iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sven

SUPERMILK. @supermilk-games.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Hello all! I just wrote up a new devlog post for Frayed Arc, a Golden Sun-inspired RPG. There is some info regarding the development process and I showcase the movement system a bit! Check out the devlog entry here: supermilk-games.com/blog/2026-09... #GameDev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Cloud reflections! The reflected clouds are not raymarched because a rough light approximation looks good enough in the blurry reflection. ⛅ #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I finally extended all materials to have a unified lighting model that considers the atmosphere's effect on direct and indirect light. 🌄 #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

making games is haaaard not sure if I'm ready for another round of "why does this material's opaque pass not run" right now

the rocket on the launch pad but they are completely invisible, replaced by the starry sky of the skybox

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

One of the gas giant's larger moons features an atmosphere and ocean. The atmosphere scattering green light means that we get a purple sunset :) #bevy #gamedev

The view from the surface. The spaceship is landed by the shore. The ocean reflects the light of a far away sun and backlit faint rings of the gas giant as just barely visible through the dense atmosphere.

The view from far away, showing the ocean and islands through the thick atmosphere.

A shot from a low orbit, right at the terminator, which makes the atmosphere look mostly purple.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

So far the chunk culling assumed a worst-case terrain height when calculating the bounding boxes. But the culling happens on the GPU, so we can instead read the height from the elevation texture to get a much more precise estimate. No more rendering invisible tiles! #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Felt compelled to add eclipse shadows to the game, for no reason in particular. #bevy #gamedev

View from behind a moon with a shadow on the planet behind it.

Mars-like planet with a big shadow on it.

Gas giant with a small elongated speck of a shadow.

A gas giant's moon, casting a tiny shadow on the planet behind it.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

please enjoy a mediocre picture of the event

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

uhm excuse me what is going on here

A spaceship hovering over a black monolith surrounded by five of Blender's Suzanne monkey meshes.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Super excited to announce that ring worlds now also have an atmosphere :) #bevy #gamedev

A spaceship sitting on a small island on a ring world. The landscape curves upwards in the distance. Compared to earlier screenshots there is now a haze from the atmosphere.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Physics time warp! Another advantage of moving all physics systems to Bevy's fixed-rate schedule is that we can speed up time even with Avian's rigid body physics active. Any speed multiplier world work here and the behavior is the same as in real time. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Continuing the instanced rendering arc with terrain scatter. It doesn't look that fancy yet and it's lacking any kind of artistic control. But it's a start! #bevy #gamedev

A moon's landscape with rocks scattered close to the camera and far into the distance.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

And here's the new ring debris rendering together with the rest of the planet! I also added raymarching for the ring dust. 🪐 #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

And here are the planetary rings with frustum culling and level of detail implemented! This is a total of 4M objects (~1M after culling). #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

Let's move the planetary ring debris fully to the GPU! Today I worked on a proof of concept rendering a million points. Single-precision floating point again makes this harder than it should be. The solution? Use a Taylor series approximation close to the observer, where all the debris is. #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 02/05/2026

The ring shadows are done by intersecting a ray to the sun with the ring and then sampling the 1D ring texture at the hit position. #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Spent a bit of time rewriting the ring texture system. The ring textures are now generated on the GPU together with the rest of the terrain data, instead of being loaded from memory. This allows for much quicker iteration time when working on those textures :) #bevy #gamedev

Gas giant with backlit rings. There are fainter secondary rings now.

The view from a spaceship below the rings, which case a shadow on the planet below.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Sketch of a tidally locked ice world. I quite like the surface texture of the ice here :) #bevy #gamedev

A world far away from the sun. The hemisphere towards the sun is rocky and transitions to a full ice cover as the surface curves away from the sun.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

This was supposed to be a moon but it ended up looking more like a planet. Trying a new method here to get more color variation. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 11/04/2026

Messing around with noise functions for the desert planet I noticed that faking dried up rivers and lakes is just a matter of layering and warping noise. No complex simulations required :) #gamedev

Mars-like planet with a focus on a darker spot that looks like a dried up lake with remnants of rivers that one flowed into it.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

how about some procedural volcanoes

A closer look into the crater, showing cracks filled with glowing lava

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Somehow got inspired to improve the looks of the "default moon" in the game. This is the first time I'm using a grid-based approach for the craters. That way every generator invocation only needs to iterate over the nine closest craters to calculate their height offsets. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 04/04/2026

Investing some time in cloud rendering again 🌤️ Here's a small improvement to the density function that makes the cloud layer thicker and uses an additional 3D texture to give it more detail. #bevy #gamedev

"before" and "after" image of the clouds. Before is much flatter and after is a thicker cloud layer with more detail.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

Finally added planetshine! Now planets and moons will also illuminate the rocket based on how much light they receive from the sun. Really helps tie the scene together. #bevy #gamedev

A rocket above a green moon. Its shaded side is illuminated by the surface and has a green tinge.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

With the latest driver update nvidia threw a curve ball my way. The terrain suddenly rendered with black hexagons and the generated data of some planets lost a lot of resolution. #gamedev

Terrace-like effect from quantization in terrain height.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

