Helloooo, everyone! We're finally ready to start testing our biggest update yet 🙌
There are a looooot of misc fixes and smaller things - we'll do the full notes once the patch is released in the game proper, but for the sake of brevity, for now I'll highlight only the main stuff. That's where we'd appreciate your help testing - we'd be super grateful if you report bugs (via F6) and crashes (via the crash reporter's pop-up window) 🙏 Tom & I will be actively monitoring and fixing things as they pop up. If you need a reminder on how betas work and how to opt-in, please see instructions at the bottom of the post. All righty! Without any further ado:
Stairs
The biggest addition is of course stairs! They turn into platforms & ladders depending on steepness, and can be attached to walls and flattened roofs. You can access a detailed editing mode by right-clicking them, and you can even place clutter on top of them. Please note that the SFX is a work-in-progress. We didn't want to stall the playtesting, and we still need to add the final sounds (the ones in the game are placeholders, and will change).
Cobblestone
There are 3 new cobblestone variants of path tool!
New floor patterns
The old floor pattern got a visual uplift, and acquired new friends: 2 stone and 3 wood patterns. They can be accessed via the customization tool.
New music
Oda Tilset composed 5 new tracks for us 💞 one for each glade season.
Circular timbering rework
Timbering on towers has received a visual uplift too! They're no longer made out of small wooden pieces, but instead are one continuous curved wooden beam. This should look way neater, especially on narrow towers :3
Photomode filters in game mode
The filters, brightness, contrast or saturation adjustments will now be also applied to the game mode. So if you want to make it more spoopy, or turn summer into a chilly day, now you can do that even while building. To reset it back to default, select the first filter in the gallery (the one with a bookmark icon).
Auto-save & backup menu
We've rewritten our save system, and added autosave in the background. Previously saving the game was an expensive operation, and happened only if you pressed the ESC key, entered photo mode, quit the game, or of the game panicked (crashed in a controlled manner). While this worked fairly well, if your computer lost power or hard-crashed, you could lose progress. Now the game saves automatically and transparently in the background after *every* operation you perform (don't worry about your hard drive's longevity - only the relevant updates are sent to disk).
In addition to that, Tiny Glade will automatically backup your save every 5 minutes, keeping four of those backups around, approximately 5, 10, 60 and 120 minutes old (additional backups are also created upon panics too). This means that if something catastrophic happens to your system, or Steam Cloud goes haywire, you should still be able to load a relevant backup. There's also UI for loading those.
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_14_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\SteamYOUR_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, or would like to send any feedback about this beta, we'd appreciate an in-game report using the F6 key 📝 If the matter would benefit from a discussion, you're also welcome to write a comment to this post or on Discord.
Thank you for reading and playing! We hope you have fun 💚
Love,
Ana & Tom