Mars First Logistics 1.0 comes out on Friday! Here are some of my favourite builds from Steam Workshop:

Starting to think that I need to separate the distant forests layer from the terrain and use some funny brdf there to smooth out the transition Anyway, here's your #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #indiegames #gamedev

So, some numbers: ~28k trees, rendering them as models (~1.2k triangles) takes 29.5 ms, rendering them as impostors takes 3.2 ms, about 10x faster. I probably can push this further my using a simpler shader for distant impostors, and there's almost no visual difference!

Ooph, it looks like I've fixed the remaining bugs with tree impostors, and now after a certain distance they look almost indistinguishable from models, the transition zone barely visible. Horray! Btw, I have 64 images in the atlas, each 64x64 px. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Debugging entity & impostor orientations with a stupidly asymmetric model

Debugging normals is always fun

Ok I've found a few more bug with computing impostor projections, those should be fine now. The only remaining problem is that the impostors are sometimes offset a bit from the model... #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

So impostor shadows are rather tricky: normally I render back faces to the shadow map, but impostors...don't have back faces 😅 I hacked together something that kinda works, and the model-impostor transition is much smoother, but, still, meh. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Implementing shadows for the impostors. Unfortunately it gives a ton of (incorrect) violent self-shadowing, need to investogate.

Debugging time! Replaced tree meshes with flat elongated cubes

Made impostors replace the original model at a certain distance. Quite happy that the overall tree canopy look (aka averaged brdf) stays exactly the same, but there's clear popping at the model/impostor boundary, still investigating that. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Added interpolation between 3 nearest impostor sprites based on view direction. There are a few issues + there's popping because I don't use the depth map yet, but it's already looking rather nice! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

First real impostors test with proper view direction selection & lighting. The discrete impostor sprite transitions are clearly visible, but it's pretty nice already if you don't look too close 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Pretty sure that's not how impostors are supposed to look like but idk the trees are clearly visible

Graphics realism level: indistinguishable #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

That's what graphics programming debugging looks like

Octahedral impostors wip: now the albedo, normal & depth maps are rendered with proper projections (i.e. view directions). The normals are still a bit off, though...

Octahedral impostors wip: set up the textures & render passes, made them render test albedo, normal & depth maps with a fixed hard-coded projection, almost ready to generate actual atlases with proper projections

I'm still procrastinating implementing octahedral impostors, so here's another lovely screenshot instead 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

So I was losing my head a bit as to why so many entities caused performance drops, and it wasn't the obvious things (culling, rendering, updating). Turned out it was entity raycast for selecting objects, which I never optimized to this scale 😂 #indiedev #indiegames #gamedev

I think @runevision.bsky.social asked me earlier to make the world a hexagon. My terrain chunks are skewed rectangles so it's a bit tricky (but ofc possible). Here's what I'm actually planning to do (you have to imagine the sand chunks being deep under water):

So I need to carefully choose between southern and northern Italy, got it

Oh, Kitsune Tails, our overwhelming positive rated and award winning queer Super Mario Bros 3-like is 30% off on Steam this week store.steampowered.com/app/1325260/...

Anyway, now that I have entities spawning I can at least make much more dramatic screenshots 😍 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

First tests with spawning entities on this huge map. The terrain -> trees transition looks meh, but more importantly rendering this many trees really hurts performance, gonna work on that. Amusingly, frustum-culling 300k entities each frame is rather cheap! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Fun fact: I usually over-saturate and over-expose (with contrast adjustment) my sunset screenshots before posting them. They actually look great in-game, but look dull when viewed as a small image on social media 😅 Or maybe I need to tweak my in-game colors a bit... #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Anyway, now that I have entities spawning I can at least make much more dramatic screenshots 😍 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

First tests with spawning entities on this huge map. The terrain -> trees transition looks meh, but more importantly rendering this many trees really hurts performance, gonna work on that. Amusingly, frustum-culling 300k entities each frame is rather cheap! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Graphics Programming weekly - Issue 408 - September 14th, 2025 www.jendrikillner.com/post/graphic...

Idk why, but I absolutely love the aesthetics of grid-based terrains with discrete heights. And the triangular grid makes it even better 😍 #indiedev #indiegames #gamedev

— You alright, mate? — AAAAAAAAAAAaaaa yep, all good #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

What a lovely little village! Would be a shame if it was just 0.02% the size of the world, right? 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Idk why, but I absolutely love the aesthetics of grid-based terrains with discrete heights. And the triangular grid makes it even better 😍 #indiedev #indiegames #gamedev

— You alright, mate? — AAAAAAAAAAAaaaa yep, all good #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

What a lovely little village! Would be a shame if it was just 0.02% the size of the world, right? 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Previously I'd pre-spawn a bunch of villagers & instruments at (0,0) coordinates, which isn't a great idea now. So, while I don't have a "new game" screen or smth like that, I've made another debug button to just spawn them anywhere and start playing :) #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Fixed the last precision issue: computing camera ray using inverse f32 camera matrix was extremely imprecise, so I switched to computing it manually from camera angles. Now everything is as smooth as it gets, the fixed-point transition officially finished! #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #gamedev

Fixed the last precision issue: computing camera ray using inverse f32 camera matrix was extremely imprecise, so I switched to computing it manually from camera angles. Now everything is as smooth as it gets, the fixed-point transition officially finished! #screenshotsaturday #indiedev #gamedev

Don't have time to record some flyover footage right now, so here's a fun island chain instead with the islands so evenly spaced that it looks like a map generation bug 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

So raw 20.12 fixed-point arithmetic isn't enough for my world<->grid conversions, so I added ad-hoc manual code mixing 20.12 coords with 32.32 constants, which works perfectly! The fixed-point transition is basically finished, hurray! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Debugging precision issues...

Fixed the terrain LOD issue, but now there are some precision issues with converting from world space to grid space and back

Aaaaalmost finished the fixed-point refactoring! It compiles, but some things don't render properly. In particular, terrain LOD selection is somewhat broken... #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Looking for examples of well designed game UI overlays. The non-diegetic kind, so _not_ Dead Space. Any ideas? I quite like the one in Warcraft Rumble: a chunky opaque tray. Most overlays are floaty and semi-transparent, making them distracting whenever anything moves behind them.

The problem with making the "game you always wanted to play that never existed" is that now you'll actually never play this game You'll make it, balance it, polish it, market it, debug it, fix it, but you won't play it

Never does it make feel more an impostor/outsider to gamedev community then when literally everybody on the planet is playing the same goty roguelike puzzle platformer and here I am not fancying roguelikes puzzles or platformers alike

Started the grand Fixed-Point Refactoring and there's a ton of code to change, so I'll probably not post any new screenshots for a while. I was trying to figure out how to do it in stages, but honestly it's probably easier to do it in a single large sweep. Wish me luck 🥲

God I love procedural map generation. Once I get my hands into it, it's really hard to stop 😅 #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

While doing procgen, I often get sad when it generates a map without cool mountains/cliffs/bays/etc, and I have to remind myself that this is actually a good thing: if all maps always have the same features, it makes them repetitive & boring, and makes randomness pointless.

Oh wow, found a gorgeous seed: an island with a single mountain chain stretching across the entire island's length #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev #screenshotsaturday