Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect

13 Apr

I'm making a cozy and relaxing town builder called 🌳🏡Island Architect 🏡🌳! - Coastal European vibe - Sculpt terrain, including caves & sea arches - Build wonky, curved buildings Wishlist now on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3079100/...

Seeing Oklab enjoyed and used by so many is mind-boggling! I still can’t quite comprehend that I wrote a blog post that ended up as a web standard and in software everywhere. Best part is seeing so many people say they enjoy Oklab and that it is a tool they regularly use.

Xor@xordev.com

If you need a random color (e.g. procedurally coloring objects), you should use Oklab or Oklch color space instead of RGB or HSV. RGB may span the whole spectrum, but it does not pick fairly (leaning dark/muddy). Oklab is designed to more closely map to how we perceive color

I finally added different roof styles to Island Architect, my upcoming relaxing building game. Feels good to finally be able to make buildings like my hometown! Stockholm is of colourful stucco and painted metal roofs. #screenshotsaturday #indiegames #gamedev #indiegamedev

I made it possible to make sloped walls in my relaxing building game 🌳🏡Island architect🏡🌳 Starting to really feel like the buildings system is coming together, with a good balance of flexibility and it just doing the sensible thing for you. #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegame #cozygames

Made some progress on windows for my relaxing building game Island Architect! Placing windows now makes actual holes in the building! Will also make it possible to vary the window style, add details and more! Also glass roofs for greenhouses. #screenshotsaturday #indiegames #indiegamedev

14 Aug

Working on windows and openings for my game Island Architect! I want to make them look a bit better, make is possible to see through buildings and later add some styling options. Here’s what it looks like right now, as I am debugging all the mesh generation! #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegame

25 June

Working the water simulation for 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳, my relaxing sandbox building game. The interaction between the water and simulation is starting to work well, allowing you to build dams and aqueducts! #gamedev #indiegame #indiegamedev

23 June

Made some progress on the water simulation for my relaxing sandbox game 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳 I added some proper shading finally, and performance is much better, with a priority system for what to update each frame. In the video you can see how it reacts to terrain edits. #gamedev #indiegame

6 June

Here’s 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳 on a field trip! A bit surprised by how well it works on my laptop without dedicated GPU already! #screenshotsaturday #indiegame #gamedev #indiegamedev

30 May

Feels slow at times, but I’ve certainly made some progress on my relaxing building game 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳! #screenshotsaturday #indiegame #gamedev #indiegamedev

store.steampowered.comIsland Architect on SteamSculpt seaside towns nestled between cliffs in Island Architect, a relaxing free-form builder. Shape winding streets, carve tunnels, and craft cozy harbors inspired by coastal Europe. Build with flowi...

30 May

If this looks interesting, wishlist on steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3079100/

20 May

Got a first version of waterfalls working! Really fun to see the water react and new little ponds and waterfalls form as you edit the terrain. Next I’ll look at some better shading, VFX and solving lots and lots and lots of edge cases. #indiegamedev #gamedev #indiegame

I'm working on a stylized shader for flowing water. Here are some results combining phasor noise with advection along the flow direction. Some more details in 🧵. The code is on shadertoy: www.shadertoy.com/view/N3sGD2 #gamedev #procedural #indiegamedev #techart

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This gets more and more distorted the further we follow the flow, so we need to reset periodically. To hide this the noise is sampled three times with different offsets and blended together

cdn.akamai.steamstatic.comcdn.akamai.steamstatic.com

The flow technique was used in Portal 2 and Left4Dead, but with a texture instead of procedural noise. I really like the added look of the noise adapting to the flow direction though, which you can't do with a texture. There are more detail in this talk: cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/2...

Phasor, gabor and phacelle noise are neat ways of generating branching noise structures from a flow direction. They are relatively cheap to evaluate and they can be expressed as a simple function of position and direction. It can easily be animated, but only perpendicularly to the lines formed.

To animate the noise so that it looks like there is flow along the lines themselves a different technique is needed. I'm using an old trick for this: We let the position we sample the noise at move along the flow field.

11 May

Working on water shading for my relaxing building game. Here's a quick test with a foam shader showing water flow and some reflections. A lot of details to solve since it is fully dynamic! Left to do: transparency, waterfalls and a bunch more... #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiegame

11 May

Since this is fully dynamic and you can make streams that branch and join etc, tricks like scrolling a texture don't work. This is instead phasor noise that is animated using the classical Valve trick using two locally scrolling samples that are reset and blended between. Seems to work well!

7 May

Got a first version of the water surface working, including some quick foam that moves with water speed. This is for the water simulation in my relaxing sandbox building game Island Architect. #indiegame #indiegamedev #gamedev

29 Apr

Working on the dynamic water system for my cozy building game Island Architect! Think about where water should come from. Should it rain every now and then or should you directly place water sources? More thoughts in 🧵 #indiegamedev #gamedev #indiegame

29 Apr

One option is that water mainly comes from rain, evaporates when it is sunny and that there’s a dynamic weather system. This adds a water management aspect. You will need to fill up reservoirs and have water slowly seep out to have little ponds in your town.

