This Week in Game Engines #22

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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:

• Phaser: Push Your Luck
• Phaser: Tween ease params graph
• Phaser: Bubble Shooter in Phaser – Part 3
• Phaser: Easy Japanese Hiragana
• Phaser: Breathing Life into Game Graphics with Physics
• Phaser: Jumping Orbits
• Phaser: Battery Bot
• 001 Game Creator: 001 Game Creator – New 001 Version & Autumn Sale
• Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine 5.7 Preview
• Unreal Engine: MetaHuman 5.7 Preview Released!
• Unreal Engine: Mafia: The Old Country: Making the old feel new with Unre...
• Unreal Engine: Register now for the 2025 Epic MegaJam
• Unreal Engine: Ravine | Houdini - Unreal Engine Environment | Unreal Eng...
• Unreal Engine: Rematch reinvents football using Unreal Engine 5
• Unreal Engine: September learning content: Gameplay Ability System, Meta...
• RPG Bakin: プロットは地図、制作はクエスト ― 『サバトの女王』リビルドに向けて、旅の足跡
• RPG Bakin: 2種類の新DLCが登場！
• nCine: A New Site
• RPG Architect: September Wrap-Up

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• FlatRedBall: Release_September_23_2025
• GDevelop: 5.5.242
• Pyxel: Pyxel 2.5.7
• Solarus: Max Mraz opened issue #1933: Fatal Error: Invalid directi...
• Solar2D: 3724
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-382
• Nu: Screen Space Refraction + Bloom Post-Process + Sand Box 2...
• MEG-4: Deri LULZZ opened issue #22: fcirc is not working correct...
• Excalibur.js: 0.31.0-alpha.1507+846b25c: docs: [#3519] Site samples sty...
• Chickadee: math: Replace min/max implementation with a more robust one.
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.09.26.21.10
• Lisien: clayote created branch roll in clayote/Lisien
• Kool: v0.18.0
• Robust Toolbox: v267.2.0
• Pixi’VN: v1.3.26
• Carimbo: v1.6.80

Must Reads this Week

Big week for Unreal Engine!

This is a preview release, so big disclaimer on using it on prod. But Unreal Engine 5.7 is here with highlights on:

• PCG (Procedural Conten Generation framework) Update.
• Procedural Vegetation Editor experimental plugin.
• More Nanite tools such as Foliage, Assemblies, Skinning.
• MegaLights in Beta.

And one of the biggies is the new update on MetaHuman, which they made accessible in the engine back in 5.6.

One really cool website to check all the new Unreal features is their roadmap here, which includes a small visualization panel for everything mentioned and much more.

Not only that, but last week Unreal also published their new September learning content, an interview with Rematch creators Sloclap, another interview with the Mafia: The Old Country developers at Hangar 13, and announced the registration for the 2025 Epic MegaJam.

Interviews are nice even if they are mostly about the specific Unreal Engine features the developers used in their games, and Epic MegaJam is already available to join at its Itch.io page, starting on October 16th and lasting for a week!

Fresh Batch of Links

• Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D. This is a gem of a blog post and if you don't have time to read anything this week, give this one a shot. Super interesting, quite funny, and surprisingly in-depth on aerodynamics and plane simulators. You can even play the resulting simulator on itch.io (although it requires a gamepad to play).
• Procedural Generation with Wave Function Collapse. Wave Function Collapse is a really cool name for a quite simple Procedural Generation strategy, and this article explains it quite well.
• (Civilization VII) From the Devs: Improved Map Generation. Still on the topic of Procedural Generation, we got Voronoi diagrams being used on Civilization VII on a really nice post on the new map generation strategy they are using on the new maps. And we get some nice map generation gifs too!
• Game Boy Advance Audio. This is a very in-depth description and almost reverse-engineering on how the Game Boy Advance audio hardware and software works (and why it sucks, apparently - the kid in me is still in shambles after reading it).
• Gamedev Torch. This is a small and new curated search engine for GameDevs. "Curated" here basically means it has a list of sources it indexes pages from, and the nice thing is that you can access the list here. Really nice tool to check resources for specific gamedev-related topics.

Onto graphic topics:

• Messenger. This is an amazing browser game about delivering messages in a little planet. Putting this here because after digging for a bit on HackerNews, I found the artist Vicente Lucendo post on creating a web project with a similar art style, and he has a presentation video about it too.
• NVIDIA Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials (v2.0). Definetly not on my list of most exciting tutorials to follow, but it's nice that NVIDIA released it's updated Ray Tracing tutorial for more recent versions of Vulkan.
• Anisotropic Scaling in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and DOOM: The Dark Ages. Quick blog post explaining a graphical solution for scaling anisotropic sampling settings dynamically, written by Martin Fuller, the very same graphical engineer that created it (honestly I was surprise he could even write about that, that's a nice nod from Machine Games and id Software).

Missed something?

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