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. :)

[1] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/kajiya [2] https://youtu.be/dpYwLny0P8M

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.

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.

If anyone needs ideas, making [boids](https://slsdo.github.io/steering-behaviors/) in Bevy is a great weekend project.

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.