Tiny Glade 'built' its way to >600k sold in a month

One of the many fun/cool things about Tiny Glade is that it quietly has one of the most advanced realtime global illumination lighting engines shipping in any game today, and it’s all completely custom for just this game. One of the devs, Tomasz Stachowiak, is a big deal in the realtime rendering world and previously was at DICE and Embark; at Embark he led the Kajiya experimental realtime GI project [1] that made quite a splash in the rendering world a while back.

The other dev, Anastasia Opara, is a big name in the procedural graphics world. She gave one of my favorite presentations on the topic a few years ago [2].

Anyhow if you can’t tell I’m a big fan of both the game and the devs. :)

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya [2] https://youtu.be/dpYwLny0P8M

I’m creating my own builder-focused game with procedural parts, and I’m truly humbled by the expertise and execution behind Tiny Glade. As you mentioned, the GI is stunning, and I’d add that the entire game feels incredibly polished.

Achieving that level of technical and artistic refinement is such a huge factor in its success. Watching it in action, everything seems so intuitive and effortless—a quality I’m still striving for in my own work. My creative mode leans towards a mix of Valheim and procedural meshes, but I’m still figuring out the best way to make it feel both intuitive and powerfull.

Yeah it looks amazing. I just wish it was more of an actual game. I guess lots of people like digital lego, but for me it seems like a ridiculously well polished toy or tech demo. I don't know why I'd play with it for more than an hour...

They did introduce daily challenges/themes, which give you a sort of soft goal each day. But in the end, it's a zen art game more than anything.

Do you have a Steam page? I love Valheim and looking for more games that scratch that explorer/builder itch.

> Achieving that level of technical and artistic refinement is such a huge factor in its success.

Yep, the article talks about how they built their way to success, but the actual method they used is "have a team of two superheroes make the game".

According to the article most people play it for around an hour.

Yes I do! Ardaria on Steam or https://steam.ardaria.com

The survival mode is in development. What I have now: - Procedural Voxel planet with 1 biome, oceans and mountains - A highly scalable and powerfull build system which empowers builders - Light parkour: climbing, vaulting

I feel I made that mistake to dev the creative mode instead of the survival mode for my game.

Agreed, these kind of games feel lazy imo. Like a dev just wanted to toil endlessly on making a game engine but then never add actual gameplay elements. I played around with Tiny Glade for a little bit and then never really touched it again. Neat, but no depth.

The "lazy" adjective to speak about game dev is provocative because it sounds ignorant. You can't say "lazy" regarding a piece of software which requires that amount of effort, it's just a trolling non sense.

The depth comes from the players own creativity. Not everything needs goals and gameplay loops. Nothing about this is lazy. It's sophisticated piece of software that does exactly what it sought out to do.

And we can argue that using your creativity to tranform thoughts into pixels is a goal in itself

Watching the video without sound is delightfully funny. Left click! Right click! Click and hold! It has all the clicks!

But seriously it looks very cool.

Great! Wishlisted. Looks good too!

:)))) And you forgot the middle click! It will copy both scale and rotation of the element you are aiming it!

Thanks! I forgot to mention that you can play right now to the creative mode, which will stay free in this form

Have you tried Enshrouded? Many Valheim players have found it to be similar but improved in various ways.

Yeah unshrouded is from the same niche: survival creative Incredibly well executed game, solid team of 40+ people behind and they are working on voxel games for a decade with Portal Knights.

TBH I freaked out when Unshrouded trailer got released because it's a direct competitor and how cool their game is !

> feel lazy

Game studios which release games with a good 'survival' or 'story mode' have dedicated 'art and story' departments (story- and script-writers, world-builders, art and music directors) who collaborate with the engineering department (engine and gameplay programmers) to produce a cohesive game. The smallest 'indie' games that I've played with a semblance of a story—anything by Amanita Design[1], for instance, or The Long Dark by Hinterland Games[2]—still have teams of about 10-20 people working on different aspects.

Tiny Glade was developed by two people—both extremely talented engineers. But story writers they may not necessarily be. Even though they're 'just engineers' they still managed to produce a beautiful art style backed by serious engineering effort, including real-time non-raytraced GI. There's nothing 'lazy' here. Game developers are frequently just that—developers. They may be creative, but to write an engaging narrative is an entirely different ball-game.

Give them a chance to reap the profits of Tiny Glade, grow their two-person studio, and hopefully hire more staff and put out expansions, sequels, and other titles that have what you wish for.

[1]: https://amanita-design.net/about.html

[2]: https://hinterlandgames.com/