Hello there, my favorite traveling companion! I hope I’m not interrupting your binging of Baldur’s Gate 3, as I bring forth news from the lands of Tiny Glade 🧙🏰 The totally-not-rigged dialogue options are “yesss”, “yes please”, and “show me naaaawww!” 😁
First and foremost, we have a shiny new trailer 🎬✨ If you’ve managed to catch it during the Future Games Show, thank you so much for tuning in, and I hope you enjoyed it 💗 But if you haven’t seen it yet, worry not, here it is:
(While the trailer was a combined effort of everyone in the team, we’d like to give a special shoutout to our music composer, Oda Tilset, for writing such a beautiful track 🎼)
Having finished the new trailer, we also had a quick look at our Steam page, and realized that it too needed some updates. It’s now full of fresh GIFs and screenshots for you to peruse, like thes ones below :3
If you look closely, you may notice that the game feels somewhat… refreshed. That’s because we’ve completely replaced the lighting code (haha, yes, again! 🤓). We now have ray-traced global illumination, which is a fancy way of saying that objects bounce light between each other 🏓💡🏓 (don’t worry, no fancy new graphics card required; our hardware requirements stay the same!)
This feature has been brewing in the background for over four months, but now that it has landed, we simply cannot go back :D Below is a comparison of old vs new lighting 😎
(The castle above was made by one of our playtesters.
Thank you so much, Sebastian! 💚)
Previously, we had three individual settings, which we hand-tuned to look OK: noon, sunset, and midnight. Now all times of day are consistent, and can even smoothly transition into each other! This means we can finally enable the passage of time, and let you raise buildings in the day, watch them bask in the last rays of the setting sun, and finally unwind to night ambience 💙 … or whatever works for you! 🧛
This is but one of the new features we’d love for you to try in our upcoming closed playtest in October! We will send out a signup form in the next newsletter, so keep your eyes peeled 👀
Aaaand, that’s all for now 👐 Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week!
Love,
Tom & Ana