something even crazier and cooler looking! Oh and look, bridges work too! (welp that was the motivation after all)
In Tiny Glade, we want the elements to look cohesive with each other, so adding elevated buildings meant additionally designing a set of systems that would glue the pieces together. Thus, we automatically place brackets, supports and stone pillars, which will re-adapt if you move the elevated pieces.
There will of course always be cases we havent thought about, considering the freeform nature of the game, but we try to address anything that stands out too much. For example, tiled roofs and flat roofs used to have an unsightly seam - now they will have a row of merlons
The largest chunk of our time is now dedicated to preparing the game for release, as well as crafting a demo. Were porting prototype systems into shippable code, and doing a lot of improvements across the board. Optimization is an oddly satisfying process, as you have a clear and measurable objective - make the (CPU/GPU) time necessary for a single frame go down. Tom made an automatic system that tracks performance for each of our builds, so were now addicted to watching this little crawly critter descend
Most of our days look something like this Investigating performance, analyzing debug plots, and optimizing the data flow between subsystems. Lots of code, lots of coffee, a touch of zen.
We have a few more shiny gameplay additions, but we want to avoid the remainder of our updates looking programmery like that So we wont spoil them all, and instead, pace the new things throughout the future write-ups :3 That brings me to the topic of the release. We said wed ship in 2024, and its 2024, right? Let me just put on my Production Lead hat for a moment ok, all set We have a plan and a launch window in mind. Woo! So, heres the plan: we know we want to have a demo, so people can try the game, and see if its their cup of tea. Since well have a demo, we will want to participate in a Steam Next Fest. The February one is too soon, so were aiming for the next one, in June. We want to launch shortly afterwards. Thus, our current guesstimate for Tiny Glades release window is Summer 2024. The exact release date will depend on whether we have any major issues to patch, or whether theres a large game launching next to us, and possibly other factors: maybe we get lucky, and Steam offers to feature our launch on a specific day (anyone from Valve reading this? :D). So yeah, well see how our plan survives contact with reality, but we have a decent degree of confidence (or yoloness). Well keep you updated! With all that said, its time to wrap up this update. I wish you a beautiful day, and thank you for reading~ Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2024-01-30 11:26:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello! Hope the season is starting to look festive where you are. If not, worry not, weve got a winter treat for you
Weve 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 caff-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 thats 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: Dear Tiny Glade fans! We promised our players that House Flipper 2 would be their best holiday gift And who knows, maybe youll 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=pYkLylSAyRs;full][/previewyoutube] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1190970/House_Flipper_2/ Cheers! Aaaand, thats 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 r ) Love, Ana & Tom (and Oda & Martin pass their God Jul too )

[ 2023-12-14 13:01:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello! Hope youre 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 weve 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 Id share a bit of what goes into crafting the games 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 dont always need to match reality, and theres 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=RTXBt7ID5P0;full][/previewyoutube] And I use my fingers to go tippy tappy on a table for fences. [previewyoutube=UBsuyXGThEI;full][/previewyoutube] Oh, and some sounds that fences make are from chess pieces from my grandfathers chessboard.
kudos to grandma for taking this illustration photo <3 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 - theres 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 - its about doodling charming dioramas. Thats 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

[ 2023-11-29 11:36:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

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, its 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!.. Lets discuss whats new in the world of Tiny Glade! Up until recently weve 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. Thats why weve 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 heres a video with 9,241 frames, worth 9,241,000 words! [previewyoutube=lBLRkRn70NQ;full][/previewyoutube] Hopefully that gave you a glimpse of where were 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. Were also tinkering with the existing tools to better support some types of builds weve spotted in playtests. All the while were 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

[ 2023-11-03 15:04:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello there, my favorite traveling companion! I hope Im not interrupting your binging of Baldurs 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 youve 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 havent seen it yet, worry not, here it is: [previewyoutube=2-Pmal2UupI;full][/previewyoutube] (While the trailer was a combined effort of everyone in the team, wed 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. Its 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. Thats because weve 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 (dont 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 wed 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, thats all for now Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week! Love, Tom & Ana

