Okay, I'm back! Part 2! Where were we?.. oh yeah!

https://twitter.com/anastasiaopara/status/1634569679384502272?s=20

Once we had a trailer (and a name!), we had something that was easy to share around. TikTok videos, Youtube mentions, articles - they all compounded in a VERY long tail for us, that lasted all the way until February!

When starting as indies, the scariest thought was that we'd pour thousands of hours of love & hard work into a game no one would know about.

Today, Tiny Glade is #87 top wishlisted game on Steam, having gathered 257,387 wl 3 months since the reveal.

So, uh, HOW, right?😅

🧵👇 I'm NOT a marketing expert or anything like that😛 so I'm simply going to share what we did, to hopefully provide a useful data point for others. Maybe something here could work for you too!

In my tiny building game, I want your creations to exist in a world that feels alive. As a first step, I tackled ivy 🌿 As time passes, ivy grows on walls, bringing a bit of life with it✨

Brief tech overview in the🧵

#screenshotsaturday #indiegamedev #rustlang 🦀 #bevyengine A new system needs to interact with all the previous systems. Finding a suitable algorithm took me a few iterations 👀💦

Ivy needs to know if a wall gets changed...

This month I finally convinced myself to tackle the undo-redo system since it was becoming a premonition of a technical debt👀

And of course I decided to make it animated. How hard can it be, right!? 😂 [1/10]

#screenshotsaturday #indiegamedev #rustlang 🦀 #procgen #bevyengine [2/10] Undo is essential for this game to stay playful and relaxing: if you misclick, a cat jumps on the keyboard, or you simply change your mind, it should always be easy to go back.

I had been scheming an undo system for a while, and now was the time to roll up my sleeves 💪

My genetic drawing toy project is now opensource github.com/anopara/geneti… Disclaimer: the project is from when I was getting into programming, so dont have high expectations of the code hehe😅I also added an automatically generated sampling mask [see thread 1/4]🙃 The algorithm starts with uniform sampling, then a mask is created based on edges to allocate more samples around regions of high frequency. I finish it up with a custom mask created in Photoshop to annotate semantic centers of attention (such as the face, or people, etc) [2/4]

Continuing archaeology of my old hard drive 🧐 here's another project from 2017 where I was playing around with genetic algorithms. The algorithm has ~100 "tries" to arrange 20 brushstrokes after which it repeats the process, overlaying on top of the previous iteration [1/5] With each iteration, the brushstrokes were progressively smaller (to imitate drawing finer details). For portraits, I also used a hand-painted mask that would allocate more samples in the region of face and hands [2/5]