Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی

31 Mar

Our game Puzzling Places is coming to Steam on April 9th. It will give you hours of flow and relaxtion. If that's your kind of thing share and give it a review on launch day, because it will help with the algorithmn. store.steampowered.com/app/3530820/...

Around me, I see a lot of people in tech and entertainment feeling a bit down and lost. AI plays a role, but its a general sense of hopelessness and lack of some positive vision of future to strive for. I am wondering if my sample is biased, or if its a bigger general trend.

Even among those tiny parts of the tech industry that are riding the AI wave to riches, I have heard too often that a source of motivation is fear. A sense that we are on a critical junction and whoever doesnt adopt is left behind.

Looking at peoples 9 games, I think most people just want to be teenagers again. I realized there are so many amazing games I have played over the years, but nothing beats the late nights in counter strike, or that first vespa in vice city.

And here the winter version of The magic school demo scene I made on my @sketchfab.bsky.social The scene was almost fully made with geometry nodes. All the buildings, landscape and natural elements etc. skfb.ly/pOr68

The magic school demo scene I made is up on my @Sketchfab The scene was almost fully made with geometry nodes. All the buildings, landscape and natural elements etc. Here the summer version: skfb.ly/pOr6q

4 Sept

Blender 5.3 has some crazy stuff planned, geo nodes like layering system for compositing (thats sick), scripting nodes for node base system (finally done with the spaghetti salad of simple math blowing out), and programmable lighting equations (insane for stylized scenes)

4 Sept

Alternate reality. Someone took some really wrong choices down the decision tree. Whatever happens in the future, the aura of power and myth surrounding the seat of the American President is fully gone.

Rami Ismail (رامي)@ramiismail.com

what the fucking fuck www.whitehouse.gov/arcade/

whitehouse.govArcade

shahriyarshahrabi.medium.comIndie Case Studies Volume I — 8.26Indie Case Studies is a series where I play a bunch of games as part of my own stay fit routine as a game designer, with a critical eye on…

31 Aug

I am starting a new series where I play small games that are not well known for educational purposes with an eye on the design, product, and business of games and do a small write up. Here is the first volume, Indie Case Study Volume I: shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/indie-case-s...

29 Aug

fun little project. geo nodes for a animations and much of the scene building, eevee for render #screenshotsaturday

23 Aug

late night geo node fun. some procedural walls.

7 Aug

I had a lot of fun with the first case study. Airborne Empire. Some UX issues, but crazy good fantasy. They manage to do alot with very little!

6 Aug

Can you still make indie games sustainabily with 20k new yearly releases on Steam? This and others was a question that popped up in our mind as we were releasing our latest game on Steam. To answer them, I did a deep dive in the Steam indie market shahriyarshahrabi.medium.com/deep-dive-in...

5 Aug

I feel like there are entire segments of PC games I dont know anything about. I have decided finally to play more smaller games. So made myself this little Steam suggester. You give it a criteria, it suggests you game to play. github.com/IRCSS/Steam-...

3 Aug

because data visualization are fun. Steam indie market 2025

2 Aug

I finished crunching through steam data of 140k games. The analysis has come down to 46 charts, plus extra seven slides from Newzoos and Matthew Balls report. This is going to be a long post 😅 Some good insights for indies though!

Blenders auto UV is better now due to the concave packer. But its still strangly behind the open source XAtlas, which somewhat matches industry leaders like Simplygon. I wrote a little wrapper with GUI/ CLI support to unwrap with Xtlas from within blender github.com/IRCSS/XAtlas...

View full thread

Of course the same topolgoy could unwrap better if you care less for avoiding stretches etc. Some applications like Simplygon/ RC give you better unwrap with default paramters, way larger faces, better iterative packers with more flexible island rotation etc

But the main issue with Blenders auto unwrap is not even that! If the topology transitions smooth enough from one point to another, it never triggers the 66 degrees angle base unwrap, causing overlapping faces. This will lead to bake and texturing artifacts that are a pain to fix

Strange is XAtlas is a single .h .cpp with no dependencies, so adding to a c++ project shouldnt be hard. Maybe issue with MIT license and blender licecnse. So here a visual example what can go right or wrong with an unwrap. Here is an unwrap that XAtlas does. Nice and packed

28 July

I am crunching some numbers, looking at releases on steam. blog post comes later, but a fun graph is this one, its the reverse of Steam games expontential growth past few years. 75 percent of games released in 2025 have 0 reviews

