Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 17hLooking 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. 000
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/09/2026And 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 0110
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/09/2026The 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 090
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Blender 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) 060
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Alternate 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. 031
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 31/08/2026I 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...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… 051
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 29/08/2026fun little project. geo nodes for a animations and much of the scene building, eevee for render #screenshotsaturday 081
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/08/2026late night geo node fun. some procedural walls. 1183
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 07/08/2026I 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! 000
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 06/08/2026Can 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... 092
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I 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-... 161
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 04/08/2026because data visualization are fun. Steam indie market 2025 010
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 03/08/2026I 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! 180
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Blenders 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... 140
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/07/2026I 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 100
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 18/07/2026And 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 070
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 05/07/2026My 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... 080
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 17/06/20265 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... 0123
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 13/06/2026I 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 0161
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 02/06/2026made progress on the front entrance 090
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 01/06/2026castles 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 060
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 31/05/2026Perfect 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. 230
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/05/2026ignore 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 0110
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/05/2026So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅 091
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 24/05/2026added 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. 0162
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/05/2026I 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 0130
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/05/2026someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves. 131
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 18/05/2026Back 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 0276
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 12/05/2026My favourite game event Amaze is starting tomorrow! Hit me up if you are around! 000
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 09/05/2026added 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 0191
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 09/05/2026fixed 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. 060
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 08/05/2026I 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! 0100
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 07/05/2026Couple 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 0266
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 29/04/2026Everything 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 1221
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 28/04/2026I 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. 0120
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 26/04/2026For 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 🥸 090
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026So, 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 1131
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026One 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! 031
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 25/04/2026This 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 151
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 24/04/2026Time for rivers. The mesh auto fills the space of the river channel. I also inserted an edge loop at certain distance from river bank so that we can do the stylized foam on the edges 0120
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 23/04/2026realistic waterfalls are hard 🥲I will settle for stylized 270
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 22/04/2026Very happy with the second cliff type. This should make the whole landscape generation a bit easier. I low key had Etretat in mind 1162
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 21/04/2026Making the demo scenes, the toughest things was always the landscape. So I am making a second type of cliff, this time using a whole different method. If nothing else, we get table cloth out of it😃 110
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 20/04/2026based on the little magic school scene I made, I realized I need a way to not have doors on the gothic structures so that I can git bash them. Potentially I would need controls also for the window sizes because they can gt a bit out of hand 080
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 19/04/2026Another demo scene. I can finish these in around one and half hour. I did realize here that I need new front type for the gothic structures that has no door and window, and new tower tops. But over all very happy with what the tool can do so far 1150
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 19/04/2026It was annoying that the doors were all the same size, so I randomized it 040
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 19/04/2026Have a baisic house generation along spline wokring, as usual all geometry nodes. It still needs a few improvement, but slowly I just want to get start with the next pahse. 1262
Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی @ircss.bsky.social · 17/04/2026Windows has been utter trash recently, each update worse than before. from constant kernel crashes to randomly changing monitor resolution. That said, happy acciedent, kinda digging this DOOM 2016 on ultra low resolution 110