This Week in Game Engines #25

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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: Maintenance release: Godot 3.6.2
• Phaser: From Ink.js to Phaser.js
• Phaser: Dealing out the upgrades to the tower!
• Castle: KTX support improvements, ability to load images faster
• Fyrox: Fyrox Game Engine 1.0 Release Candidate
• Unity: The power of play: Unlocking growth with playables
• Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine 5 helps Frogwares deliver a different sort ...
• Unreal Engine: Virtual Pine Grove | UE5 [4K]
• Unreal Engine: Brick WizSamson | Unreal Engine Halloween Animation 4K HDR
• RPG Bakin: 10月30日発売予定！新DLC2種類のストアページを先行公開！
• Felgo: Release 4.3.0: Felgo QML Hot Reload, Android 15, Qt 6.8 &...

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• Eldiron: Eldiron Creator
• GDevelop: 5.5.244
• Pyxel: v2.5.9
• Solarus: Dawn Owl opened issue #1938: Compiling editor with Solaru...
• Stride: releases/4.2.1.2485
• PlayCanvas: v2.13.0-beta.1
• FLAME: flame-v1.33.0: chore(release): Publish Flame v1.33.0 et. ...
• RPG Paper Maker: 3.0.2
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-411
• Fyrox: v1.0.0-rc.1
• Excalibur.js: 0.32.0-alpha.1536+f6961aa: chore: Update dependency vite ...
• Ebitengine: v2.9.3
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.10.25.14.48
• Lisien: clayote pushed to interpreters at clayote/Lisien
• Snap!: v11.0.6
• Carimbo: v2.0.36
• RecoilEngine: 2025.06.07
• SDL Simple DirectMedia Layer: 3.3.2

Engine Updates this Week

Exciting news for the Rust gamedev ecosystem, and this time is NOT about Bevy!

Fyrox Engine just released its version 1.0 (Release Candidate). Fyrox has been around for a while now, and unlike Bevy (and to be fair, most gamedev crates in Rust ecosystem), it's not ECS, instead opting to be "Unity, but in Rust". Quite a bold statement from Fyrox page itself, but an approach that has resulted in a very nice Engine and Editor with Rust crates that can be extended pretty much anywhere.

The Release Candidate page boasts the usual Engine stuff that is paramount for most 3D engines (PBR rendering, Particle Systems, Skybox), so it's a good way to check what the engine offers, but you can also jump straight into the examples page to see examples running in the browser.

As this website maintainer, I can say that Fyrox is being developed quite consistently (I check git updates for new Engine versions and Fyrox always have some new minor versions to update every week), so this is a very welcome major feature update. Still, don't expect a fully fledged Game Engine yet, specially on the UX experience of using the editor. Case in point, when I tested this Release Candidate, there was a somewhat lengthy compilation time for the project that ended up hanging because I didn't had "libasound2-dev" installed on my Linux. So caveat emptor, etc. Still, great news that adds a bit of much needed diversity into the Rust gamedev ecosphere.

Fresh Batch of Links

• A Looking Glass Half Empty, Part 2: A Series of Unfortunate Events. Somehow I missed another great post from The Digital Antiquarian, this time about the end of the Looking Glass Studios (of System Shock and Thief series fame). Always very entertaining to read, I will never not recommend it.

• Mesh2Motion. A website that made the rounds on my feeds, it's an Open-Source version of the reliable Mixamo, where you could add a humanoid-shaped character and have access to automatic rigging + a library of good-enough-to-use-in-a-gamejam animations. Haven't used Mesh2Motion yet but it's definetly something I'll think about next time I'm in a gamejam pinch.

• Yet Another Year With Decker. This is a progress report of Decker for its third birthday. Decker is "multimedia platform for creating and sharing interactive documents, with sound, images, hypertext, and scripted behavior" - and, of course, pretty nice and retro-looking adventure games. There are many examples in the report of what you can use using Decker, and specially a really cool work-in-progress of a interactive fiction game.
• The Greatness of Text Adventures. On the topic of Text Adventure games, this is an article with a good introduction to common text adventure mechanics and examples of great adventure texts (old and new) you can play in the browser.
• How to Avoid Fighting Rust Borrow Checker. A good article that is only tangentially gamedevish, but I think it's suitable for this week since we have the release of Fyrox v1.0rc. It's an opiniated overview of Rust "good memory architecture" habits to have an easier time with the Borrow Checker. Seems compatible with the general feeling of using memory arenas vs. Rc<RefCell<>> I've seen in Rust gamedev circles.
• Luau Performance. Luau is the "Roblox Lua" scripting language, made with type annotation and sandbox'ing in mind. This is part of Luau's documentation page - not exactly sure why this made the rounds on my feeds, but it's an interesting overview of the main Luau engine differences from Lua.
• Raylib New Software Renderer. I deleted my Twitter account long ago, so it's an announcement I have to count on GameFromScratch to know about. RayLib now has a Software Renderer backend, which makes RayLib run without the need of a GPU. The "real" reason is more interesting though, on a LinkedIn post, one of RayLib founders Ramon Santamaria explained how this makes RayLib RISC-V proof.

Missed something?

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