This Week in Game Engines #20

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

Game Engine News:

• Godot: Release candidate: Godot 4.5 RC 2
• Godot: Godot 4.5, making dreams accessible
• Defold: Towards First-Class Teal Support
• Phaser: Phaser Editor Development Update
• RPG Paper Maker: DiscordRichPresence
• Castle: Castle Model Viewer available on iOS, Android version upd...
• Unity: Inside the Survival Kids multiplayer network infrastructure
• Unreal Engine: Built with UE5, Borderlands 4 delivers ambitious scale wi...
• Unreal Engine: The Sports Broadcast | Motion Design Sample is now available
• Unreal Engine: Unreal Fellowship: Games—explore the making of six awesom...
• Unreal Engine: Fab in Launcher is now available!
• Wonderland Engine: Build a Discord Activity with Wonderland Engine
• RPG Bakin: 「東京ゲームショウ2025」出展！

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• Eldiron: Eldiron Creator v0.8.70
• Armory3D: 2025.9
• GDevelop: 5.5.240
• Solarus: Christopho closed issue #1898: (2.0) Fatal Error - Missin...
• PlayCanvas: v2.11.3
• Bevy: v0.17.0-rc.1
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-369
• MEG-4: bzt pushed to project branch binaries at bzt / meg4
• PixiJS: v8.13.2
• Excalibur.js: 0.31.0-alpha.1504+f5bccaa: chore: Update dependency vite ...
• Hot Soup Processor: v3.7 Windows Release (English)
• Decker: v1.59
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.09.09.02.07
• Lisien: clayote pushed to export at clayote/Lisien
• Snap!: v11.0.1
• Butano: 20.1.0
• Robust Toolbox: v267.0.1
• Carimbo: v1.6.20: Merge pull request #6 from willtobyte/sentry

Must Reads this Week

Godot 4.5 is finally upon us! There are plenty of new things that are much better described on the official blog post, but my favorite ones are:

• Stencil support! This was a must-have to make many types of shaders that required a lot of workarounds in Godot before, like showing an x-ray of a character through other 3D models.
• Shader Baker. Now Godot can pre-compile shaders in Forward/Mobile rendering modes for supported platforms, which might give a huge boost in loading times when used right.
• WebAssembly SIMD Support. This is basically a free performance boost for web games made in Godot, which was already one of the better Game Engines for web games development.

This is a great new version of Godot and I really recommend reading the official blog post to check the many new features the engine has. Stencil support is particularly game breaking- I remember seeing this feature request back in Godot 2.X days because Stencil is a requirement for many shaders and tricks. I'm expecting to see a boost on many new Godot graphical experiments on YouTube.

Another post on Unity's blog about Survival Kids, this time about its Networking Architecture. It's a really good post (even with the usual self-marketing on Unity products) and it honestly made me quite excited on Unity producing more games, so we can have more content like this. Also, I've noticed I somehow missed the post about level layout in Survival Kids, which is algo a must read (from two weeks ago, oopsie daisy!)

In other news:

• Defold now has a much better support for Teal, a typed language that transpiles to Lua (the equivalent of Typescript to Javascript). An interesting choice - I didn't know Teal before, but I know other Lua variants such as Luau (from Roblox fame) and MoonScript.
• Unreal Engine had its Unreal Fellowship event, where developers participated in a 30-day intensive course on Unreal Engine to produce a small game. You can find some of the results in the post as a nice showcase of games made in Unreal, and more interestingly, you can check each of the developers devlogs.
• Also, Borderlands 4 is made in Unreal, so of course they made the Unreal Engine interview to talk about the tech they used in the game. The timing of the interview may not be great, though - Borderlands 4 launched to "Mostly Negative" reviews on Steam thanks to crashes and performance issues. Of course this is not an Engine specific issue (lots of great games in Unreal Engine are well optimized and run well in plenty devices), but still, Borderlands 4 might not be the best example of a "Unreal Engine optimized" game, at least not yet.

Fresh Batch of Links

• Procedural Island Generation. You might know by know that I'm a really big fan of math-related articles with lots of animated figures, and this one delivers. Quite an interesting topic and really good visualizations.
• I Replaced Animal Crossing's Dialogue with a Live LLM by Hacking GameCube Memory. Really unhinged and fun results, but the most interesting part was how to inject the procedural generated text into a 24 years-old game.
• Performance Improvements in .NET 10. Specially relevant for developers that use more "native" C# libraries (like MonoGame), less so if you use a Game Engine that has C# support (most of the time Game Engines play catch-up with new .NET versions). Still, quite an interesting read on performance improvements in C# world.
• By the way, what’s a AA? Interesting analysis on the market and what "defines" a AA type of game (and the first AA definition that I've read that does NOT include money spent into the game's production).
• A Digital Darwin Adventure with Mating Melodies. A small and sweet article on a musical experiment using genetic algorithms. Not very Game Engine related but it's

Missed something?

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