This Week in Game Engines #27

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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: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 3
• Phaser: Yes! Full animations are now here.
• Unreal Engine: Explore Agora Studio’s new animation sample projects for ...
• Unreal Engine: Developed with UE5, I AM RIPPER puts a gripping, gritty n...
• Unreal Engine: UE5 lays the smackdown on long rendering times for WWE’s ...
• Unreal Engine: MetaHuman 5.7 Released!
• Felgo: Meet the Qt Community in Vienna – Qt Day Austria & CEE 2025
• nCine: Signed Commits
• Easel: Multiple cameras and more! What's new in Easel (November ...
• Easel: What's new in Easel (November 2025)

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• Wicked Engine: 0.71.854
• MonoGame: MonoGame v3.8.5.develop.13
• GDevelop: 5.5.245
• Pyxel: v2.5.10
• Twine: 2.11.1
• Solarus: Metallizer opened merge request !1616: Fixed dev versions...
• Solar2D: 3726
• PlayCanvas: v2.13.0
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-432
• Nu: Box2D.NET physics integration and enhancements!
• pyglet: v2.1.11
• PixiJS: v8.14.1
• Excalibur.js: 0.32.0-alpha.1560+24fadc4
• Ebitengine: v2.10.0-alpha.5
• KAPLAY: 4000.0.0-alpha.23
• p5play: v3.34
• Redot Engine: redot-4.4-rc.1: Merge pull request #1107 from Arctis-Fire...
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.11.09.07.13
• Lisien: clayote created branch move in clayote/Lisien
• KNI: Hotfix v4.2.9001.1
• Robust Toolbox: v267.4.0
• Carimbo: v3.0.64

Engine Updates this Week

• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 3. As Godot approaches version 4.6, some of the biggest changes are being merged to main, including a complete editor UI theme redesign and better inspector UX.

• Unreal Engine: Explore Agora Studio’s new animation sample projects for Unreal Engine. This is a new project template for Unreal Engine with a complete real-time animation setup. Particularly insightful in the post is the 10min video with the project walkthrough, which also explains a bit of the storyboard-to-animation process inside Unreal Engine.

• Unreal Engine: Developed with UE5, I AM RIPPER puts a gripping, gritty narrative in players’ hands. Another Unreal Engine developer interview, this time for the horror game "I AM RIPPER". This interview is in video format and is quite short (only 6min), so Unreal Engine specific features are only briefly mentioned.
• Easel: What's new in Easel (November 2025). Easel is a browser-based Game Engine (games and editor) with some interesting multiplayer features that make it easy to create online games in the Easel ecosystem (you can only publish games in the "easel.games" website). This post introduces the biggest rendering change (support for multiple cameras) but also has a brief explanation on how the P2P multiplayer system works in Easel.

Fresh Batch of Links

• The Space Sim’s Last Hurrah. Another great post by the Digital Antiquarian, this time about the end of the Space-sims era with Wing Commander, TIE Fighter and Freespace.

• RotMG map seeds. A post by RedBlobGames about trying to find the specific seeds used in the generation of maps on the game Realm of the Mad God. Not particularly pragmatic but a nice read, and specially interesting is the how he optimized finding the specific seeds.

• Bevy game development guides. A website with a list of small-to-medium guides on Bevy covering many topics and bits of the API, and a bit of general Rust specific guides. Very useful website for Bevy fans.
• Voxel Engine in a Weekend. Straightforward tutorial on creating a simple voxel engine. Nice thing is that the entire tutorial uses pseudo-code, so the exercise of choosing and adapting it to a language is left to the reader.
• The Sega Master System. Great article for retrogame developers. Explains some of the hardware and architecture differences between the Master System, his predecessor Coleco Vision, and the NES.
• Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology. Another cool piece of retrogaming, this time as a software archeology adventure of trying to recover and re-licensing the USENET game Conquer.

• Spectral rendering, part 1: Spectra. A three-part pathtracing render tutorial using Spectral analysis (only the first part is available). I may look smart summarizing it but to be fair you can ignore the math to understand why spectral rendering is useful. I recommend first checking the example at the end of the post to understand a bit the main difference between a "normal" RGB pathtracer and a spectral pathtracer on a 3D scene.
• Game design is simple, actually. A recent blog post by Raph koster, of "A Theory of Fun" fame. I tend to think he is a bit too reductionist (a criticism he addresses himself in the post), but the post is still a very good list of references for anyone studying game design.

Missed something?

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