28 July

considering that the average steam consumer buys 2-3 games a year, having an average of 26 precent growth YoY means more and more games go unplayed. Add on top Chinese market playing more of their own game, shorts and reels eating into gaming time that number makes sense

18 July

And I am done with my little festival scene. A little bit of fun to relax abit. Model on my @sketchfab.bsky.social skfb.ly/pLUrI

6 July

I love the silhouette

5 July

My child was born so I have been really busy. But I managed to clean up the magic school demo scene and add it to the repo. So far everything was generated using 100 percent geometry nodes. Now its time to add in some hand modeled stuff github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

17 June

5 years ago we set out to find a game system to engage people with cultural heritage. Now, over 350+ cultural sites brought to over a half million players later, I put down the lessons we learned making Puzzling Places medium.com/realities-io...

13 June

I got my magic school scene as far as I could with geo nodes. So far zero modeling, all meshes, materials and textures are done procedurally/ mathematically. Still need to do art direction and add small hand modeled details

2 June

made progress on the front entrance

1 June

castles are really not build in a day. repurposed my overhangs to make a roof for the bridge and add some details to the corners. Still so much to go, I cant even imagine how I would solo make this without geo nodes within any reasonable time

31 May

Perfect example of why Google AI summary is a clear downgrade compared to a normal google search. I forgot how Rorschach was spelled, Google searched immedietly got me what I wanted, the AI summary gave some nonesense.

31 May

You have the solution to your problem already, but then someone says, guys what if we tried to solve this in a different way! A worse solution, costs more to use it and it throws away the whole monetization model the internet is running on! What are we waiting for 😍😍

28 May

ignore the terrible lighting. but I realized I can reuse the node I wrote to add extentions as balkony or entrances can also be used for attic windows. Though I would need to add some control paramters

25 May

So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅

24 May

added the lower part to the extention for the cases where its attached to a wall. Next is adding the extention balkony for when there is a door.

23 May

I havent had a lot of time to code, but making small progress on the building extention. Added a roof to the door and some controls

23 May

someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves.

18 May

Back from Amaze. Started working on a terrace type. Would like to easily be able to add extentions with windows and doors to the main buildings. Still quite a bit of work left

12 May

My favourite game event Amaze is starting tomorrow! Hit me up if you are around!

9 May

added flow speed based on the inclination of the river. Now I can use it for different type of streams. I still honestly think I should just paint the river in whenever I need it

9 May

fixed a small bug and brought the node tree to the other blend file. Current workflow is to fix in the main git tracked blend file and reimport the whole thing every time fixes are done. I should have set things up properly as asset library.

8 May

I repurposed the mill for the main centeral tower of the school. Added attic windows, control for frequency of the windows on upper floors etc. Not sure about the distribution of the attic windows yet. But we will see!

7 May

Couple of days of break, back at it again. I started doing the magic school scene for real, and immedietly had a to do list of 30 items. Added more controls for the shape the towers. Loving the vibe

29 Apr

Everything on my todo list is done, time to go back and properly make the magic school scene. Tonight I added more scale control for the cliff side and added an extra layer of voronoi noise to the second cliff. This will make it easier to make giant landscapes

28 Apr

I prefer painting the path in the texture mostly but for large landscapes its nice to have something like this so made one. I would probably remesh at the end and bake.

26 Apr

For my magic school I need still two things, one of them is a bottom for the floaty towers, hence I added this module. Second a better rocky cliff. I am still not happy with the landscape I have 🥸

So, here is the river. Its a spline, so you can just extend it and it adopts to the landscape using geo node, and unrwaps it in a rivery way for the procedural materials to do their magic

Without all the extras, this is kind of how that works

github.comGitHub - IRCSS/Blender-Geometry-Node-French-Houses: Blend file containing geometry nodes to procedurally create french style housesBlend file containing geometry nodes to procedurally create french style houses - IRCSS/Blender-Geometry-Node-French-Houses

As usual, all nodes are available for free use under MIT license here github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

One day I will just ship a game that looks like this. Like these hipster cafes that decided their deco style is unpainted walls and broken furniture!

This is the reason I needed the extra shore line edge loop. Technically I could use the new ray cast node in the material of blender 5.1 and just sample the depth map for shore line as you would in game engines, but that would require geometry under the river