This Week in Game Engines #12

Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a recurrent digest on gamedev news and articles 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 the announcement of Unreal Engine 5.6 getting all the spotlight with plenty of tech showcases! Plus, good news for Godot web game developers, and an Unity interview with the Psycasso devs!

Game Engine News:

• Godot: Upcoming (serious) Web performance boost
• Phaser: Catch the Falling Fruits Game
• Phaser: Work-Life Balance
• Phaser: From The Depth
• Phaser: Build a Candy Catching Game
• Phaser: Trials of the Crescent Moon
• Castle: Game controllers (gamepads, joysticks) – new comfortable ...
• Unity: Making a killing: The playful 2D terror of Psycasso®
• Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine 5.6 is now available
• Unreal Engine: All the big news and announcements from the State of Unre...
• Unreal Engine: Hang out with Epic Games at Annecy Festival 2025
• Unreal Engine: Quixel Derelict Corridor | Unreal Engine 5 Cinematic
• Unreal Engine: Missed the State of Unreal? Catch up here.
• Unreal Engine: Take Part in the Unreal Engine Dance Animation Challenge
• Unreal Engine: Underwater
• Wonderland Engine: Release 1.4.3 - Further Hotfixes
• Wonderland Engine: Wonderland Engine 1.4.4 - Fixes and UX Improvements
• PixiJS: PixiJS Update - v8.10.0
• nCine: Presenting at /dev/games
• nCine: Presented at /dev/games

Git Activity:

• Wicked Engine: 0.71.787
• Solarus: Christopho closed issue #1900: game:stop_game_over() requ...
• Solar2D: 3721
• Bevy: v0.16.1
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-240
• MEG-4: bzt pushed to project branch main at bzt / meg4
• PixiJS: v8.10.0
• Excalibur.js: 0.31.0-alpha.1428+6ff3467: chore: Update dependency playw...
• Decker: v1.56
• Arcade: 3.3.0
• Intersect: 0.8.0-beta.546
• Axmol Engine: v2.6.1
• Crown: v0.56.0
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.06.03.00.15
• Lisien: clayote pushed to android at clayote/Lisien
• Butano: 19.4.1
• KNI: Hotfix v4.1.9001.1
• Robust Toolbox: v261.2.0

Must Reads this Week

The main article this week that will impact gamedevs the most is State of Unreal 2025 Highlights and Unreal Engine 5.6 Launch. There is already lots of content around, but a quick rundown:

• Witcher 4 Tech Demo.
• Open-World focus tech on Unreal Engine 5.6.
• New Meta-Human version.
• Unreal Editor for Fortnite updates and new IPs collaborations.
• AI powered tools in Unreal Engine 5.6.
• RealityScan 2.0.

Plus a bunch of new features on Unreal Engine 5.6, specially on the new animation authoring tools front.

I'm not an Unreal Engine developer per-se but I'm Unreal Engine curious, and there is some seriously exciting stuff there. Reading the announcement made me download and test RealityScan (available on Android), and it's a very straightforward tool to make 3D models from your phone camera that also works on any other Engine (thanks to the new license they announced during this State of Unreal). I guess the only announcement I didn't vibe with (heh) was the AI tools. I'm not particularly against AI (we're living in interesting times, willingly or not), but the presentation of the new AI Persona tool (to create AI powered characters) just felt, well, a bit cheap. The Fortnite AI Darth Vader was certainly an interesting novelty, but I guess it's up to Unreal Engine developers to figure out how to make interesting gameplay out of it.

Next announcements are not nearly as much packed as the Unreal Engine news, but we have pretty good news for Godot developers making web games: a performance improvement that requires absolutely nothing from developers (the best kind of performance improvement), because it's already integrated in the web WASM exporter. And last but not least, there is a nice Unity interview with the developers of Psycasso, a 2D cozy pixel-art game about making art with blood and harvesting body parts. It touches lightly on some of the Unity features they used.

Fresh Batch of Links

• The Witcher 4 Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo: Digital Foundry Reaction. This is a great dissect of the State of Unreal Tech Demo from Digital Foundry experts. Really recommend watching for the sober, hype-less tech analysis.
• What was Radiant AI, anyway?. Radiant AI was the name of the ambitious AI engine used in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Fun, content-packed and really interesting article with amazing pieces of game development trivia (and from one of my favorite games, too). Also, the article recommend those follow-ups if you are into game AI:
  • Three States and a Plan: The A.I. of F.E.A.R. The classic paper on gamedev AI on what is still considered one of the best game AI's, used on the FPS F.E.A.R. (I honestly think that I reread this paper at least once every year).
  • How AI in Games Works. It's a 2009 article explaining how the AI works in some of the more impressive games of that era. It's much more approachable than the F.E.A.R. paper.
• Finite Atari Machine. A project that is better explained by a single quote in its introduction: "What if I shove a billion monkeys in a GPU and asked them to write a game for the Atari 2600?". Surprisingly insightful project on Atari emulation and AI/ML heuristics, too.

Missed something?

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