Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a recurrent blog post on gamedev news, articles, and related tech development content from the week before.
This format of weekly news was greatly inspired by This week in Rust. Most of the content is automatically added to the post via official RSS feeds from Game Engines websites, and miscellaneous gamedev content is hand-picked from suggestions and news aggregators such as hackernews, lobste.rs and gamedev.city.
This week we have Unity's Indie Survival Guide news, some great game marketing and publishing articles, and a delightfully retro treasure-trove of gamedev tutorials!
The best content this week comes from Unity's Indie Survival Guide. The new blog posts are a summary of ideas from the original VOD's they launched on YouTube earlier this year, but if you never seen the interviews, the blog posts give a good insight on what's in them. Two of my favourite ones are "5 tips & strategies for marketing indie games" with Chris Zukowski (author of HowToMarketAGame.com), and "5 lessons to learn from a failed game" with Emily Pitcher (solo developer of lily's world XD).
Speaking of Chris Zukowski, he published a great article this last week called "Can itch.io success translate to Steam success?". Itch.io is my favorite platform to share my little projects, so it's great to see actual numbers comparing real scenarios between itch and Steam.
The next article on a similar topic I read this week: pocketgamer.biz published an article called "How to launch a new game in 2025". It's much more game-company-business oriented, so it's definitely not going to be every indie developer cup of tea, but having a good broad understanding of the game industry might be really helpful in this trying times.
This screenshot will make sense, I promise.
On Lobste.rs, someone posted about a 2003 tutorial on Car Physics for Games (the tutorial is 22 years too late to post on a weekly newsletter but bear with me here). This is an in-depth tutorial on car physics on a 2D plane (think SNES Rock N' Roll Racing), and it's quite good and engine agnostic.
Well, I got curious on the other material this "Marco Monster" had. He did mentioned his other tutorial "Achieving a Stable Simulator", in which he talk about numerical stability (important if you're using e.g. differential equations in your physics engine), but the link of the post from Lobste.rs is unfortunately dead.
Well, aren't we glad Internet Archive exists! Some images are missing, but most part of the content about numeric calculus in a physics engine application is still there. And lo and behold, his delightfully retro website also have a snapshot, which means we can now read a 2001 tutorial about Skeletal Animation (where the screenshot comes from)!
And the treasure trove of old gamedev gems doesn't stop there. From the links in Marco's website, I also discovered FlipCode archive, with a huge collection of gamedev articles from the early 2000's. You can find articles about Frustum Culling, Reflections and Refraction in Raytracing, Basic Collision Detection, and many other things there.
A lot of information I covered here is obviously quite dated (I don't think I'll ever need an OpenGL 1.0 code reference), but there are some truly good gems there, as most of the tutorials were made considering you'd be making a Game Engine from the ground-up, so at least part of the knowledge is the math substratum that we have for granted when we use another Game Engine API.