iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Was running in cpu performance issues from the ruined citites since there's 3000 cars with LODs, colliders and components related to resource harvesting so added a proxy system where when player is far away it gets replaced with an extra lightweight car w/o lods, colliders etc. #indiedev #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Improved the look of the screen space shadows to they look better from the side and grazing angles, + less flicker on distant objects #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev #graphicsdev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Just updated from blender 4.3 to 5.2.... a plugin I want is minimum 4.5 :( Hopefully it's got better performance and stuffs #indiedev #blender

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

For example, why does a plank have 7 LODs???? and why is it 44 verts for LOD0 and 10 for LOD7 ??? Like just have like 2 or 3 at most? And the last one should be 8 verts for a stretched cube?? (or just a double-sided plane??) #indiegame #gamedev #models

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

People selling models and art should always provide wireframe views... please :) I dont want to buy something and for it to have thousands of unneeded vertices and weird meshes. Also when they sometimes don't have LODs, or the LODs are just 50% decimate modifier again and again

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Fixed the layout, but need to fix the colors and and styling, so started by adding an ability to change color theme during runtime. Gonna see if I can make it read a json file aswell, so it can be user defined color themes perhaps #indiegame #ui #uitoolkit #indiedev #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Working on creating a proper settings menu, based on UIToolkit instead of UGUI. Still far from done, but having tabs makes it a whole lot more manageable :) #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Finally got around to fixing the Unity domain reload issues with the clouds, so now they don't disappear when pressing restart in a build or reentering playmode in editor :))) Also just shows how fast the game is to start by tp'ing to a bandit camp as fast as possible #indiegame #gamedev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Working on making enemies smarter, especially when they're in a complex environment such as the cities, but to begin with I gotta fix the navmesh for the buildings as it's kinda wild #indiegame #gamedev #gameai #navmesh #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Differences between low and high terrain quality, mainly just noticeable for distant terrain / jagged terrain. Pretty big difference in performance numbers though, so it's a good way to get extra performance on weaker systems #indiegame #gamedev #procgen #procedural

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Don't mind me, just sharing a few images of the ruined cities in Scorching Engines :) #indiegame #steamgame #indiedev #fpsgame

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Being inside the ship with the shader issues made me feel like I'm in the matrix weapon room, for some reason only the crafting bench was unaffected, even if it should be using the same shader #indiegame #gamedev #bug

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

That being said, I did manage to discover that there was a big a decently big shader still in use (thought I'd replaced all assets that used it) but apparently there were still some small decals on desks that used it, which I managed to discover with the tool #indiedev #gamedev #solodev

Yellow squares were still using the other expensive-ish shader from an asset instead of using the simple replacement shader I made instead

(should bake it into the model of the drawer, but the asset is temporary-ish for a few years and I might replace it instead)

26 desk squares still using the shader, but only 1 material (so only 1 drawcall) but with a bunch of shader variants I wanted to get rid off.

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Forgive me for I have sinned, I got gemini llm to give me a editor window for unity to scan what shaders are in use, how many materials use that shader and how many gameobjects/entities use it, so I can more easily optimise Scorching Engines #indiedev #gamedev #indiegame

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Also when people say "He says we should do this" when talking about an LLM... like, it's not a person

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Hopefully people will notice that I'm keyframing out the doorframe and gun in order to show the next clip behind inside the building , because otherwise it's a bit of wasted work haha #indiedev #gamedev #devlog #indiegame

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

work on the next devlog continues, and is slow going even if it's going to be the shortest devlog yet :& #indiegame #gamedev #devlog #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Before / After with around 6 months of work. (part time during evenings) New terrain, cities, lighting and clouds. (+ enemy AI which can't be shown in a picture) #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #indiedev #fpsgame

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Just thought that the city debug draws looked cool when viewed from the player's perspective instead of the scene view As you can see all the cars, roads, buildings and the buildings state #indiegame #procgen #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Now the cities have correctly setup bandit camps, with bandits and vehicle parts spawning. The cities are nearing the finish line :) #indiegame #procgen #gamedev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Lotta work making camp variants of the ruined buildings, as each building variant needs to have a few different configs of bandit camps to reduce the risk of them looking identical, and then the camp variants are cleaned up versions with less rubble and stuff #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Hate when model assets from the assetstore are for Unity and Unreal... (In unity) there's a prefab for a rocky road, "sm_floor_nanite_tileable_lod0" and it's 200 THOUSAND vertices??? Guess it's my fault for not being an artist and making my own stuffs #indiegame #unity3d

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Passed 500 wishlists for Scorching Engines !! store.steampowered.com/app/2640660/Scorching_Engines/ Thanks to any and all that are interested in it :) #indiegame #steam #gamedev #steamwishlist

