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 🏰🌿