This Week in Game Engines #24

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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.

I'm two weeks late! Sorry about that. Life got in the way and I missed the timing of the last newsletter, so this one is a digest of the last two weeks.

Game Engine News:

• Godot: Release candidate: Godot 4.5.1 RC 2
• Godot: Godot Showcase - Material Maker
• Godot: Maintenance release: Godot 4.5.1
• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 2
• Defold: Defold release 1.11.1
• Phaser: Demon Cleaners
• Phaser: Developer Studio Spotlight: Cabbage Systems
• Phaser: Developer Spotlight: Cabbage Systems
• Phaser: Developer Spotlight: Danny Limanseta
• Phaser: Monster Tamer - RPG Tutorial with Phaser 3 (S2E1)
• Phaser: Samme's Showcase 1
• Phaser: Build a Tic Tac Toe Game
• Phaser: Monster Tamer - RPG Tutorial S2E2
• Phaser: Marathon running it's not.
• LibGDX: libGDX 1.14.0
• Castle: Demo how to distribute web application with encrypted data
• Unreal Engine: NITRO GEN OMEGA: Bringing the art style of “spaghetti ani...
• Unreal Engine: Five years, 35 car models: how Unreal Engine is accelerat...
• Unreal Engine: MILES AND FLOWERS | Award-Winning Animated Short
• Unreal Engine: The Fab October Flash Sale is now on!
• Unreal Engine: Cinematic Trailer For A Game That Doesn't Exist
• Unreal Engine: How an indie animation team of four uses UE5 to produce B...
• RPG Bakin: イベント出展！「東京ゲームダンジョン10」
• RPG Bakin: アーリーアクセスローンチ3周年記念セール
• RPG Bakin: アーリーアクセスローンチ3周年！
• RPG Bakin: DLSiteにて『RPG Developer Bakin』販売開始
• RPG Bakin: DLsiteにて『RPG Developer Bakin』販売開始

Git Activity:

• Narrat Engine: v4.1.10
• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• Wicked Engine: 0.71.834
• MonoGame: v3.8.5-develop.12
• GDevelop: 5.5.243
• Defold: v1.11.1 - stable
• Solarus: Max Mraz opened issue #1936: Request: give me a way to tu...
• O3DE: 2510.0
• Solar2D: 3725: iOS/tvOS: packaging (#850)
• PlayCanvas: v2.12.0
• RPG Paper Maker: 3.0.0
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-395
• Nu: Specular Anti-Aliasing + Fluid Simulation in PhysicsEngin...
• Gideros: Gideros 2025.10
• MEG-4: bzt commented on issue #23 at bzt / meg4
• Excalibur.js: 0.32.0-alpha.1530+9196521: docs: Site particle docs (#3531)
• Ebitengine: v2.9.0
• Taylor: v0.4.0
• Arcade: 3.3.3: Update version (#2783)
• Crown: v0.59.1
• MSXgl: MSXgl v1.3.2
• KAPLAY: 4000.0.0-alpha.22
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.10.07.08.33
• Lisien: clayote pushed to interpreters at clayote/Lisien
• Snap!: v11.0.5
• Robust Toolbox: v267.3.0
• Pixi’VN: v1.3.32
• Carimbo: v2.0.3
• RecoilEngine: 2025.06.06

Must Reads this Week

Not many major launches this last week, so we have a couple of interesting articles:

• Godot Showcase - Material Maker. This is an open-source application made with Godot to create engine-agnostic PBR textures and materials. This article is a interview with Material Maker author RodZilla, and it has insights on the why's of using a Game Engine to create such an Application.
• Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 2. Godot Snapshot for 4.6 dev 1 didn't had many new features, but this Snapshot actually came with two really interesting bits: LibGodot (building the Godot Engine as a library) and ObjectDB profiler (a way to create snapshots of all instantiated objects at a given time in the game, and be able to profile/diff that with other snapshots)
• How an indie animation team of four uses UE5 to produce BellyFant. On the topic of Game Engines making not-games, this is an interview with the show creator Pete Dodd, explaining the reasons and advantages of creating a custom animation pipeline on Unreal Engine.
• Phaser: Developer Studio Spotlight: Cabbage Systems. The Phaser website article is very poor in details, and you can find the original article from Reddit developers blog here. I actually didn't knew you could even launch such games on Reddit; you can take a look at their SDK (and what's possible with it) on Devvit documentation website.

• NITRO GEN OMEGA: Bringing the art style of “spaghetti anime” to life with UE5. Cool interview with the Italian studio making a "Spaghetti Anime" game. Really cool concepts following this interview, too.

Fresh Batch of Links

Too many interesting posts, so first the articles for the Not-Tech-Artists crowd:

• Owlcat games learning portal. This is a crowd-sourced learning content for gamedevs, made by the developers at Owlcat games. Looks like it still is under development so it's a bit hard to check some references, but this is a great initiative and great way to check some different Gamedev learning sources.

• Meta Horizon Engine at a Glance. Somehow this escaped me on the previous newsletter, but Meta is previewing their custom engine for the Metaverse. As a gamedev, there are a lot of questions on what is the focus of this engine, since Metaverse is (supposedly) mainly VR experiences, but the Engine will also support their Meta app on mobile devices (the Robloxified experience). The engine is still not out there, so we'll have to wait and see.
• Playgama: New Web games Engines & Genres. Focused on the Playgama web-games portal, this is a cool insight on the current game engines currently being used to publish web games.

• Legends of the games industry: Roger Dean. Really cool interview with Roger Dean, English artist and designer that (among many things) created the album cover for the band Yes and worked illustrating game covers back in the Psygnosis publishing days.
• Hacking GTA V RP Servers Using Web Exploitation Techniques. This is a breakdown of an exploit in GTA V online RP servers. Good rundown on the discovery of the exploit and the challenges of making secure multiplayer servers when you allow server customization.
• Calculating the Bounding Rectangle of a Circular Sector. Very simple math-tutorial that I very quickly enjoyed because there is a gif of a circle section going vooom at the very start of the page. Good math and easy to understand.

And now, some graphic-related posts of the last two weeks, in order of how easy it was for me to understand:

• Satisfaction of Render Pipelines. Very simple conceptual introduction to Render Pipelines and why they are useful. No OpenGL knowledge needed at all.
• Ocean Rendering, Ptoppbilde-2art 1 - Simulation. Very good walk-through very heavy on math but easier on rendering knowledge. In spirit is similar to one of my favourite articles Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D.

• GPU Instanced Grass Breakdown. Now we're getting on the nitty-gritty GPU stuff, but the post explains quite well what GPU Mesh Instancing is, and it made it really nice to show the difference in implementation between Unity versions.
• Field Guide to TSL and WebGPU. This is a really nice guide to WebGPU from someone that already knows at least some rendering (and some Three.js), using the Three.js Shader Language. Really cool article but in the worst-case scenario of the reader not understanding much (totally not my case), the pictures are pretty and some of the pictures even move.

Missed something?

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