Game Engines Database

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.

After a long break, This week in Game Engines is back! Site got updated with a comment section (and a Code of Conduct, be nice!) and a newsletter by email (off by default, you can toggle on anytime, and I promise I won't spam you).

This week, we got PLENTY of Game Engine updates (and a Game Jam to participate), PlayCanvas going OpenSource, the story behind Rollercoaster: Tycoon, and much more.

Game Engine News:

Git Activity:

Must Reads this Week

Narrat Engine launched version 4 with Steam and SteamDeck support, and Lovely Lady RPG on Steam to follow it up (a great showcase of a launched game on Steam). If you're interested in making Visual Novels or other kinds of , this might be a great engine to pick up. And with a 2 week Narrat Game Jam starting last weekend, this might be a good opportunity to start playing with it.

But Narrat wasn't the only engine getting updated. Godot is closing on its 4.5 release, Castle Engine made low-level improvements in June/July, and RPG Architect made great strides in July.

Last but not least, Unreal Engine published its showcase blog posts. I recommend taking a look at Small teams, big dreams for the beautiful and diverse indie games showcase.

Fresh Batch of Links

Compulsion Games boss tells Brazilian devs to bake discoverability into the bedrock of their games. Close to home because I'm brazillian, but it has a good insight on this current indie market.
Getting an LLM to Play Text Adventures. This was an interesting read because I found the imagination exercise of using LLM's in Text Adventures very interesting. It also shows what the current limitations of LLM's are in this particular context.
Xogot – Godot on iPad – Now Free for Students. Xogot is a proprietary custom built Godot made to work on iPad, and it now has new price plans and a free tier for Students.
PlayCanvas WebGL/WebGPU Game Engine Open Sourced. As explained in GameFromScratch blog post, PlayCanvas Engine was always OpenSource, but the Web editor wasn't Open Source - until now.
Open Source Game Clones. A Website with a list of open source games and game-engine clones.
More than 15,000 new web games were released in Q2 2025. Good source of information of which engines are being used to create web games.
Rollercoaster Tycoon (or, MicroProse’s Last Hurrah). A great history bit from one of the MicroProse's greatest moments (and I love The Digital Antiquarian posts, definetly give the others a read too).

Site Update!

Two big updates this month! One is the new Comment section. I always envisioned this website to also become a hub for game crafters, so this is the initial step towards that goal. Feel free to give feedback on posts or suggestions (but remember there is a Code of Conduct now)!

Another new update is the newsletter. Now you can subscribe to blog posts to receive them directly on your email. This was a request that was asked to me a long time ago, and I'm finally able to do it with the brand new domain email "newsletter@enginesdatabase.com".

Missed something?

If you have any suggestions, send me feedback at my Mastodon or Bluesky account, or send me an email at "henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com"! And if you want to add a new game engine to the website, consider suggeting a new Game Engine.