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