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
This is likely the first gamedev project written entirely in Rust and Vulkan to achieve significant financial success on Steam.
I'm genuinely proud of the authors — they've set an inspiring example and given us hope for a bright future where the Rust ecosystem serves as a foundation for unique and creative game development projects.
The Gnorp Apologue (mentioned in another thread here) was also notably written in Rust. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1473350?emclan=10358...
Lovely game, would recommend.
I play it in the background when chatting with friends on weekly game nights!
Yes. It's a good success story. And a cute little game.
I wrote https://taintedcoders.com/ for anyone looking for an introduction to Rust game development with Bevy.
Bevy is still early, but the sweet spot right now is simulations. It's particularly weak in its UI, but that's the coming focus for getting the editor built.
If anyone needs ideas, making [boids](https://slsdo.github.io/steering-behaviors/) in Bevy is a great weekend project.
While Bevy might be the hottest thing in the Rust gamedev scene, Tiny Glade didn't use it for rendering purposes - AFAIK only the ECS was used from Bevy.
This is a great result -- and the game looks wonderful! -- but it's not that unexpected, since it launched with over 1 million wishlists and was, just before release, the top wishlisted game on Steam. The interesting part, the "building", was actually already done before the game launched.
More interesting to me are games like Palworld and (the) Gnorp Apologue (both of which are covered here: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/how-this-solo-dev-incre...) These sold one or two orders of magnitude over their wishlist total! Steam's recommendation algorithm must be so powerful nowadays.
Tiny glade was in big short form content (tiktok, shorts and reels).
I feel like this was a great part of it, the dev created a community before the release
Marketing for this was on point or I fell into the exact set of channels they were using because it seemed like I was coming across an update every few months that kept it at a base level of consciousness yet not overwhelming.
I guess I fall into perfect demographic, aging gamer developer with interest in Rust, casual games, and generative content.
Congrats to the team for such a great job and great success!
It’s a truly amazing, beautiful, stunning piece of tech. The ability to seamlessly blend the pieces of your build together in such an elegant way can’t be appreciated enough. What these devs have accomplished is truly stunning.
I always think I’m a pretty decent engineer. Then I see someone create something like this and I just feel like I should hang up my spurs and pick different career.
Digital Foundry did a review of the game. It is quite unusual for that channel to feature such a small indie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvswAg5Lrtw
I've been having a lot of fun with this "game", it strikes the same zen cord in my mind as Minecraft use too before Minecraft got too into the weeds with game mechanics. I know I can still throw it into creative mode but Tiny Glade just nails it.
That said I do have a few gripes that I hope get addressed. I need to be able to copy/paste structures, I'd love to be able to group structures and I wish the maps were bigger.
That said, if you want to turn your brain off I do highly recommend it, the developers knocked it out of the park.
I was randomly following this build. Following indie game builds is not something I normally do, but I remember always enjoying seeing their demos of what they'd been working on. Eventually I unsubscribed because it felt like the updates started feeling the same, but I'm happy they're doing so well!
The seamless integration between one type of object and another is really impressive. The way that the blocks in the roofline perfectly work regardless of the height of the roof is a great example.
How is this possible? Is it some kind of procedural geometry that fills in the available space?
It is surely procedural, maybe wave function collapse? I’d love to read a writeup from the author, in the same style of Factorio’s
I can't remember where exactly but I think I did read somewhere it was based on wave function collapse.
I think wave function collapse is still super underexplored in game dev. This recent paper is pretty interesting: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582437.3587209
The texture is certainly procedural for brick patterns, etc. but I'll bet smoothing intersecting polys happens at render time.
Just a clever shader
That build tool UI looked really slick. I don't have much experience with 3D modeling tools or building games. Is this UI uniquely innovative?
I was just looking at this thinking it would be fun to play with my wife, and then realized its windows only. When does the mac version come out?!
The devs mentioned they're not currently looking into it. The game uses Vulkan which isn't supported by MacOS, so they'd have to write a whole second renderer just for Mac.
It is also available on linux.
MoltenVK should make it possible to port to Mac.
Curious that it uses Vulkan and not wgpu.
You can use Whisky [0] which is a free tool that uses WINE to run Windows applications on macOS, including games. There are also paid tools like CrossOver and Parallels but Whisky works well enough for most use cases.
Really impressive. I wonder if the fact that it's one of the only graphically cohesive games built with Rust/Bevy has anything to do with its relative success.
I'm jealous. My indie VR game Rogue Stargun has sold abysmally on Steam.
What kind of marketing or outreach have you done for your game?
Edit: I ask because the devs on Tiny Glade are ex-DICE (I think?) and definitely ex-Embark Studios, two very well-known AAA studios, and they've been very active both in the Rust community (Discord, Meetups, etc), the Houdini community (conferences and meetups) and elsewhere to promote this game during development..
So they already had a personal brand and an audience built-in, which I'm sure helped.. Plus it's a great game.
If you want to give the marketing side a real try for your game, this is a decent resource if you're not already familiar with it: https://howtomarketagame.com/
(No affiliation but I know a few indie devs who were not well-known and had no pre-existing audience, and had success with the approach).
Quite honestly, virtually no marketing and no more than $200 in paid ads.
I actually have a full time job so spending time on making the game decent and marketing and raising a kid is currently impossible.
As long as my game is out in the world creating a bit of entertainment, I'm content
From my observation, their youtube views have been really high. Whenever I see a video review on youtube, it was on average ~100k views with lots of engagement.
Yeah, I was going to suggest something similar. It seems many successful indie titles these days are born from people working social media to create some sort of following before or during development so you already have an audience aware of the game and possibly excited for it on launch. Just standard marketing probably isn't the way to go these days.
Sorry to hear that! I just checked out the game and I don't see anything immediately off-putting on the store page that could explain it. It may just be a matter of visibility? Can you elaborate on how you attempted to market or get the word out about your game?
I have to imagine much of this comes down to the fact that VR games, which have additional hardware requirements, necessarily cater to a much smaller segment of the market. Selling an indie game is already hard enough!
Not sure why downvotes, but I will be happy to buy it again from GOG. For me Tiny Glade is a spiritual sequel to Townscaper :
Does anyone know how it works? Is it some sort of wave function collapse?
The developer has a lot of threads and wip on their twitter, I remember when I saw it first, it was a simple demo showing the wall drag and build functionality.
yup, WFC is exactly how it works
> yup, WFC is exactly how it works
Not according to the 1 of the 2 that are the studio[0].
Love Tiny Glade. You can very casually create amazing places. I fire it up on boring corporate calls just to keep my hands busy.
I've been considering getting a Steam Deck just to play this game.
My wife has played a few hours of Tiny Glade on her Steam Deck and it runs well with functional controller support. Perfect fit for a cozy Sunday play session!
I remember reading a blog post where the author didn't think Rust was suitable for game development because it made making large changes to the code base too hard.
if something is possible, it does not mean it is the best option.
Congratulations!!
The post could use some screenshots of the game.
got vines growing on my stuff
Substack is full of these sites where in good cases 2 sentence of useful into is buried into 15 pages of text. But most of the time there isn't any useful info - like here - and almost 99% of that is useless filler bullshit laden crap.