iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

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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

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Reposted by Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect

Seamus Blackley @seamus.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Fucking cool.

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

That was always my favorite part with Sim City also! I also spent a lot of time in the Warcraft II map editor, with no interior of playing the maps

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

I love that this got brought into a thread about usb-c cables

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Yes! Would be fun to add sluices, pumps, water wheels and little boats to guide around the channels!

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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

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

Yeah, I like the white lines for a stylized look when the water is a bit more calm, but with massive bodies of water like the dam breaking, some kind of underwater bubble thing would be better

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

The water simulations is fully 3d, but the update prioritization works on a 2d grid

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

The simulation is divided into hexagonal tiles. It prioritises tiles where there are changes to terrain or buildings first, then tiles where the largest height difference has happened in previous simulation steps. Each tile has a smooth falloff and overlap so everything is smooth.

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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

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

Lovely! Haven’t seen that before (guessing it never made its way across the Atlantic)

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

Thank you! Yes, certainly a balance. Could easily see myself spend a decade adding more and more, but will definitely take less time than that 😉

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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

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 31/05/2026

Thank you Ryan! Right now a lot of people have reached out about wanting go get involved with the music, and I’m not quite at a point where I am ready to decide if I am bringing someone in the project (the music so far I have written myself). Feel free to DM but my response might be a bit slow

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

Yeah, progress certainly adds up over time! Thank you ☺️

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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

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Yes, remember that paper from when it when it was released and being impressed by bit!

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Yeah, that’s the plan! Just need to figure out all the magic bits! Haven’t seen that video, so will definitely check it out!

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Yes, me too! Certainly a risk for the development of the project 😉

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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

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

I can definitely see the similarity! Spent a lot of time reading Moomin recently with my three year old, so maybe I was subconsciously imitating the style. Would certainly be fun to explore some more ink-like rendering with variations of this shader!

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

I posted the shader now on shadertoy also: bsky.app/profile/bott...

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

I posted more about the shader now: bsky.app/profile/bott...

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

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...

cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com

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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

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

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.

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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.

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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

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

It's fully dynamic yes! Will share some more examples soon!

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

Hmm, yes, looks like my implementation is actually closer to @runevision.bsky.social’s simple phacelle noise already! The whole erosion technique looks great also. I’ve looked into that, but forgot about the new noise technique!

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

Some differences in my case: flow is encoded per vertex instead and instead of reading from a texture, I evaluate phaser noise, since I want the noise also shaped like the flow: thibaulttricard.fr/project_page/phasor_noise/phasor.html

thibaulttricard.fr

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

Thank you ☺️. Here are the slides from their presentation: advances.realtimerendering.com/s2010/Vlacho...

advances.realtimerendering.com

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

No reason to make it more complicated than that 😊

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

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!

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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

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Björn Ottosson - making Island Architect @bottosson.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Yes, makes sense! Leaning towards some variant of both occasional rainfall and some form of controllable sources and drains. Been a while btw, we were briefly at Frostbite at the same time some 15 years ago!

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