This Week in Game Engines #11

Updated June 3, 2025
Written by
Henrique L. Alves

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 a big batch of Unity games and Phaser updates, the start of "Epic Games State of Unreal 2025" event, a Pokémon battle engine made with Zig, and more interesting articles!

Game Engine News:

Git Activity:

Must Reads this Week

Monster Train 2 screenshot

Unity published their "May 2025 in review" post, with a compilation of games made with Unity Engine, including Monster Train 2, sequel of one of my favorite rogue-likes, and Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping, sequel of one of my favorite Duck-base detective adventure game.

Phaser also has a nice post on the latest developments, including Phaser 4 RC 4 (possibly the last Release Candidate), the last version of Phaser 3, and an update on the new no-code platform Phaser team is launching called Phaser Beam. In particular, I specially liked the newly released Phaser template for Tauri, an Electron alternative built on Rust. Tauri has seen quite a few developments in the Rust world, and using it with Phaser seems like an interesting experiment to test on a Game Jam.

Fresh Batch of Links

I thought long and hard about a coherent theme for the links this week, but I couldn't find any. So I'm just dumping them all here, which I guess it works fine too.

  • How to make a game that punches above its weight. A good gamedev article by the Creative Director of The Astronauts, on how to efficiently use your resources to make great games without triple-A investment or team size. Goes a little bit too much into coach territory but that's still a great topic.
  • Game Accessibility Guildelines. Great website on different types of accessibility options games should have, divided in implementation complexity (Basic / Intermediate / Advanced) and type of accessibility (e.g. Motor, Cognitive). It's a great reference for game developers on the kinds of options that enable their games to be played by many more players.
  • Cult Flash game revived after programmer rescues source code from kid's laptop. A bit of a mouthful, but it's an article on GameDeveloper.com on the revival of the flash game Dungeon Rampage. What I found particularly interesting it's the description of the game client and server: the original game server was made with C++ and PHP, while the client was obviously made in Flash. The new one has a much more modern game server, but apparently (the article is not 100% clear about this) the client is still in Flash (although updated to work on Steam).
  • The State of Unreal 2025. GameFromScratch made a great video on the Epic Games State of Unreal 2025 event happening right now. The event will end June 5th, so I expect many more announcements (and blog posts on the Unreal Engine website), but that's a great keynote follow-up if you're curious on what they're talking about on the event.
  • Pkmn Engine. From the GitHub repo: "A minimal, complete, Pokémon battle simulation engine optimized for performance and designed for tooling, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence use cases.". It's also a great example of a complex project programmed in Zig, which is a language I've been seeing increasingly more in the gamedev tech sphere.

Small site update!

Some may notice today is in fact NOT monday. I'm still figuring out the best time to publish this weekly news - the main reason is, well, I actually read all the links I post here (and many more I don't post), and this takes quite a while! Good portion of the curation work happens on the weekends and leaks into monday, so I'm giving myself one extra day. For now, I'll be publishing This Week in Game Engines every tuesday!

Also, I just created a new bluesky account! I'm terrible with Social Media but I'll be trying to ping gamedevs there and on my Mastodon account on every This Week in Game Engines issue. If you have any suggestions, please ping me there! I'd love to hear more about the people reading this blog posts :)

Missed something?

Newsfeed is obtained automatically using RSS feeds from the game engines official websites. If you are the developer of a listed game engine, consider adding an RSS feed on your website! If you want to add new game engine to the website, consider suggeting a new Game Engine!