Tiny Glade is the sort of indie game we love to be surprised by at Digital Foundry: one that uses seriously impressive custom tech to create something unique. Made by just a two person team, developer Pounce Light has crafted a simple and charming gameplay loop: make, create, and arrange castles, villas, or cottages to your liking using the game’s flexible building system. It may be cozycore on the surface, but there’s plenty of bespoke stuff driving its warm pastel aesthetic, including ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), ray-traced reflections and loads of procedural tech. Impressively, it all runs really well on near-decade-old GPUs too. RT on a GTX 1060? Believe it.
This is a game which has surprised me with nearly every aspect of its technical execution and that starts right away with the user experience. As its name suggests, this is a tiny (1.8GB) game that can live entirely within active RAM and as a result it’s ultra-snappy. You reach the first screen two seconds after launching it on Steam, and six seconds later you can be playing. Even games running on cartridge sometimes take longer to start! The game’s use of proceduralism also means that all loads are fast, with starting a new scenario taking less than a second, so you can near-instantly be creating something different.
Of course, Tiny Glade isn’t throwing about 4096×4096 textures everywhere to slow it down like a AAA game, but we don’t expect such a snappy experience even from modern indie titles. That’s enhanced by the highly polished user interface and 3D camera, which react quickly to your input – important elements for mouse-driven games like RTS and city builders.
There’s some beautiful attention to detail here – like the inertia and rhythm you feel as the camera whips around, or the way buildings morph and align to the environment as they change size, with vines growing up buildings and bird houses or barrels appearing alongside walls. The buildings themselves have their controls built in diagetically, allowing you to change their width, height, rotation and styling without moving to a distant part of the UI. There’s a lot of procedural detail, and a lot of joy in seeing how objects that you place automatically change to fit their surroundings in funny or surprising ways.