29 Apr

The other option is that you can place water sources, that magically ”creates” water, much more flexibility, but without the extra dimension of water management. Not sure yet which way I lean, or if it’s both! Thoughts and opinions are very welcome! 🙏

24 Apr

Second day of working on the dynamic water system for my relaxing building game. Water now interacts with buildings and walls, so you can build (or break) dams and aqueducts! Looking forward to soon giving it more proper rendering and VFX! #indiegame #indiegamedev

22 Apr

Started working on the dynamic water simulation for my relaxing building game today. Obviously a lot of work left, but it’s already working with overhangs and everything. Looking forward to making waterfalls more than just lines and making it possible to build aqueducts! #gamedev #indiegamedev

20 Apr

Island Architect has gotten over 300k views the last 10 days! Big thanks to everyone who has liked or commented! ☺️ But I need to reach even further. Next I’ll prototype some wilder ideas, starting with a dynamic water system, to allow ponds, aqueducts and waterfalls! #indiegamedev #indiegames

20 Apr

It’s a quite strange sensation. 300k views is an insane number if you think about it! At the same time I know I need to reach much further to be in a good position to release a demo, and then the game. Marketing games is a crazy thing!

15 Apr

Building some houses as time passes, in my upcoming relaxing building game 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳 #wishlistwednesday #indiegamedev #cozygames

15 Apr

Wishlist here if you are interested: store.steampowered.com/app/3079100/...

13 Apr

youtu.beIsland Architect, my relaxing town building gameYouTube video by Bjorn Ottosson

14 Apr

High resolution video here: youtu.be/wQ1MqNv0kdE?...

13 Apr

There are many inspirations behind Island Architect, but Kiki’s Delivery Service has a central role. I love the outsider perspective on Europe’s architecture and how styles from across the continent are blended. I am Swedish, but the aim is to make a Pan-European amalgamation 🇪🇺

11 Apr

I’ve made lots of progress made on my cozy building game: 🌳🏡Island Architect🏡🌳. Therefor time for a new gameplay collage for #screenshotsaturday! #indiegame #gamedev #indiegamedev

10 Apr

I’ve added to ability to choose colors for buildings in my upcoming cozy building game, Island Architect. You also get railings now when building terraces or balconies. #indiegame #gamedev #indiegamedev

10 Apr

The colors are inspired by traditional colors here in my hometown, Stockholm! You can also alternate colors on a buildings to get various patterns:

Here's a quick thread about how the procedural material is set up to enhance the details of the editable terrain in Island Architect, without baking any textures. Still details I want to add, but I'm happy with the foundation! Here's the final result and the diffuse texture: #gamedev #indiegame

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This gives most of the data for highlighting edges, but does not differentiate between convex and concave. For that I also store per vertex how it relates to it's neighbouring face centers along the normal direction. With that I can find concave and convex parts:

By combining this in various ways and combining with tiling textures I get something resembling what you'd get in something like substance, but quite cheaply and for a dynamic mesh in realtime. Still some things I don't quite like, but the approach I like for sure!

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That does two things. It makes it possible to chose between hard and soft normals in shaders, by exaggerating the length difference or reducing it in the vertex shader and outputing both. The pixel shader is then free to blend or use the result in different ways

There other useful thing is that it exposes the length of the normal, as a way to highlight high curvature areas. Here's what that results in, with some processing to highlight just the high curvature areas (here with yellow for high curvature, blue for low)

The core problem is that I don't want to unwrap the mesh or do any sort of texture baking, but I still want to highlight edges and cavities. To help I calculate some data per vertex. First I scale normals by how flat the surface is at that point. So normals aren't normalized

8 Apr

Here's a quick peek at the new lighting in Island Architect! Feels really nice to see the lighting react as you build houses, edit the terrain or watch time pass. The new solution has bounced lighting and reflections, all without relying on ray tracing hardware.

8 Apr

Will share more details on the lighting solutions later, a few novel ideas in there I think! I also have quite a few new little details to share about the game soon!

26 Feb

I accidentally made a horror game! NaNs happen randomnly when looking at large depth differences. Due to spatial-temporal denoising they spread, and they spread faster with lots of camera movement. The only way to escape is to quickly find an uninfected part of the screen and zoom in.

11 Feb

I've been working with Spherical Gaussians recently as a representation for irradiance in realtime raytracing. Ended up deriving quite a few new approximations relating to SGs and diffuse lighting. Ended up with something both cheap and accurate. Check it out: www.shadertoy.com/view/WX3fRB

11 Feb

The most exciting bit is that this little expression approximates diffuse lighting from a SG very well, with R being the resultant mean length. This naturally maps to raytracing denoiser outputs, if you just store color and color*ray_direction.