Dev Diary - Our windows are chameleons 🦎

Emerges from the familiar pile of TODO stickies. Oh, hello-hello! I hope you’re doing well, and have already had a chance to enjoy any hints of the upcoming spring 🌼 Spring is coming, right? 👀 Peeks outside the window to humid grayness and biting wind… Ehh! 🥶

Well, at least in Tiny Glade it’s always sunny 😄 Tom and I have been spending a loooot of time in it - this month has been an intense whirlwind of improvements, bug fixes, and preparations for a v0.1 demo build. The list of TODOs is still formidable, but so far we’re on schedule, and everything is going according to plan o7

There’s a million things to wrap up, but this month one of our main efforts has been completing the code for window interactions.

Windows can now be placed on roofs, on edges between roofs and walls, and they turn into doors atop a stone floor. Corner windows are also a thing now. We saw a few folks trying to attach windows to corners in playtests, so we made that a proper feature 👩‍🔧👨‍🔧

For now, we’ve wrapped up one window family: cottage windows, which we’ll have in the demo. It’s a thread that’s been in development for multiple months now, so we’re very happy it’s finally coming to fruition.

Changing the roof shape will make windows re-adapt as well. You can say our windows are like chameleons 🦎: very blendable with their environment!

Speaking of roofs, we’ve expanded rectangular roof controls, and added a new roof type where two sides are a wall - a so-called “gable”. (and yes, you can place windows on both the roof and the wall parts!)

Tom and I continue to optimize the game. Since one element in Tiny Glade often affects other nearby elements, the biggest improvement is doing computations only when and where necessary. In the GIF below, you can see a special developer view: drawing a path/terrain affects only some regions (highlighted as white squares), and then only those cause walls (red outlines) to recompute. It’s an ongoing effort to make every game system as sleepy as possible 🦥 so your computer stays cool and quiet.

Having done some preliminary optimizations, we’re even considering expanding the glade size from what we’ve shown. More on that in a future update 👀

There’s been a lot of other changes, small and large (for example, more music 🎵), but I shall keep this update short and sweet, for I must return to gnawing on my TODO stickies 🦝📄

As always, thank you so much for reading :3 I wish you a wonderful week full of warm thoughts. Until next time!

With love, Ana & Tom

PS: Tom recently shared his thoughts on what makes a game cozy in (https://www.pcgamer.com/games/life-sim/even-cozy-gamings-biggest-fans-cant-decide-on-its-definition-but-they-arent-worried-theres-a-whole-lot-of-grey-area-and-thats-what-makes-it-interesting/). Check it out!

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