Tiny Glade is the kind of indie game we love to be surprised by at Digital Foundry: one that uses truly impressive custom technology to create something unique. Made by a team of just two people, developer Pounce Light has created a simple and charming gameplay loop: create, craft and arrange castles, mansions or cottages to your heart's content using the game's flexible building system. It might look cozy on the surface, but there's a lot of bespoke stuff that drives its warm pastel aesthetic, including ray-traced global illumination (RTGI), ray-traced reflections, and plenty of procedural tech. Surprisingly, everything works very well even on GPUs that are almost ten years old. RT on a GTX 1060? Believe it.
This is a game that surprised me in almost every aspect of its technical execution, and that starts right away with the user experience. As the name suggests, this is a tiny (1.8GB) game that can live entirely in active RAM and is extremely snappy as a result. You reach the first screen two seconds after launching it on Steam, and six seconds later you can start playing. Even cartridge games sometimes take longer to launch! The game's use of proceduralism also means that all loads are quick, with starting a new scenario taking less than a second, so you can create something different almost instantly.
Obviously Tiny Glade doesn't use 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. This is enhanced by the highly refined user interface and 3D camera, which react quickly to your inputs – important elements for mouse-driven games like RTS and city builders.
There's nice attention to detail here, like the momentum and rhythm you feel as the camera moves, or the way the buildings transform and align with the environment as they change size, with vines growing on the buildings and birdhouses or barrels appearing next to walls. The buildings themselves have controls integrated diagetically, allowing you to change their width, height, rotation, and style without moving to a distant part of the UI. There's a lot of procedural detail and a lot of joy in seeing how placed objects automatically change to match their surroundings in fun or surprising ways.
Rendering technology is another standout feature of this little game. The game uses a Vulkan renderer with zero shader compilation stuttering and makes extensive use of compute shaders to drive rendering. Tiny Glade's diffuse global illumination uses software ray tracing, so it scales with ultra-low-end and older GPUs. According to the developer, the game tracks proxy geometry of lower complexity and fires rays at sub-native resolution, with one ray for each 4×4 pixel grid. Like many games that use RTGI, such as Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the rays start in screen space first and then move out of screen space to track proxy geometry in a BVH only when necessary. This further reduces costs and provides the game with additional lighting detail in areas within the screen space. To keep noise low, the lighting is encoded into a spherical harmonic to smooth things out and is simply referred to as post-processing. Essentially, every part of the RTGI is just at the edge of quality needed to match the art style, which keeps performance high.
RT is also used for specularity or reflections, but this manifests itself more rarely in the game, mainly on water or ice surfaces. There, the rays are again traced in the proxy geometry, but notably mixed with the screen-space reflections. So if you move the camera up and down while using a camera closer to the ground (like in the game Teardown) you can see how most of the color and reflection detail is eliminated from the screen space and you see lumpier proxy geometry instead . That doesn't stop reflections from being beautiful for what they are, but there are clearer visual limitations than diffuse global illumination, which can be much coarser in detail before it starts to fall apart.
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Global illumination technology gives the game its warm glow, where objects are brought together by light bouncing between them. Like any game with RTGI, you can see some spectacular effects, such as encroaching darkness between the trees in a densely forested area, or shadows and lighting coming from the sky, allowing areas outside of direct sunlight to appear naturally lit and not bright or bright. out of place. I think the RTGI is the gel that holds the images together and it looks really gorgeous almost everywhere.
However, the game has some graphical limitations, such as in internal areas when using the “walking” camera. Here, perhaps due to the proxy geometry and dependency on screen-space rays, you may find areas with disappearing illumination or occlusion issues. Likewise, you can occasionally see light reflected from the sun beneath the ground, which affects the lighting of buildings above when the sun is just below the horizon. But overall things look fine and corners cut for performance reasons don't disturb the game's graphics.
Besides ray tracing, there are two other effects I want to highlight. The first is ice rendering, which includes surface shine from the sun, reflections, and local lights on the top layer. Below this is a layer that shows the cumulative darkening and refraction of fish and other objects in the water below. Finally, you can even see shadowing from cracks in the ice stopping the light coming through them. This makes the stylized rendering of the ice very convincing.
The second effect is the camera's depth of field, which I used everywhere but can be turned off in the menu if desired. This is the smoothest depth of field effect I've ever seen in a video game, whether you're looking from a distant tilt-shift perspective or closer in normal gameplay. I particularly like the reduction in depth of field for objects close to the camera compared to objects in focus behind them. Usually thin objects like sticks in a fence have some discontinuity when they overlap with things in the background in video games, but this is not the case. The blur area appears natural, without strange artifacts. This helps the game feel physically grounded, and at times, it feels like you're actually seeing a diorama: haunting and wonderful.
Despite the strengths of these techniques, the game still maintains a solid 60fps even on low-end hardware. For example, the classic GTX 1060 can run at 80% 1080p, complete with RTGI and reflections. Of course, on higher-end GPUs you get an even better presentation: I opted for 6K recording at 60 fps for my b-roll shots on an RTX 4090 PC, as seen in the video embedded above. I noticed that the game doesn't play well with utilities like RTX HDR and RTSS, both of which caused the game to drop frames even though it was working fine internally.
Regardless of the small issues, there's a lot to be proud of for the two-person development team, with great performance and solid technical decisions that further the art and gameplay style of Tiny Glade. I think this game also proves that RT and high-tech rendering isn't just for the AAA space or genres chasing photorealism. It also ably demonstrates the power of custom technology and why custom engines are still needed in this day and age. I can't imagine an Unreal Engine game running this fast or this well without a lot of work.
With this release as a starting point for the studio, I'm also curious to see where the developers take the title next. I can imagine more palettes, archetypes and increased map sizes in the future, but what's already here is great and worth checking out – and if the cheap asking price is still too much for you, a free demo is also available on Steam.