This Week in Game Engines #29

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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:

• luxe: dev log #16 - 2D Ready RC
• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 5
• Phaser: Turf Trim
• Castle: November improvements: huge animation upgrade, guidelines...
• Unreal Engine: Optimizing blood and VFX systems in UE5 for Let Them Come...
• RPG Bakin: 3種類の新DLCが登場！
• RPG Bakin: 「抜けろ！マスターアップ！」（開発100日目）
• RPG Architect: November Wrap-Up

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• jMonkeyEngine: jMonkeyEngine 3.9.0-alpha5
• GDevelop: 5.5.246
• Defold: v1.12.1 - alpha
• Solarus: Metallizer opened issue #1948: Crash sur sauvegarde autot...
• PlayCanvas: v2.13.6
• FNA: 25.12
• RPG Paper Maker: 3.0.10
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-467: Merge pull request #33 from razz...
• MEG-4: Gissu opened issue #27: Support for more LUA versions? at...
• Excalibur.js: 0.32.0-alpha.1568+800f627: docs: adds type checking to al...
• Ebitengine: v2.10.0-alpha.7
• Decker: v1.63
• Intersect: 0.8.0-beta.555
• Axmol Engine: v3.0.0-alpha1
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.11.27.22.29
• Lisien: clayote pushed to opttest at clayote/Lisien
• Butano: 20.3.1
• Robust Toolbox: v268.0.1
• Pixi’VN: v1.3.34
• Carimbo: v4.0.23
• RecoilEngine: 2025.06.12

Biggest Engine Updates

• luxe: dev log #16 - 2D Ready RC. Luxe is a smaller Game Engine compared to the Big 4 (Godot, Game Maker, Unreal, Unity), but the interesting bit is that it is developed and actively used by Anypercent, an Indie game studio developing The Mossfield Archives with Luxe. In the most recent development, they just completed their 2D milestone with important features like Particle effects, better Editor UI and workflow, and many other things worth checking out.

• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.6 dev 5. As Godot approaches 4.6, more changes are merged to master before the planned feature freeze for the Beta version. Some of the more interesting things merged to master was support for delta encoding with patching PCK's, big optimizations on the 2D renderer, and many other things listed on the post.
• Unreal Engine: Optimizing blood and VFX systems in UE5. Instead of the usual interview format, this post was written by the developers at Tuatara developing Let Them Come: Onslaught, a Vampire-survivor like that migrated from Gamemaker to Unreal Engine. Interesting post with some good insights on how they used Unreal VFX systems.

• RPG Architect: November Wrap-Up. RPG Architect is the RPG-Maker-like, and this latest update has some interesting bits specially on fixing and cleaning up the Engine now that it reached its 1.0 milestone, but the most interesting thing to me is that RPG Architect now will feature a "Blueprints" series on Youtube, with quick tasks you can do in RPG Architect on a quick format of 2-3 minute videos (an important introduction to a new Game Engine).

Fresh Batch of Links

• DOOMed to Fail: A Horror Story. The best link of this week. This is a 2022 interview with the late Rebecca "Burger Becky" Heineman, legendary developer, co-founder of Interplay, porter of Doom for the 3DO console. She passed away on November after fighting cancer, but left an incredible game development legacy and personal stories that this interview covers just a bit.
• Making Crash Bandicoot. Directly from Andy Gavin website, co-founder of Naughty Dog and co-creator of Crash and Jax & Daxter, it's a series of articles detailing the creation of Crash Bandicoot, from "Sonic Ass" concept (his words, not mine!) to development war stories. Lots of content and great stuff to read.

• Game User Interface Technologies Roundup. A GameFromScratch post about the different UI frameworks used in engines and as frameworks, with some good references of the industry-standard of game UIs.
• S&Box Game-Engine Open Sourced. Also from GameFromScratch, S&Box Game-Engine (the spiritual successor of Garry's Mod) got open-sourced. This is interesting because Source 2 is NOT open-sourced, so there still some layers of proprietary code that S&Box needs to run on top of, but this is still quite a good development for Game Engine programmers.

• All Sources of DirectX 12 Documentation. Not a tutorial, but more of a result of the investigative process of finding out where the pieces of the DirectX 12 documentation are, so a good reference for graphic engineers to have when looking for information.
• Langjam Gamejam. I love gamejams, and the concept of this one got my interest: it's a Gamejam in which you have to first design a programming language, then write a game with it. Very freeform kind of Gamejam (definition of a programming language is up to you), but an interesting challenge to take for a week.
• Ray Marching Soft Shadows in 2D. Great post about 2D raymarching using distance fields. Easy to follow and has INTERACTIVE bits which always makes me happy for this kind of post.

• How to implement action sequences and cutscenes. In summary, a very introductory post to coroutines (with LUA) and why they are useful, with some good examples in-between.

Missed something?

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