Shahriar Shahrabi | شهریار شهرابی

Our game Puzzling Places is coming to Steam on April 9th. It will give you hours of flow and relaxtion. If that's your kind of thing share and give it a review on launch day, because it will help with the algorithmn. store.steampowered.com/app/3530820/Pu…

My favourite game event Amaze is starting tomorrow! Hit me up if you are around! btw @AMazeFest the "Get Tickets" link on the website is broken

@Friedemann_A Game when? I am still waiting for those gorgeous side scrollers you prototyped years agao with the abstract emojis for dialogue

Would you play (& not refund) a ~1.5 hour game by me that's purely atmosphere, exploration & music?

@noio_games and its endlessly harder to market and attract players that way. but 5 years in and we are still have a niche audience and can pay somewhat ok salaries

@noio_games I think you can earn a livelihood avoiding the dopamine machine imagery. Its just a lot harder. At a certain level every game has a dopamine loop, but with puzzling places we on purpose avoided all design patterns that weren't serving the gamification of cultural heritage thing

This is a thought I’ve been having too.. lately.. When I started making games it seemed cool, artistic, innocent, valuable. Now more often I wonder if we’re just building dopamine machines? And therefore: if I want to make art should I be making different decisions?

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.

@faaaaarck there are some stuff that doesnt get moved for some reason, like viewer nodes that are turned off, or floating frames that are next to it as comments. often zones are moved into frames though I cant figure out how exactly

@faaaaarck Honestly some max hard limit on how many nodes the graph that needs to be moved has would make it awesome. 10 nodes? awesome! 500? I can't really think of a case where I want that auto moved. or any algo that would do a reasonable job of figuring out what to move where

The auto shift thing blender nodes have is a crime against humanity. I thought I turned it off, but here we are, you accidently droped a node on a line 5 minutes ago, and blender shifted 400 nodes in eachother. Absolute chaos, will take 30 minutes to clean up!

@robertrioux the 5 minutes ago is the key part. you are working on a part, zoom out and realize damn, the whole node tree is ruined and you are way past the point of undo

@IRCSS Undo?

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

Finishing off a Puzzling places 2 player puzzle inside Meta Quest 3. This is a 3D scan we did of Ambrose Dudley’s tomb inside St Mary’s church Warwick. The church earnt real licensing money 💰by allowing the game to use the tomb scan. Imagine if all historical buildings could monetise their assets and buildings? #history #vr #puzzle #game @PuzzlingPlaces

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

Added spline support and a few optimizations, a lot interactive now :) Also added material support, was bit of a grind but allows importing blender shader nodes as material assets (limited node support for now) Assets from @IRCSS geonodes french house collection. #UE5 #Blender

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 🥸

As usual, all nodes are available for free use under MIT license here github.com/IRCSS/Blender-…

Without all the extras, this is kind of how that works

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