This Week in Game Engines #16

Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a recurrent digest on gamedev news and articles from the week before.

Any suggestions or feedback? Comment down below, or send me a message at henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com. You can also follow our newsletter!

Game Engine News:

• Narrat Engine: mastodon.gamedev.place/@narrat/115051340315798465
• Godot: Submissions open for Godot 2025 showreel
• Phaser: I Built a Fast-Paced Survival Game Using Phaser JS
• Phaser: The Sovereign
• Phaser: Building a Modern Web-Based Farming Game
• Phaser: Learn Phaser 3 by Building a Space Shooter
• Phaser: Crabs in a Bucket
• Phaser: How to Create Pokémon Battle Transitions with One Shader
• Unity: The evolution of rewards: From marketing model to loyalty...
• Unreal Engine: Updated Stack-O-Bot for Unreal Engine 5.6—available now
• Unreal Engine: Register now for the Mega Stack-O-Jam game jam
• Unreal Engine: UE5 Automotive Cinematic

Git Activity:

• Narrat Engine: v4.1.3
• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• jMonkeyEngine: jMonkeyEngine 3.9.0-alpha4
• MonoGame: MonoGame v3.8.5-develop.7
• GDevelop: 5.5.239
• Solarus: Metallizer opened merge request !1606: Documentation: add...
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-333
• Nu: Performance Improvements, Fixes, and Minor Enhancements.
• GGEZ: 0.10.0-rc0: Merge pull request #1330 from ggez/release
• pyglet: v2.1.8
• Excalibur.js: 0.31.0-alpha.1490+82b5244
• Ebitengine: v2.9.0-alpha.14
• Decker: v1.58
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.08.14.07.46
• Lisien: Release v0.21.2
• Robust Toolbox: v267.0.0
• Pine: Release v2.0.2
• Pixi’VN: v1.3.4
• Carimbo: v1.5.68
• RecoilEngine: 2025.04.11

Must Reads this Week

Good showcases for Narrat Engine and Godot!

Narrat Engine Summer Jam is over, and you can check the results here. Engine specific game jams are always a good source of inspiration to know more about an Engine and what is possible to make using it, so I recommend taking a look on the great jam results (including the fantastique Three Leasbians Learn French).

And if you are creating a game using Godot, submissions are open for Godot 2025 showreel. Previous Showreels were pretty nice and a good way to showcase different styles of games created using Godot, and the games were so diverse the videos are an awesome source of inspiration.

Last but not least, Unreal kicked off its Mega Stack 'o Jam, a Jam in which you have to use its Stack-O-Bot sample template as the basis for the game. The jam will still run for two days, so we'll be able to check the entries soon.

Fresh Batch of Links

If you only have time to read one thing, I recommend reading The Tech Behind Geotoy and Bullfrog in the Dungeon (I can't NOT recommend The Digital Antiquarian, so make do with 2 articles!).

• The Tech Behind Geotoy. This is a great article showing the tech behind Geotoy, a web application that allows you to code 3D shapes using a domain-specific scripting language. It covers many things, from web distribution to the dedicated scripting language parsing.
• Bullfrog in the Dungeon. Another absolute banger from The Digital Antiquarian. Must-read for any Dungeon Keeper fan.
• Our Workflow with Blender and Godot. A great article by the Technical Director of the Blender Studio on how they created a good workflow to use Blender and Godot on a team with multiple artists. Great article for technical artists working with Godot.
• Your Mac Game Is Probably Rendering Blurry. Technical article on the fun problem in Mac development of taking into account the Notch and screen safe area. Might be useful for Mac game developers out there.
• Pixi Editor. A great free, open-source general art tool with Node Graph support, Pixel and Vector art, and other things they describe better on their 2.0 announcement.
• Unity 6.2 Released. As always, GameFromScratch did a really good video highlighting Unity 6.2 new features.
• Retro Rogue-Like: Modular Programming in C. This is part of a trilogy of articles (here and here) of building a small rogue-like game in C to run on a "collection of retro computers from the 1970s and 1980s". Great stuff, and touch on some good C software architecture advices.
• Dithering on the GPU. Great article about, well, creating a dithering effect on the GPU. It also visually explains some dithering algorithms and has great examples.

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.