because data visualization are fun. Steam indie market 2025

I 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!

Blenders 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...

I 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

And 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

I love the silhouette

My 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...

5 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...

I 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

made progress on the front entrance

castles 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

Perfect 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.

ignore 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

So added the extention too! time to go back again to the magic school scene. I hope this time I can just finish it 😅😅

added 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.

I 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

someone mentioned I should straighten the geometry nodes noodles lines. Yeah, I am never going back to curves.

Back 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

My favourite game event Amaze is starting tomorrow! Hit me up if you are around!

added 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

fixed 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.

I 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!

Couple 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

Everything 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

I 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.

For 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 🥸

So, 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

One 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!

This 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

Time 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