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