💧 Waterful 💧 Transform the dry landscape into a lush oasis 🌴 By solo dev @lenjamakesgames.bsky.social A peaceful nature-builder, dig riverbeds to guide water through tiny procedurally generated desert valleys 💌 email press@ / creators@ futurefriendsgames.com to get on the review list

✨️ finally officially announcing my first game ✨️ WATERFUL: a peaceful nature-builder where you dig riverbeds to guide water through desert valleys 🏜️ make tiny ecosystems blossom! 🌴 grow a variety of plants 🦊 discover animals in the new habitats ⚙️ unlock contraptions to reach new areas

WORLD PREMIERE: Collect every animal, tackle challenging terrain, or simply create a beautiful oasis in WATERFUL, a game about digging riverbeds to guide water. Create different shapes to grow plants and attract animals to new habitats. #WholesomeDirect2026

The Toukanas made a lovely clip of me visiting them in their office 🤩 Thanks so much again for having me 🫶

I am so happy the tree is done, this killed me 🤡 So here some fully geo node procedural stylized tree. The hardest part was nailing the style and shading. Nodes here: github.com/IRCSS/Blende...

Working on a sticker book for all the animals you can collect! Now I'm realizing that every game recently has some sort of book in it 👀 Are we fed up with books yet or is this fine?

Making the procedural cliffs almost made me gave up. Its so hard 😅If you can allow yourself baking maps, remeshing etc, the problem becomes trivially easy. But without it you are fighting the lack of resolution. Any ways semi happy with my current setup. next is trees

I've been busy getting my little 1-woman-company running. Feels a little overkill with all the incredibly clunky birocracy here in germany and there's not much progress on the game... But it feels kindo cool to be all officially a company now with my own little (wip) logo and stuff!

Had a lovely time co-working at @toukana.bsky.social 's office today! They're cooking up something really cool for the summer ✨ Thanks for having me 🫶

Just the level generator telling you all to hang in there today! Thanks, level generator 🫶

Look who's here in their favourite lookout spot 🌴

Instead of shrinking and dying, I tried making plants dry out so they can be "saved" when you get them their water back. That might lead to the level being covered in dry plants which I'm not sure is a good or bad thing 🤔

I was reworking some shader stuff when suddenly everything turned into a magical winter wonderland❄️✨ I had scrapped the idea of snow in my game but now I'm wondering if I tossed out a low hangig fruit🤔

The level generator is starting to create some pretty cute canyon valleys 🏜️✨ My camera controller is not a fan of those pillars though🥲

Back working on level generation. My approach is still to make a height map by stacking a bunch of noises in a shader and saving that as a texture for my terrain generator to munch on. Its going okay, creating real variation is hard! Also what are the level borders supposed to look like?

3D unwrapping this little fellow feels wrong somehow 😬 🥺

Finally got an excuse to use Unity's VFX graphs (instead of good old particle systems out of habit) and I must say they are pretty neat. The ability to combine them with Shadergraph shaders did it for me! So I can both have flying behaviour and flapping wings in this little bee swarm VFX I made 🐝 👌

drake meme: ✋😒 fix bugs and create content 😎👉 f* around with water shader

Researching water mechanics I found these cool water wheels that romans used to transport water upwards! 🤩 They're called "noria" and are solely driven by the river's current. I loved them so much I needed them in my game too!

My postcards made it all the way to New Zealand!! Thank you @cuddlepunk.bsky.social for those photos 🥰

Made some postcards with screenshots of my watery game for a playtesting event. Of course they arrived half a day too late and now I'm stuck with 300 of them 🤦 They'll probably be outdated by the time I get to the next event too so... anyone want to get a postcard from me? 😅

I did it people, I got the funding for my watery game! 🥳 That means I can actually make this into a real thing and bring it to you on Steam 🤯 This already is a dream come true, thank you MBB for believing in me and everyone here cheering me on 🥹❤️

So on a scale from 1 to Niagara - how many waterfalls are enough waterfalls? 🤔

Tall waterfalls! And ripples under them. Also: grass adjusts nicely to the new color variations in the terrain now.

Experimenting with different colors for each height level of the terrain 🎨

I've been working on waterfalls for my watery game! 🌊 Here's some WIP footage:

Officially announcing my new game: GARBAGE COUNTRY. A lonely road trip through the ruins of a forgotten world. feat. vast wastelands, tower-defense battles, upgrades, mysteries, & lots of driving.

Tapping, swiping, poking—diorama interactions are coming! 🎮💥 Inspired by #Hearthstone, we’ve added water, grass & dust VFX—3D elements are next. What would you love to mess with between moves? 🌊🌱💨 #WishlistWednesday #GameDev #IndieDev

I've been working on terraced terrain for my watery game! 🪨 You can now create little green pockets in those tiny valleys...

Some more screenshots of the prototype I've been working on for the last 6 months. I recently applied for funding to make this into a full game, wish me luck! 🙏

Hey bsky! 👋 I'm Lenja, a solo indie dev based in Berlin, Germany. Here's what I'm currently working on: My 6 month old prototype for a game about spreading water in the desert and watching things grow. 🌱✨