Hi, y’all! Phew, I don’t know about you, but it’s been two crazy-hectic and overwhelming weeks 🤪 I think it’s fair to say both Tom & I are feeling a tad exhausted, but it’s a very happy kind of exhausted ^^ Happy because every day we’re delighted to see that you’re enjoying your time in Tiny Glade. Seeing your creations, both big and small, kind comments and excitement is pure joy – wholeheartedly thank you for the amazing reception and support 💖 I can’t fully express how much energy it gives us to watch your creativity and imagination come to life. More than 500k people have played the full version of Tiny Glade by now, and I believe the technical term for that is *bonkers* :D I was quite worried and stressed just before the release, since we already knew that we wanted to continue making Tiny Glade – we just didn’t know whether it’d be viable. Well, now we certainly can, and we will! 🥳
So, what’s next?
[gives the mic to Tom]
I’m happy to report that our inboxes, forums, pneumatic tube mail and homing pigeons are absolutely overflowing with feature requests and ideas 😅 It’s lovely to see it all, and we try to read or at least skim them all ^^ There’s a ton of stuff y’all would like us to add, and we certainly see patterns. There’s a lot of stuff that vibes with us too.
So where’s the roadmap, and when are hedgehogs coming to TIny Glade? 👀
… this is where we sneakily escape through the back door 🦝 … we do have a list of features that we’d love to see in Tiny Glade, but that list is not a roadmap, and we don’t really want to have a roadmap.
We’ve developed Tiny Glade organically, evolving and adapting the design as needed, driven by our own intuition as well as your feedback - we intend to continue doing just that. It’s the only approach that works here really; Tiny Glade is in large part an experiment in procedural generation, and beneath the simple surface lurks devilishly complicated machinery that makes it all tick. To add or change a feature is to make all others work with it. Sometimes it’s a breeze, but sometimes it just doesn’t click.
We enjoy working on Tiny Glade, and keep brainstorming what’s next, just like we did a year or two ago. We’ll keep tinkering - but we’re still a tiny team, and it is still a tiny game. New features will take time to design, develop and test - so please hold on, and keep your eyes peeled for our postal pigeons 💌🕊
But before we jump into developing the Next-Big-Feature™, Ana & I need to take a break. We’ve been in a non-stop work mode for a really long time now, and we need a moment to breathe, pet grass, hang out with friends and family, and finish that nth Baldur's Gate playthrough. We still have a few things to wrap up though. So, before we disappear for a bit, here are the things that are happening this week:
The graphics crash hunt continues
If you’re one of the unlucky players, or if you’ve been following our updates, you may have noticed Tiny Glade struggling with random graphics-related crashes. Most players aren’t affected at all, but some can’t play for an hour without seeing five of those. I’ve made it my personal quest to pinpoint those issues, and deployed workarounds in the previous patches: one for the Radeon RX 5x00, and another for an NVIDIA crash that we could reproduce. Still, the “fixes” resemble stepping over a hole in a road instead of filling it in, and they’re not 100% reliable.
I’ve reached out to AMD and NVIDIA as soon as we started seeing the crashes, and as far as I know, they’re investigating, but those investigations take time. I’ve also spent several days trying to figure it out on my own, but the deeper I go, the less sense it all makes. In hopes that more data will help, Tiny Glade’s latest patch now integrates “Nsight Aftermath” whose job is to provide extra diagnostics when GPU crashes happen. Fingers crossed we’ll see some useful clues.
Programming is often a lesson in humility - if you blame someone else, most of the time you’ll eventually find that it’s been your own mistake all along. The odd behavior like PCs shutting down are driver and/or firmware bugs, and I could point fingers at them, but in the end, it is likely my own bugs that upset the drivers. Hopefully in a few days, I’ll stare at the code, slap myself on the forehead, change one line, and the bugs will disappear. Or maybe the good folks and NVIDIA & AMD will come back with “Tom, you forgot a semicolon here.”
Two small QoL things
[Ana] Meanwhile, I have two Quality of Life additions coming: an option to remove merlons & railings (no more need to overlap two blocks to get rid of them!), and the game remembering your last color/style choice, and applying it to future shapes (so you can batch-place pink windows or straightened walls). I just need a few more hours of focus to wrap it all up, and then I'll prepare a beta branch for testing, which should be live tomorrow or a day after. By the end of the week it should make it into the base game, assuming no blocking issues are uncovered during testing :3
Aaaand that’s it for now ^^ Thank you so much for reading and being awesome 💗 We wish you a lovely day!
Lots of love,
Ana & Tom