Tiny Glade, the ridiculously adorable procedural indie sandbox "doodling" creation game from PounceLight, launched yesterday on Steam (with a 15% early bird discount), and it's already a runaway hit. With over 2000 Overwhelmingly Positive ratings, it's fair to estimate Tiny Glade's likely sold over 100,000 copies on Steam in its first 24 hours.
I played a bit of Tiny Glade last night, and can personally confirm its adorable ridiculousness. Unlike other sandbox building games, where you're directly (and painstakingly) connecting/adjusting objects, the procedural generation seems attuned to your mouse movements, delightfully filling in your design choices as you go. Create separate segments of a wooden fence, for instance, and without you having to ask, Tiny Glade helpfully connects them together, then turns the fence into a stretchable "fabric" you can pull across your glade. (You'll probably have to play the game yourself, to experience what I mean.)
As luck would have it, Tiny Glade comes at a time when "generative AI" continues to be a siren buzz word in tech, encouraging enthusiasts to imagine that gamers will want to text prompt virtual worlds into existence. The success of Tiny Glade shows how procedural generative-assisted creation is preferred by actual gamers. As I wrote a few months ago:
Tiny Glade puts the emphasis on user choice and creativity. The goal with the AI here is not to replace human creativity, but to make it easier, more delightful. It also seems robust enough that very dedicated people could, with enough practice, create especially amazing worlds.
To judge by all the wildly varied user-made castles on Tiny Glade's social media, that last part is especially true. It's also contributed to Tiny Glade's immediate success. Over the last year or two, PounceLight has been demoing their game on TikTok and YouTube, generating tens of millions of views -- while encouraging influencers to run with castle building on their own social channels. For instance:
I also have to wonder if PounceLight is planning to turn Tiny Glade into a new kind of virtual world, linking each user-made castle on the same path, then adding avatars (or a group of your own villagers/nobles) so you can visit neighbors, exchange gifts, and chat -- a new kind of Animal Crossing-esque cozy MMO that's somehow even more adorable and creator-centered.
Here's my Tiny Glade, by the way. It's decidedly Not Much but I do love how when you pull the camera back in the morning, it looks like your little castle is in a Miyazaki movie.
Please support posts like these by buying Making a Metaverse That Matters and joining my Patreon!
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.