This Week in Game Engines #26

Updated Nov. 5, 2025
Written by
Henrique L. Alves

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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:

Git Activity:

Engine Updates this Week

  • Flax: Flax 1.11 released. The main update this week, 929 commits condensed in a new release for Flax Engine. There are two main improvements on the rendering side that enable new features in the engine: now you can create custom shading models (the post points to a cel-shading tutorial that gives a good insight in what is possible to do on Flax now), and use per-pixel masking via stencil buffer (which now enables mask decals, also pointed out in the post).

Flax toon shader screenshot

There's also a lot of improvements on debugging such as GPU profiling using Tracy, UX improvements on the graph editor, performance improvements in GPU particles, threading and asynchronous Scene loading, and many other things. The post is a good way to understand what Flax is about, since it briefly touches many engine features. Haven't used it myself yet, but general feeling that I could check online is that it's an interesting replacement of Unity, with some great additions (hot reloading C++ and C# scripts in the editor) and the obvious caveats (e.g. lack of good-ol' Unity Asset Store).

Flax decals screenshot

Unreal Engine october learning content screenshot

  • RPG Architect: October Wrap-Up. An important milestone for RPG Architect is the fact that all main milestones were reached for the upcoming 1.0, so there's some cool features to see in this post for those interested in "RPG Maker-like" game engines.

RPG Architect screenshot

  • Twine: 2.11.0 is here. Twine is the Interactive Fiction Engine darling. Not many new new features, but mostly good UX improvements in editing the flow of stories.
  • Phaser: PAC-MAN: Halloween 2025 Edition. Just a cool addition on the Phaser 3 portfolio, the latest Pacman Doodle that was available in Google's homepage was made using Phaser.

Fresh Batch of Links

  • Ghost of Yōtei – tech deep dive. Another missed post from the week before (looks like I need to update my RSS feeds). Tech "deep dive" is a bit of a misnomer because the article stay in the shallow waters of fancy animations and doesn't go in too deep into details, but it's still quite nice to see the kind of tech used in AAA custom engines.

Ghost of Yotei screenshot

  • Brief History of Random Numbers. A Rust crate README file sure is an unexpected place to find a good and well-written history of Random numbers and PCG algorithms, but alas.
  • Networking Architecture: CS2 vs CS:GO. A Reddit post sure is an unexpected place to find a Counter-Strike network protocol deep-dive with detailed explanations and infographics, but alas (it even has a Table of Contents). Grantly, the post was NOT made by a CS developer, so it should be read with some grain of salt even if the content was tested by the author.
  • 6502 emulator using coroutines. It's a Rust project but the motivation is agnostic of programming language: this is a 6502 microprocessor emulator (same microprocessor used in Atari 2600 and NES) using coroutines, with an interesting explanation of the emulation problems that tend to arise when emulating CPUs.
  • React Native Godot. Have you ever thought "I like Godot, but I'd love to use React Native components instead of Godot UI elements in my mobile game project"? Me neither, but to be fair only because I never thought this was even possible in the first place. Cool feat of engineering, not exactly sure on the possibility space this opens because I'm not a React Native dev myself.
  • Text rendering and effects using GPU-computed distances. Basic-to-intermediary graphics article about glyph rendering using distance fields. Cool animations (my main driver for graphic-related articles), and easy to follow explanations.
  • Dithering - Part 1. I've seen different dithering tutorials from time-to-time while making this newsletter, but this one has the best presentation by miles away. Really cool explanation with BEAUTIFUL animations.

Dithering tutorial part 1 screenshot

  • Study Game Engines list. In one of my articles deep dive, I ended up in this list of many Game Engines and Game Engine-related tech. It's literally just a huge list that I barely explored myself made by Dmitry Kolesnikovich (whom I don't know), but the content has some interesting stuff that I may be able to cover on the next newsletters, so I might as well share the list here.

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 suggesting a new Game Engine.

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