Hi, everyone. I hope you're well! A considerable amount of time has passed since our last dev diary. This one we've been cooking for a while, and now that it's in a presentable-enough state, I can conclusively say: we're adding wooden walls! Woo! (Note: this is still a dev prototype and a work-in-progress)
Our initial prototype was simply a texture, but we weren't happy with how it looked. A big part of Tiny Glade's charm is how touchable everything looks. Thus, in the end, each wooden plank is its own little piece, arranged individually by the game just like the bricks.
I love bricks, they're well-behaved chunks. Planks, however, are divas, with their lanky elongated shapes that need to be split up to fit with arches, windows/doors and various roof shapes. The negotiations took a lot of coffee, and recently, ice *slurp* (iced coffee with cardamom is my new best friend)
You can, of course, recolor the planks. On rectangular and circular shapes you can also change their layout: horizontal or vertical. Freeform walls only have vertical, to avoid a craftsmanship conundrum of how to arrange horizontal planks on an -arbitrarily- curved surface. Instead of getting hung up on that, we spent time on...
...adding stone foundations. You can adjust their height. Raise them all the way up and you gain a new stone surface type, or lower them all the way down and you're left with pristine wooden walls.
Meanwhile, in Tom-land...
Because Tom is a madman (respectfully and lovingly), he took it upon himself to rewrite our grass system. He's been mumbling something about unimplementing the "Tiny" from Tiny Glade, and grass got in the way. Apparently the new system supports all sorts of flowers too... Anyhoo, the clip above is a tech prototype, and its visuals are subject to change.
Aaaand last but not least, clutter selection menu. Just a few days ago, Tom got the basics working! It still needs a bit work (as you can probably tell by the placeholder "category" icons :P), but I think it shows the promise not only for a better UX, but also for... steam workshop. We're currently upgrading our asset pipeline to make it easy to add custom clutter. I'm getting giddy just thinking about it!
There's still a lot of work ahead before we can beta-test this (our current estimate is September'ish), but we hope you enjoyed this sneak peek.
Thank you all for playing and following the updates.
Sending you lots of love.
Ana & Tom