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.
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...
Agreed, these kind of games feel lazy imo. Like a dev just wanted to toil endlessly on making a game engine but then never add actual gameplay elements. I played around with Tiny Glade for a little bit and then never really touched it again. Neat, but no depth.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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!
Readit News
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".
Dead Comment
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.
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!