Cosy Worlds, Coding Chaos

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on quite a few different things. Firstly, I have decided to rename beep8 to beepmini. This is a relatively small-sounding change but it means rebuilding the website and merging it with the beepmini.com domain.

I still think beep8 was a good name, but about 6 months after I bought the domain, someone else released a project with the same name. I reached out but didn’t hear back. I was first, but I don’t fancy a fight, so I’ve decided to change it. Fortunately, when I bought beep8.com I also grabbed beepmini.com. At first I thought I’d use it as a games arcade, but now it just makes sense to keep everything together.

Merging the two sites, updating the code, and rewriting the copy is taking a while. Hopefully I’ll have it sorted in the next week or so.

Late last week I also had the (possibly terrible) idea to make a very simple 3D engine for beepmini. There are some 3D libraries that work with JavaScript but I feel like they are all too complicated. Maths is not my strong suit, 3D maths in particular, so this might be more chaos than genius. I’m muddling through, slowly getting somewhere. It’s trickier than I expected, and I might just give in and use a third-party library anyway. Still, at least I’ll have learnt something.

Besides this, I’ve also made some updates to the Particle Flow Fields app, adding extra colour schemes and a full gallery that you can submit creations to. And this went so well I also added submissions to the Emoji Art Maker, and Code Ninja. I’m now getting daily gallery submissions which is so lovely to see. I will set aside some time each month to go through the submissions and add the best ones to the gallery.

Every week I feel like I haven’t achieved anything, but writing this makes me realise I’ve done OK. I just need to keep going.

Speaking of keeping going, one app that’s been on my mind a lot lately is Tiny Glade.

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Tiny Glade

Tiny Glade is a simple and beautiful app for creating little worlds. I first saw it years ago when Anastasia Opara shared a video of a tech demo where she drew a wall onto some grass, and then drew a path and as the path reached the wall an archway opened. This was years before Tiny Glade was released but I was fascinated. It’s around the same time Townscaper (the link is for a browser based version) was released which is another simple world-building app.

Watch the trailer

As Tiny Glade was developed it had increasing amounts of charm and whimsy and a beautiful aesthetic. You’re given a small clearing in a forest and you can draw paths, walls, rivers, trees, flowers, and buildings. Everything is procedurally generated so you can just draw the basic shapes, place boxes, position windows, and everything works itself out.

It’s not a game in the traditional sense, there’s no objective, no score or levels; it’s a cosy world-building experience.

Get Tiny Glade on Steam → (currently on sale!)

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Concept Artists Play with Tiny Glade

Watch the video

I follow a lot of concept artists on social media. I love seeing artists pull amazing worlds straight from their brains. This video shows 3 concept artists creating Tiny Glade scenes to use in a short cartoon.

The thing is, Tiny Glade is so simple and so beautiful that you can’t help but make something interesting. But I still enjoyed seeing how different people approached their creations, and I loved the final results.

Next up is the cartoon made with the Tiny Glade assets made in this video.

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Tiny’s Tale

Watch Tiny’s Tale →

Tiny’s Tale is a short film made using Tiny Glade and Aseprite. The environments were made in Tiny Glade (in the Concept Artists Play with Tiny Glade video) and then the characters and animations were made in Aseprite. It’s a sweet little story about a tiny creature who lives in the glade. It’s also a really creative use of Tiny Glade. I’d love to see more export options in Tiny Glade, so assets can be more easily reused in other projects.

And if cute creatures aren’t enough, someone even used Tiny Glade to recreate Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings.

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Helm’s Deep in Tiny Glade

See the creation of Helm’s Deep in Tiny Glade →

Tiny Glade might be cosy, but apparently it’s also tough enough for an orc siege! It’s fascinating to see a more mature project tackled with something so whimsical. The creator has done an amazing job of recreating the fortress and the surrounding landscape. The armies and soldiers in particular are really interesting since Tiny Glade doesn’t support characters, but with a bit of imagination it can be done.

I hope the sheep didn’t get hurt during the battle!

All of this made me curious about the people behind Tiny Glade, and luckily they’ve shared some of their story.

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Tiny Glade Developers Discuss Bevy, Proceduralism, and Publishers in Cozy Games

In this article, the developers of Tiny Glade share their insights on using the Bevy engine, the importance of procedural generation in their game, and their experiences working with publishers in the cosy game space. It also looks at the background of the developers and how they came to make the game. Which, as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve ended up making an entire newsletter about.