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4 hours ago
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Björn Ottosson told us about his upcoming Townscaper-inspired city builder Island Architect, explained its mechanics and differences compared to Tiny Glade, and shared why he decided to work with a custom engine instead of Unity or Unreal.
Introduction
Hello, I'm Björn Ottosson, the developer of Island Architect. I have always been fascinated by computer graphics. As a kid, I was obsessed with the first Toy Story movie and everything 3D animated. That early passion led me to start programming and 3D modelling in the late '90s. After earning a degree in engineering physics, I landed a job at Electronic Arts, where I spent a decade working on the Frostbite engine in both leadership and engineering roles.
During those years, I had the opportunity to build technology and tools for a wide range of games, such as Battlefield, Star Wars Battlefront, Need for Speed, Dragon Age, FIFA, and more.
In 2020, I decided it was time for something different, and since then, I’ve been consulting, teaching, and, more recently, started working on my own game project, Island Architect.
Island Architect
I’ve long felt that the architecture in historic European villages and towns is underrepresented in building games. I grew up playing SimCity and later Cities: Skylines, but the places there look nothing like the city centre of Stockholm, where I grew up, or any other older European cities or towns.
In older European towns, buildings are built right up against each other, streets and stairs are crammed in where they fit, and almost all space serves a purpose. Buildings and streets loosely form a grid, but it is irregular and branching and rarely completely straight.
In building games, on the other hand, you mostly have one of two choices: build buildings by freely placing buildings or parts of buildings or build buildings on a completely regular grid.
Neither approach captures the organic, lived-in feeling of historical European towns and cities. With free placement of buildings, you don’t naturally fill the negative space between houses, and you easily end up with awkward spaces and gaps. With regular grids, you can fill in all the space naturally, but it becomes rigid in a way that real places aren’t.
One game did a lot to challenge this, and it inspired me a lot: Oskar Stålberg’s Townscaper. It gives you a grid to build on, but it is organic and irregular, making for a much more dynamic result. That unique combination gives you the best of both worlds.
Another major inspiration is the scenery in Studio Ghibli's Kiki’s Delivery Service. I love the outside perspective on European cities, with a clear influence from Swedish Visby and Stockholm but freely mixed with influences from all over the continent.
Island Architect is a game that gives its players the tools for creating places like this, and it does so by building on the idea of an irregular grid. Unlike Townscaper's fixed grid, Island Architect’s grid evolves dynamically as you build. If you are after a particular result, you are free to edit it as you choose, or you can just let it grow organically and see where it takes you.
In Island Architect the irregular grid is expanded as you build
When deciding if I want to add a feature or how to implement it, I always reference the architecture around me in Stockholm as well as other coastal towns throughout Europe.
Tiny Glade has also influenced my work, but in a less defining way. Tiny Glade’s creators, Ana and Tom, are actually old colleagues of mine from my time at EA, and I think they have done a fantastic job. The excellent visuals, high-quality tools, and user interactions are a great inspiration.
Island Architect differs from Tiny Glade in several ways. Its irregular grid system allows for curved buildings, stairs, and walls that align seamlessly. However, it doesn't support stacking buildings and walls within each other because of that. This naturally makes the scale a bit different. In Island Architect, you build villages and little towns over a larger area but spend a bit less time refining individual houses.
Stairs, curved buildings, and walls, all shifting together as the grid is adjusted
This way of building also matches the building style, with houses more inspired by coastal architecture in the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean, where smooth, slightly curved buildings with a plaster finish are common. Terrain also plays a much bigger role, with full support for building caves, overhangs, sea arches, and more.
The terrain in Island Architect is fully editable and you can build overhangs, sea arches, and caves.
Mechanics
The main attraction will be free-form building. You start with an uninhabited island, procedurally generated, and you will decide what you want to do with it and what your goals are. Maybe the top of that cliff would look great with a castle on top? Or that small cove might be the perfect place for a little fishing village.
I’m considering some optional progression, just to help learn the different tools and encourage different ways of building. If that makes it into the game, it will have a supporting role.
Right now, you can do five things: edit the terrain, paint the terrain with materials, edit buildings, add windows/doors, and plant vegetation. When editing a building, you choose whether you want to build pillars, walls, or foundations. Based on your choices, the game decides how to turn that into a building. A pillar might turn into a chimney or a spire, a building with a wall on top of a sloped roof, or maybe a roof with a dormer on it, and so on.
Part of the experience is finding these recipes and figuring out all the possibilities for how things interact. As development progresses and the foundational system mature, I will focus more on adding more interesting details and recipes.
Roofs are formed and some details appear procedurally as you edit buildings
I’m also looking at adding a couple of more things, like building colours and materials. You will definitely be able to change the colours of buildings, and there will probably be some more options for adding details and varying looks. There is still much to figure out before I know exactly how that will work. I’ll share more once I do.
Custom Engine
There are a few reasons why I didn't choose Unity, Unreal, or any other popular engine for the game.
First of all, all the procedural generation and graphics are custom, so there is less benefit from a lot of the systems and tools Unity and Unreal give you. The other big reason is that you can get good iteration times with a small custom project; it is quick to build and launch, and there’s a lot less complexity to worry about.
This approach certainly isn’t for everyone, but I wish it were more common. I think it’s important to keep diversity in technology in the games industry. If you keep the features you build concise and focused on your game, it doesn’t have to be more work than in a readily available engine. Many things only become hard if you try to generalize them to work in all possible circumstances.
For graphics, I am currently building upon WebGPU, an upcoming standard for graphics on the web that you can also use to build cross-platform native applications. It shows a lot of promise as a cross-platform, easy-to-use graphics API, but my experience with it is a bit mixed. It has been easy to get started with, but there are quite a few features that have been common on GPUs for a long time that WebGPU still doesn’t have, and I might have to switch away from it to be able to deliver an optimized experience.
Game Development
The development is going well. I’m currently at a place where a lot of the features I have built are starting to come together, and you are able to see how everything is interacting. Still, a lot of work remains, both to polish the features I already have in place and to add a few more new things. There are lots of things I’d like to add, but I also have to make sure I can get to the finish line. I am trying to find the balance that makes the things I add a cohesive and compelling package. If things go well, I hope I will have an opportunity to keep working on the game post-release, adding even more details and features.
One of the most unexpected challenges has been the complexity of dealing with walls and roofs intersecting at all sorts of strange angles. You have to think like a real-world builder: should these walls form a smooth curve or a bend? How should these roof ridges that aren’t aligned join? I think I’ve encountered hundreds of little questions like this already, but many remain!
As you adjust the orientation of a wall, its connection to buildings and other walls shift
Future Plans
I don’t have a set timeline for Island Architect's release yet. I’m currently focused on sharing more of what I’ve already built and I will refine my plans based on the feedback I get. I also want to do both closed playtests and then a public demo before the release, but I’m not ready to announce the details yet.
The best way to support Island Architect is to wishlist it on Steam and to share it with friends. I also appreciate feedback, so feel free to reach out on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, or X.
