About a week ago, the YouTube algo seemed to randomly shove a Tiny Glade video into my home feed. I’d never heard of it before. After watching, I had to try it. Demo time! But the Steam game isn’t available on my MacBook Air. So…Windows maybe?
Windows
Luckily thankfully, I already own a very good gaming laptop; my wife and I bought it mainly for the kids to share for school work. But would you be surprised if I told you they use it for gaming mostly? Never saw that coming…right. It’s not exactly a big gaming rig, but it’s beefy enough.
The cool thing is that since I recently detached from my all-Apple-only tech setup and switched to the Google-verse, it’s a cakewalk to use a Windows machine much like my MacBook. Basically, I turn them into quasi-Chromebooks.
First, the Chrome browser is set to default. Check. Next, all the main Google apps are installed as web apps, followed by my favorite websites (shout out to Pika!). Pin all those icons to the taskbar or dock. Huzzah! All my data across all my devices, regardless of their tech company origins. Cross-platform is most practical…
So yeah, I kind of just jumped into using our Windows 11 laptop with specs not too shabby:
- 11th-gen core i5
- 16GB RAM
- RTX 3050 4GB GPU
- 1.5 TB SSD
- 15.6” FHD display
- Wifi 6
It’s a nice running machine (despite the general Windows caveats). I can easily see myself switching full-time to a Windows laptop as my daily driver. (Give me some time to find a great deal…)
Tiny Glade
Steam is good. I opened it, found Tiny Glade, and installed the free demo last night. In a quick ten minutes, I launched the demo, learned how easy it is to navigate the UI, control the 3D game-field, and start building muh-chill-glade, yo.
Let me tell you — it’s nice! The charming graphics are simple yet realistic with shadows and lighting. The audio controls are great; you can have chill music or only ambient sounds (like the wind in Breath of the Wild). Of course, you can mix those up with sound effects and independently control volume for each.
When they say cozy sandbox builder, Tiny Glade might be the epitome. I only scratched its delightful and approachable surface. So I’m looking forward to spending at least a solid hour or two with it over the weekend. I like that whatever you build, you can position a camera anywhere within it and take great photos to share with others.
Tiny Glade is an artistic and creative tool, letting you easily build complex structures. I think it taps into the same thing players enjoy when building in Minecraft creative mode. Only with Tiny Glade, graphics are not blocky but rather beautiful. I’d like to make a Japanese Zen village/garden — Zen Glade! (Hey, that sounds like Xenoblade…in fact, it’s ゼノブレイド = Zenobureido)
I noticed that the game devs are continuing to update and expand the feature-set, which is very promising. It’s already great as it is. So I’m ready to get involved with it and watch the game itself grow over time while my own skills and builds within the game grow too. (Somehow I’ll still make time for Sea of Stars progress.)
Have you tried Tiny Glade? What are your thoughts?
No comments:
Post a Comment