Dev Update - Building Sneak Peek 🔍👀

Emerges from a pile of TODO notes 👀 Hi there! 👋 Takes a sticky off of her forehead What a busy month! We've been deep in focus mode with numerous UX improvements for the upcoming beta.

This is going to be a long post, so before we go into too much bla-bla, let me first show you what we have right now 🔍 Keep in mind that everything is a work in progress, and still subject to change (I mean, look at that beautiful UI on the left 😆).

We originally envisioned the game being mostly about tiny castles & ruins. However, during the early playtests we saw that grander castles, countryside manors, or even small villages were a fantasy that the game naturally gravitated towards.

Making those larger builds wall-by-wall was pretty cumbersome and time-consuming though. Thus, we set out to design additional tools that would make it easier to create architectural structures, while keeping the playfulness of our gridless drawing.

Five discarded prototypes later (😅), we now have dedicated circle and rectangle shapes! ⭕🔲

...as well as alignment and snapping helpers for the freeform walls...

...and for the new shapes.

Those additions really expanded the variety and complexity of builds! 🏰✨ At the same time, the game still plays like doodling 🖍 It's just easier and quicker to build something larger now.

We've also been working behind the scenes to improve the game's robustness, and make sure it survives whatever you throw at it. For example, wall pasta! 🍝

Our next planned additions are doors & windows 🏠 We'll keep you posted on their progress!

I mentioned a beta earlier, so let's talk about that! 💆 When is it happening? For now we'll just say "Summer" 😄 We don't yet know how big the (closed) beta will be, but our newsletter will be the main source for recruiting for help 🙏 If you are interested (or simply would like to keep up-to-date), you're welcome to join our mailing list 💌

Aaaaand, that's all for now, folks 👐

Thank you for reading all the way here, and have a lovely rest of the week 😊

💚

-Ana & the Tiny Glade team