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

I know it's not snow, but needed something that actually has a texture instead of just hues of white so it's easier to debug the shader haha #indiegame #gamedev #shader #graphics

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Working on a new terrain snow shader for Scorching Engines, with tesselation and custom lighting :) #indiegame #gamedev #shaders #graphics

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Cities coming along nicely :) Roads growing, buildings being created with a size bias towards the city center, cars on the roads and resourcezones with trees and could surrounding the cities. Takes 15-40ms roughly depending on city size #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #procgen #citygen

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Procedural car placement for the roads coming along nicely, support to change the car density, spacing and lanewidth #solodev #procgen #gamedev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Improved the debugging drawing so I can see how the city skyline is going to look as well while changing parameters. I want to make it so biases for building height near the city centre, and not just footprint, and this is going to help :) #indiegame #gamedev #procgen #citygen #city #solodev

City with debug drawing for the roads, resource zones and solid boxes for the buildings to give a rough outline of the city skyline

City with all the buildings spawned in, resource zones omitted

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Changed city road network code spawn more organically, so it grows out from the city centre instead of being a jittered grid. #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #procgen #citygen #city

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Tried adding in VR headtracking in scorching engines, and it looks surreal haha. The scale is just so different compared to flatscreen. Ran at 50 fps in editor also, (PCVR quest 3) Fun test, but not going to be a vr game/ support #indiegame #vr #unity3d #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

I loooooove debug.drawline (Junctions, roads, buildings) Black building plots are spawned, Magenta fail the size bias test, Red fail overlap tests, Yellow fail fallback overlap tests. (too many tries finding a building, just pick last roll) #indiegame #unity3d #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Fixed overlap checks for the cities, so buildings don't spawn on each other, but had to fix a few overlap issues, so there's more dense buildings along roads as it was too aggressive. (building plots touching were culled) #indiegame #procgen #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

False positives highlighted with a green arrow

Red plots are all the ones that were overlapping

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

This is an example of how the city center <> building size bias can work, cranked up higher to show more apparently. Normally it's more gradual and mixed #indiegame #gamedev #procgen #solodev

Large city center with big buildings, and then smaller buildings only at the outskirts

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Since we don't actually need colliders for the buildings when player isn't nearby. (Raiders are allowed to drive through buildings if they so desire, if noone is there to see it) I added that we disable all colliders based on player distance, (exaggerated) #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #procgen

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

got buildings spawning along roads now, not just to fix overlaps, + orient them correctly as well as biasing the size so larger buildings in the city centre #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #procgen

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Working on generating a procedural city road layout for the cities, got a nice grid with roads + junctions setup, now to step along the road edges and spawn prefabs #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #screenshotsaturday

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Rewrite going well... accidentally turned the city into a forest :) #indiegame #gamedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Work has begun on rewriting the city spawning + having new city buildings. (pics are just with new prefabs) but need to make some of them enterable with loot inside, and add in city bandit camps #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #indiedev

View of the city from a bandit camp outside

Old city spawning logic with new city prefabs. (Leading to large gaps around the small buildings, and the large buildings being too close)

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Reposted by Thor | Scorching Engines

Winter Cats Studios @wintercatsstudios.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

You can build your settlement beneath rainbows in our cozy city builder 🌈 Rainbows appear naturally after the rain, lighting up your little Norse village. Sometimes, the smallest moments are what make a settlement truly feel like home. #gamedev #indiedev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Okok, the screen space shadows are looking much better now. Fixed the blur behaviour so it's actually blurs correctly, proper color correction and a bit of temporal jitter + accumulation to make the half res shadows look better #indiegame #gamedev #shader #unity3d #solodev

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Added in colour correction for the shadows, so they more closely match the CSM shadows. #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #shaders

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Got the screenspace shadows separated into its own texture, so I can change the sampling resolution independently of the view resolution. Now just to fix the upsampling/ blur / temporal accumulation so it looks less awful at low res Quarter res = 6.25% pixels #indiegame #gamedev #solodev #shaders

Quarter resolution,
height/4, width / 4 = 0.25 * 0.25 = 6.25% of pixels of the full res, so it's ~15 times faster, but it also looks way worse

Full resolution, crispy shadows but it's ugly due to no bluring/smoothing.
Something is either shadow or not.

Half resolution (25% pixels) with a simple gaussian blur to smooth the shadows... Not even close to pretty, but it's better than raw

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

There, now the shadows work correctly. Fixed so that it checks the scene depth of the world for the raystep + the depth of the pixel it's on, and then comparing the two. fixes the objects shadowing too much #indiegame #gamedev #shader

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Thor | Scorching Engines @thorwhitemountain.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Kinda working depth raymarched shadows, breaks at angles tho #indiegame #solodev #shader

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