HN Reader

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 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.

Tiny Glade is a beautiful piece of technical art. It's worth playing even if the genre is not normally your thing.

Procedural art is fascinating and worthy of a deep dive too since it combines art, modelling, rendering, programming and maths (constraint solvers, discrete optimization, more).

Anastasia Opara (“procedural art nerd”) has a Gumroad with procedural art tutorials that show how to create environments procedurally with Houdini: https://anopara.gumroad.com/ (the first one is free)

Tomasz Stachowiak (“technical debt generator”) gave a talk at GPC 2024 earlier this month called “rendering tiny glades with entirely too much ray marching” (no recording I can find yet but worth keeping an eye on): https://www.graphicsprogrammingconference.nl/#tiny-glade

Outside of the Tiny Glade team, Oskar Stålberg (Townscaper) is worth following for his frequent insights into proc-gen: https://x.com/OskSta

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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’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.

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 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.

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?

Any recommendations for learning interactive procedural art?

Or advice for a path to be able to build things like Tiny Glade? (Other than "start 20 years ago".)

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.

Looks really cool, might need to get this!

What actually suprised me though was the almost 10% return rate on steam sales that the article did not even comment on. Is this typical? Are there a lot of people that pretty much demo and return games?

Don't think its necessarily a bad thing, just the numbers are unexpectedly high...

If people find it harder and harder to tell AI voices from real humans, it must be in parts because of people like that youtuber. If you gave me a recording of her voice and had me guess, I would have said "AI" for sure.

Does anyone know how it works? Is it some sort of wave function collapse?

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?!

I've been considering getting a Steam Deck just to play this game.

Congratulations!!

The post could use some screenshots of the game.

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.

got vines growing on my stuff

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.

sigh. https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/tiny_glade