iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

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

217826 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

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

113419 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

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

3686 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

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

628037 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

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

1244470 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

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

39813 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

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

522432 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

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

420524 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

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

180 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

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.

180 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

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

725834 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

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

420021 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

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

314712 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

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

1015111 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 28/04/2026

Yeah definitely no earlier than early 20th century! The center of the town looks like this. The large building is very similar to Stockholm City Hall for example, built in 1923. The cars and buses look like 1930s

100 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

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

31058 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

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

821922 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 20/04/2026

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

58511 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

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

618530 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

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 🇪🇺

5554 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

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/...

323838 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

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

1532661 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

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

2260 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

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

1251752 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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!

090 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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:

180 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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)

160 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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

160 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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

16115 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

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.

3759 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

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.

0411 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

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.

1140 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

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

18110 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 30/09/2025

Been fixing lots of little edge cases in the roof generation for my cozy town building game Island Architect. Really pleased with all the variety that is possible with some simple interactions! #indiegames #gamedev #cozygames

413815 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

I reworked the camera to work better with all the verticality the game’s building tools creates. Really fun flying through rock arches and up cliffs now! #indiegames #gamedev

516818 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Finally getting back to posting about my cozy building game Island Architect. I've made it so that you now select if you want buildings to have roof tiles or flat roofs. Makes walls with roof files and small pyramid shaped buildings possible, and feels better overall!

0334 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

I did an interview with @80Level about Island Architect check it out! 80.lv/articles/isl...

1341 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Dormers, chimneys and little spires with weather vanes get added automatically when building roofs. E.g., spires are added when all roofs meet in one point, dormers when you build a wall extending partially up a roof. Looking forward to adding lots of little details like this!

733723 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

Creating some cliffs and building some house in the relaxing building game I am making. #screenshotsaturday

614412 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Automatic generation of arches is a little detail I added before launching the steam page for my cozy town building game, Island Architect. When making an opening in a wall, you automatically get arch. Looking forward to add lots of more details like this!

614413 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

It's finally time to announce my game: Island Architect! Sculpt seaside towns in Island Architect, a relaxing builder inspired by coastal Europe. Build winding streets, whimsical towers, or calm fishing villages in this cozy experience. Wishlist now on steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3079100/...

823560 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 17/05/2025

When not working on my indie game, I teach at The Game Assembly, one of Sweden’s top game dev schools. Next week at Nordic Game, I’ll present a game engine we’ve built for the school. Here are some examples of students’ WIP game projects! Reach out if you want to meet up at Nordic Game!

0210 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 07/05/2025

Got a bit frustrated with not quite being able to build houses how I wanted in my cozy town building game, so I reworked the grid and tools. You can now much directly manipulate the grid and it feels a lot better now! Also updated the roof tile look a bit.

520114 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Continuing to work on the roof tiles for my cozy town building game. Lots and lots of little details to get right, but starting to look the way I want. Still a few bugs left and need to do a pass over the shaders to create some more variation.

2693 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Working on roof tiles for my cozy town building game. Really happy about how the tiles adapt to roof shape and the detail it adds. Next I’ll look at creating some color variation and fix some remaining issues and details. #screenshotsaturday

3695259 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Just got a first version of roof tiles generation working for my cozy town building game! There were a lot of details to solve to make it work with all the irregular roof shapes possible in the game! Next step is to make the tiles a bit more detailed. Right now they are simply drawn as cylinders.

835813 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Time to tackle the look of roofs in my cozy town building game! I'm working towards placing roof tiles. The look I'm going for is mostly regular, but following the shape of the roofs. Left to do is handling the edges and corners of roofs, and of course drawing the tiles themselves!

2471 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Made some more progress on my cozy little game and implemented a first version of temporal anti-aliasing. Here's a video, although maybe not that visible in compressed videos.

3895 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 22/03/2025

Quick attempt at recreating @aurumek.bsky.social's beautiful painting in the little cozy building game I am making. I didn't quite nail the proportions of the island, and definitely work left to do to make it easier to build round towers like this in the game! But fun to test! #screenshotsaturday

0718 0

Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

My cozy town building game now has flowers and some simple bushes. I also updated the lighting of the grass to be a bit softer. Feels much more alive now!

314814 0