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. :)
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.
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
> 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".
prox 1 hours ago [-]
Do you have a Steam page? I love Valheim and looking for more games that scratch that explorer/builder itch.
IshKebab 2 hours ago [-]
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...
robertlagrant 24 minutes ago [-]
According to the article most people play it for around an hour.
lopis 2 hours ago [-]
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.
modernerd 2 hours ago [-]
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
Eliah_Lakhin 8 hours ago [-]
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.
I play it in the background when chatting with friends on weekly game nights!
jsheard 57 minutes ago [-]
It'll be interesting to see if its success leads to it being ported to consoles. To my knowledge Rust has yet to ship in a console game, obviously there's a number of roadblocks to making that happen but the biggest one is that Sony apparently has a strict approval process for new languages/compilers to be used on their platforms.
Animats 7 hours ago [-]
Yes. It's a good success story. And a cute little game.
GenericCanadian 7 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
prox 1 hours ago [-]
Can I also use Rust to build UI / window / data heavy apps? I am webdeveloper mostly so looking into other avenues right now.
trissi1996 42 minutes ago [-]
Sure, there's "native" UI with stuff like slint(QT-like) or iced(system76 is actually building the COSMIC linux desktop environment with this).
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.
I can personally vouch for Slint. The DSL is very pleasant to work with, it's still evolving (and the devs are very active and responsive), tooling is also getting better and better each release and it supports translations and accessibility already (through AccessKit). I've been (veeeery) slowly working on a Matrix client with it and I've quite enjoyed it so far.
Kiro 2 hours ago [-]
> but the sweet spot right now is simulations
What kind of games are you referring to?
pdpi 2 hours ago [-]
Not so much games proper, but more like scientific computing visualisations, CAD, stuff like that.
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.
Iulioh 3 hours ago [-]
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
mutagen 6 hours ago [-]
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!
There's a decent chance they did so pretty much on the strength of Tomasz Stachowiak' name. The guy knows his rendering, and Tiny Glade has an extremely impressive global illumination stack.
myrmidon 38 minutes ago [-]
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...
Cthulhu_ 29 minutes ago [-]
I'd say 10% is pretty good; for a long time, one of the biggest criticisms of a lot of games and publishers nowadays was the lack of a demo or a return policy for digital purchases, meaning people were more hesitant to buy games on a whim or some people got scammed with an unfinished or broken game.
modernerd 1 hours ago [-]
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".)
pico303 6 hours ago [-]
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.
rco8786 8 hours ago [-]
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!
Jzush 5 hours ago [-]
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.
k1w1 6 hours ago [-]
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?
PythagoRascal 2 hours ago [-]
As far as I know they are using a customised variant of the "wave-function collapse" technique, used and popularised by Oskar Stalberg in his games "Bad North" and "Townscaper".
The technique boils down to hand-crafting tons of tiles with adjacency rules about which tiles can slot together. When the user adds/removes a tile the algorithm iteratively tries to find fitting tiles and, if needed, changes neighbouring tiles for ones with the best transitions.
He gave a talk where he goes into detail about this[1]. You can also find more if you google his name and "wave-function collapse".
[1]: https://youtu.be/0bcZb-SsnrA
PcChip 6 hours ago [-]
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
p1necone 5 hours ago [-]
I can't remember where exactly but I think I did read somewhere it was based on wave function collapse.
The texture is certainly procedural for brick patterns, etc. but I'll bet smoothing intersecting polys happens at render time.
jaimex2 5 hours ago [-]
Just a clever shader
waltbosz 5 hours ago [-]
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?
LarsDu88 8 hours ago [-]
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.
sbarre 7 hours ago [-]
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).
gauge_field 4 hours ago [-]
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.
LarsDu88 3 hours ago [-]
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
ferfumarma 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
xingped 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ferfumarma 2 hours ago [-]
Have you given copies away to streamers? Have you considered giving Fanatical 200 licenses to put in a bundle?
VR is a niche segment, so it's harder than a general purpose game.
xingped 7 hours ago [-]
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?
alumic 7 hours ago [-]
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!
LarsDu88 3 hours ago [-]
Quite honestly I have no time to market the game nor add significant features since becoming a father. My day job as a machine learning engineer pays more than I would expect to ever make from this game
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?!
tbillington 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Does anyone know how it works? Is it some sort of wave function collapse?
iKlsR 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jaimex2 5 hours ago [-]
yup, WFC is exactly how it works
bch 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pgib 6 hours ago [-]
I've been considering getting a Steam Deck just to play this game.
mbStavola 4 hours ago [-]
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!
lofaszvanitt 4 hours 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.
UltraSane 5 hours ago [-]
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.
d0mine 3 hours ago [-]
if something is possible, it does not mean it is the best option.
PittleyDunkin 6 hours ago [-]
Congratulations!!
The post could use some screenshots of the game.
m0llusk 3 hours ago [-]
got vines growing on my stuff
Rendered at 09:52:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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".
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
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!
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.
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:
- https://www.arewewebyet.org/topics/frameworks/
- https://areweguiyet.com/#ecosystem
What kind of games are you referring to?
This interview talks about it in a bit of length: https://youtu.be/PND2Wpy6U-E
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!
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...
Or advice for a path to be able to build things like Tiny Glade? (Other than "start 20 years ago".)
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.
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.
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?
VR is a niche segment, so it's harder than a general purpose game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1291340/Townscaper/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/townscaper
It is also available on linux.
Curious that it uses Vulkan and not wgpu.
[0] https://github.com/Whisky-App/Whisky
Not according to the 1 of the 2 that are the studio[0].
[0] https://x.com/h3r2tic/status/1695073463294120219
The post could use some screenshots of the game.