Tiny Glade 'built' its way to >600k sold in a month
newsletter.gamediscover.co
newsletter.gamediscover.co
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
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.
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
But seriously it looks very cool.
TBH I freaked out when Unshrouded trailer got released because it's a direct competitor and how cool their game is !
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".
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.
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.
I play it in the background when chatting with friends on weekly game nights!
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
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.
What kind of games are you referring to?
This interview talks about it in a bit of length: https://youtu.be/PND2Wpy6U-E
And you can also get an electron-like stack going, that is actually much less bloated than "normal" electron, by using tauri-webview, which uses the OS-provided webview and combining it with one of the many cool rust WASM-based reactive web-ui frameworks, like leptos or dioxus. This gets you compiled sizes of ~10s of MB compared to electrons 100s of MBs.
There's also bindings to a lot of traditional ui libs, like GTK, QT & Tk.
I'm currently going for the 2nd option (with leptos for the web part) as I'm used to the web-stack and am very productive with this approach, but native UI also seems very tempting to dig into further.
Some related links:
Still, very much in its infancy.
The backend is currently C++ but I'm considering using other languages since there are so many bindings (Mojo is on my radar).
Best of luck! I'll keep an eye on it ;)
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.
I feel like this was a great part of it, the dev created a community before the release
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 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.
How is this possible? Is it some kind of procedural geometry that fills in the available space?
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
I'm jealous. My indie VR game Rogue Stargun has sold abysmally on Steam.
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).
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
Wow; great attitude! If that's the case, then why not make it free for a couple weeks and try to build up some review volume?
Sounds like you've got the right attitude.. :-)
VR is a niche segment, so it's harder than a general purpose game.
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.
Or advice for a path to be able to build things like Tiny Glade? (Other than "start 20 years ago".)
Learn about perlin/simplex noise, Poisson disk sampling, packing algorithms, WFC, boids, inverse kinematics, SDFs.
Choose a style (2D, 3D, animation...) and from that start learning the relevant tool (Blender nodes, Houdini, Processing or something else). This is a decent start and it branches too much from here on, depending on your tastes.
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...
Of course, the lack of a 'point' as such is absolutely intentional and I'd presume the people who do keep paying it like it *because* of that rather than *in spite* of it.
Thinking about it that way (which I did have to work through in my head first, this is Not My Area Of Expertise at all), the numbers don't seem particularly surprising, and I'd guess the article didn't comment on it because the people involved in the article knew what they were talking about sufficiently that they didn't find it surprising either.
... that or steam return rates are just higher than I thought in general; it would be difficult to overestimate my level of ignorance here.
Not according to the 1 of the 2 that are the studio[0].
It is also available on linux.
Curious that it uses Vulkan and not wgpu.
Vulkan is a powerful API but it’s not universally cross platform like OpenGL.
The post could use some screenshots of the game.