[ 2023-08-24 09:23:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello Hope youre 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, wed been working hard to prepare Tiny Glade for the world, and just last month we had our very first closed playtest Wed 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 everyones positive reactions, and floored by the mountain of great feedback. The combined creative juices swirled into spicy new ideas, a few of which weve already started cooking They will of course need to be tasted too, so were already planning the next playtest As before, we will be recruiting from our newsletter! Meanwhile, weve also been preparing a new trailer The old one is no longer representative, and weve 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 youd 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 its 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 Im keeping for the trailer Aaand, thats all Have a wonderful remainder of summer, and go get that vitamin D! Love, Ana & Tom

[ 2023-08-02 14:52:11 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello-hello there How are you? OMG so much sun, right? Is Vitamin D overdose a thing? Weve been talking to ducks lately (maybe thats 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 Anas 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=vi2U41kl2eE;full][/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 Youll 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 couldnt 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

[ 2023-05-30 17:46:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

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! Theres 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, well wait Tiny Glade is about to become a whole lot more colorful Our trusty beige bricks have served us well, but weve been itching to add some customization for a while. We think youll like the new possibilities
Quick disclaimer: youre looking at cherry-picked images from various prototypes. Weve been too excited not to share these, but please keep in mind that its all an early work in progress, and well 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 were 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).
Were also improving the existing building blocks and their robustness. Weve 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 couldnt 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 Weve 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 were 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. 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. Thats 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 games release, and were 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 were 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. Were still figuring out the details! More info to come. Stay tuned!

[ 2023-04-27 11:49:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

*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=p27noSKKOBo;full][/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

[ 2023-03-21 12:05:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

Good day! Or evening, or afternoon. Whichever phase of our planet's rotation youre 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 Weve 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 well be optimizing some more We made walls respond to how quickly theyre 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. Were 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=-ir-2KwjrLA;full][/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

[ 2023-02-17 14:47:50 CET ] [ Original post ]

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

[ 2023-01-24 15:47:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

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 )

Time of day

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

Lighting

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

[ 2023-01-02 16:40:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

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.

Roofs

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

Sheep

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

Music

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

[ 2022-12-18 15:48:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello, world!~~ We'd like to extend our warmest welcome to everyone new, and also to those who have been following our game from its early stages. It's great to have you :3 Please take a seat, brew your favourite beverage, and enjoy our cozy corner of the interwebs. In case you haven't seen our announcement trailer yet, we've just revealed it at Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards Edition You can watch it below [previewyoutube=E2429O4h4Fk;full][/previewyoutube] Wow, it's a bit surreal to be showing it here on Steam It feels like only yesterday the game was but a tiny spare-time passion project, and now it's here! But this doesn't mean we're done. Therere a lot of features we're still planning to add before we ship. For example, it's possible to make cute towers and cottages by drawing circular walls, but those could really use some windows and doors. Terrain variation is another thing we're experimenting with, and we will want to add water too. We are aiming to actively post developer updates here! So follow us if you're curious about the game, and how it's going. We're already preparing a post about the new features we've revealed along with the trailer. If you wanna know how much the game might cost, which engine we're using, or whether there will be a demo, please check out our Frequently Asked Questions section -- and if we've perhaps missed something important, come over and say hi in the discussions We'd love to hear from you! Oh, wait, how rude of us, we haven't even introduced ourselves... Hi! We are a small team of just four: two at Pounce Light, full time on the game, and two audio friends at Nok Nok:
And before you go, please consider wishlisting our game if you haven't already -- it lets us know how much interest there is, and helps the game gain visibility Thank you for coming along for the adventure! Ana, Tom, Martin & Oda

[ 2022-12-08 12:23:12 CET ] [ Original post ]