Ever since the Autumn playtest, I wanted to add bridges (seeing as many people were trying to make them with varying degrees of pain ????). It took some thinking and iteration on what kind of control scheme would work best, and the design eventually evolved into a more generic system for making buildings elevated!
(are those actually called overhangs? I dunno, but we needed some naming convention in code :D)
This opened up a whole new dimension, literally ???? Here are some quick tests I did with the new system.
You can make way stranger things now ????♂️???? I’m sure y’all come up with something even crazier and cooler looking! Oh and look, bridges work too! (welp that was the motivation after all)
In Tiny Glade, we want the elements to look cohesive with each other, so adding elevated buildings meant additionally designing a set of systems that would “glue” the pieces together. Thus, we automatically place brackets, supports and stone pillars, which will re-adapt if you move the elevated pieces.
There will of course always be cases we haven’t thought about, considering the freeform nature of the game, but we try to address anything that stands out too much. For example, tiled roofs and flat roofs used to have an unsightly seam - now they will have a row of merlons ✨
The largest chunk of our time is now dedicated to preparing the game for release, as well as crafting a demo. We’re porting prototype systems into shippable code, and doing a lot of improvements across the board. Optimization is an oddly satisfying process, as you have a clear and measurable objective - make the (CPU/GPU) time necessary for a single frame go down. Tom made an automatic system that tracks performance for each of our builds, so we’re now addicted to watching this little crawly critter descend ????
Most of our days look something like this ???????? Investigating performance, analyzing debug plots, and optimizing the data flow between subsystems. Lots of code, lots of coffee, a touch of zen.
We have a few more shiny gameplay additions, but we want to avoid the remainder of our updates looking programmery like that ???? So we won’t spoil them all, and instead, pace the new things throughout the future write-ups :3
That brings me to the topic of the release. We said we’d ship in 2024, and it’s 2024, right? Let me just put on my Production Lead hat for a moment… ok, all set ???? We have a plan and a launch window in mind. Woo! So, here’s the plan: we know we want to have a demo, so people can try the game, and see if it’s their cup of tea. Since we’ll have a demo, we will want to participate in a Steam Next Fest. The February one is too soon, so we’re aiming for the next one, in June. We want to launch shortly afterwards. Thus, our current guesstimate for Tiny Glade’s release window is Summer 2024. The exact release date will depend on whether we have any major issues to patch, or whether there’s a large game launching next to us, and possibly other factors: maybe we get lucky, and Steam offers to feature our launch on a specific day (anyone from Valve reading this? :D). So yeah, we’ll see how our plan survives contact with reality, but we have a decent degree of confidence (or yolo’ness). We’ll keep you updated!
With all that said, it’s time to wrap up this update. I wish you a beautiful day, and thank you for reading~
Love,
Ana & Tom