And here's the first dwarf planet! It's far from the sun and features a "sea" of frozen nitrogen. I like how the very thin atmosphere makes it look much more dramatic. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 28/03/2026

hell yes this was fully intentional and not at all the result of putting a minus in the wrong place #gamedev

Cool looking planet with sparse, brightly colored mountain chains and dark plains decorated with pale orange bands.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 25/03/2026

And another one! I quite like the wavelike pattern on this one. It's also the first to feature the new procedural impact craters. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

More experiments with canyon features! This time with a slightly different approach which allows making them even larger. I like how those help sell the "icy moon" look. Poor moon has been through a lot though :( #gamedev #bevy

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

Finally sat down and worked through the math to generate realistic looking crater geometry. Now nothing will stop me from spamming those when creating new planets and moons. #gamedev #bevy

A procedurally generated impact crater on an otherwise plain sphere. The radius varies and there is a lot of variation in the terrain at the rim.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Started working on a new moon for one of the gas giants. I really like how adding local surface features helps to add some character. #gamedev #bevy

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Trying to place some canyons on the surface of the moons and uhmmm

Two very short canyons and a longer one below, making the moon look like a potato with a face.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

Literally all I want is to make an impact in this world Some experiments with producing impact craters in the terrain generator :) #bevy #gamedev

A moon with an impact crater with white ejecta. Looks like it has been hit by a giant snowball.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 15/03/2026

I've been quiet for a while again, but lots of things have been happening behind the scenes! Just not much that would make for flashy pictures. Now I'm looking forward to positing more about the progress again :) #bevy #gamedev

A rocket in orbit around a moon of a blueish gas giant. The moon has a cracked surface with lava glowing in the cracks.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

With the added transparency and light absorption, the water shader now passes the "do I want to go for a swim there" test :) Next, I finally need to address the texture tiling. #bevy #gamedev

A rocket hovering above the water close to the shore. The water is transparent in shallow parts and gets progressively darker and more opaque the deeper it is.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Managed to get the depth texture into the ocean shader. This felt super hacky with the higher-level material system but should allow for some nice transparency effects. #bevy #gamedev

A scene with the ocean in the background. The ocean is just a black and white representation of the depth texture and shows the terrain underneath the water.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

I added the option to output an emissive texture from the terrain generator. Here's a new moon to showcase the effect 🌋 #bevy #gamedev

A moon with a barren surface containing a network of canyons with glowing lava. In the background is a gas giant with a ring.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Many improvements later, here are some more impressions from the new volumetric cloud renderer. #bevy #gamedev

A happy little cloud from above. It casts a shadow on the ground below.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

First look at the volumetric clouds! I pushed this out for quite some time but am happy to see that they are finally on the horizon. #bevy #gamedev

Volumetric clouds, literally over the horizon of a planet. They have a warm tint as the sun is setting behind them. They currently lack high frequency detail.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 06/12/2025

Something is wrong with the floating world origin. So may I present: biblically accurate spaceship #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

I've been hard at work replacing the atmosphere renderer with a new one based Bevy's atmosphere implementation. It does not only look better, but is also quite a bit more performant! #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

sorry I haven't been posting I'm sure you will understand

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 17/10/2025

Alright let's build a megastructure! I've been reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks and can't resist adding a ring world to the game. Starting a thread for this one 🧵 (image by @alexjaybrady.bsky.social for inspiration) #gamedev #bevy

https://boac.artstation.com/projects/8eb00Q

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

I realized that the frame rate of my game was going down the more I played. Let's debug!

18 fps with a tiny window and not much going on.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

The egui -> Bevy UI rewrite is complete! Quite happy that it was possible to reproduce the look and feel from before and even improve on it a bit :) #bevy #gamedev

The Bevy UI "after" image. Looks similar but overall a bit more polished.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Currently porting the GUI from egui to #bevy UI and quite happy with it so far! The only thing I'm missing is the ability to render arbitrary meshes as part of the UI. Image nodes are super useful. I'm using one to show the navball which is a 3D scene rendered to a texture. #gamedev

A demo of the UI without the rest of the game.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 21/09/2025

I switched to the Avian physics engine! Its excellent documentation made this a pretty simple process. The physics now run at a fixed rate, independent of the frame rate. This helps a lot with determinism and things keep their velocity, even if the rendering isn't fast enough. #bevy #gamedev

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 13/09/2025

I added a hover mode to the spacecraft controller! It tries to keep the craft level at a fixed altitude so that the player can precisely maneuver across the ground. Oh and also it's now possible to load in any 3D scene with colliders, like this makeshift landing pad. #gamedev #bevy

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

Finally got around to adding oceans to the planets! It's just an additional opaque mesh on top of each terrain chunk. But changing the water's surface color depending on its depth is so simple yet so effective at faking actual translucency. #bevy #gamedev

A planet seen from a couple hundred kilometers above the surface. There is an ocean now and its color changes based on the height (or depth) of the surface below it.

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Sven @embersarc.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

Apologies for the lack of updates, I was chilling at the top of the highest mountain in the solar system #gamedev #bevy

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