This Week in Game Engines #34

Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a digest on gamedev tech news and articles from the week before.

Engine Updates

S&Box Engine - Update 26.07.08

S&Box is gmod spiritual successor. From the latest S&Box Engine update tagline:

"First-party weapons/inventory 🔫 screen-space shadows 🌗 editor MCP tools 🤖 targeted addons 🎯 viewport gizmo 🧭 faster clutter 🚀 and a ton of fixes 🛠️"

S&Box Engine is trying to join the quite difficult engine space of "Roblox-like ecosystem", where users snow-ball in user-content that snow-ball in more users, and so on and forth. So it's always interesting to take a look at the Engine updates, because usually it comes with additional Demos and game samples, a way to start bootstrapping the ecosystem from somewhere and showcase interested developers in what S&Box can do.

Also, like many other game engines, S&Box is adding an MCP Server. I wrote a little more about this below, but it's a sign of the times that MCP Servers are getting implemented in so many places, officially or otherwise.

The King Is Watching - tinyBuild interview

If you are familiar with itch.io, you might have seen the somewhat eerie banner for this game for some time, as it got quite popular there. It then got to Steam (with the help of the publisher tinyBuild), where it sold more than 600,000 copies.

The King is Watching was originally made in GameMaker, but this interview with the tinyBuild developers about the game is seldomly about the game engine, and more about general tips from having a Game Jam game with potential to a successful launch. From the article:

"From a publisher’s perspective, the engine itself is rarely the deciding factor. The concept, execution, production plan, and team matter much more. If the developers are comfortable with the tool and it allows them to build the game they want to make, that is what really counts."

The interview itself is quite nice, although it doesn't tell much about Game Maker specific features used in the game, but gives some good insights on the Game-Jam-to-successful-Steam-launch indie dream.

MCP Servers in Game Engines

Wanted to highlight this because it's a trend I'm seeing in many Game Engines, and the latest S&Box update is a good hook for this topic.

One of the S&Box updates from this week is its new MCP Server. MCP Servers are basically a way for LLM's to "communicate" with a service (in this case, the Game Engine software) in a way that makes it easier for an LLM to manipulate the software like a user would. I've been seeing many Game Engines featuring MCP's recently. From the big ones:

• Unreal Engine MCP.
• Unity MCP Server Documentation.
• Roblox Studio has an MCP Server.

Some smaller game engines:

• Official PlayCanvas MCP.
• Official Pyxel MCP.

And most (popular) open-source engines also feature at least an unofficial MCP extension (not linking them here because they are not official, but it's quite easy to search for them).

From the many hats I wore as a game developer, I worked as a Tool's engineer for some time (making Engine editor tools on my last job to help other developers and artists workflows), and the popularity of MCP tools make sense to me. The MCP is not an AI by itself, it's just a gateway for internal editor calls that Engine developers can turn into an API. So for most game developers there are no visible changes in a Game Engine when an MCP Server is added, but if you use LLMs, an MCP Server is as useful as the internals it exposes, which is much easier to do than creating an AI scaffolding on the engine itself.

Are game developers using MCPs?

Problem is trying to mesure how good MCPs are when the game industry is still figuring out if AI is improving creativity or if there is little evidence of major utility. Hype or not, I see the MCP Server trend as the simplest solution for adding LLM support without sacrificing UX, and if all major Game Engines are adding MCP support, we're certainly going to see the smaller engines following suit, officially or in the case of open-source, via extensions / forks.

Still, I'd love to hear more about anecdotal evidence on game developers using Game Engine MCPs, so if you ever used one, drop a comment in the brand new comment section I spent a lot of making because if I start vibe-coding this website I'm afraid I'll lose grasp of the pillars that sustain this Babel tower of a codebase!

From the Web

Gamedev

• This 3D Character Is Actually Flat & It's Crazy. Saw this first on LinkedIn of all places, an amazing trick to "fix" cell-shaded visuals on different camera apertures.
• Jolt Physics 5.6 Released. Last week I wrote about Box3D - this week, the popular 3D Jolt Physics launched a new major version.
• ⭐Around The World, Part 31: Clear blue sky. A devlog from a project I posted on other newsletters, this time a great deep-dive on sky rendering. The best article of the week.
• Physically Based - The PBR values database. Quite straightforward from the page itself: "A database of physically based values for CG artists".

Design

• The Shape of Apps. Amazing article about app icons in the Apple ecosystem.

AI

• DOOMQL. A vibe-coded Doom port for SQL. Not to be confused with DOOMQL, the CedarDB port of Doom for THEIR SQL engine.
• InfiniteDiffusion: Bridging Learned Fidelity and Procedural Utility for Open-World Terrain Generation. A really cool PoC of procedural open world generation using Diffusion Models (also available as a Minecraft plugin).

Intrusive Thoughts

• Hannah Montana Linux v26.0. Felt important to post this here since my inner distrohop-demon is whispering me sweet little lies about how awesome it would be to daily-drive Hanna Montana Linux to develop games.

Human in the Loop

Henrique here.

News-wise this week was quite chill, but I'm posting this newsletter a bit later than usual because I really had to spend some time polishing the comment section! Now, to the untrained eyes of a non-web developer, it might look quite simple and (dare I say) old-school, but it is, in fact, a Django application!

So it is quite old-school. It's just not simple.

In fact, this entire website is just a big Django codebase with some sprinkle of Bulma CSS and HTMX for responsiveness. I'm not an experienced Django developer by any means, but I have been using Django for hobby projects for quite a while, and it just happened that this started out as a hobby project and now got real users.

And yes, I am apecoding this website. Can't say it's 100% handcrafted because every now and then there are good uses to use LLMs, specially boring refactors using small local models when I know exactly how the end result should look like. But there are no ulterior motives besides the fact that I enjoy understanding every weird corner of this website, and it makes me feel more creative when I know how the smaller building blocks looks like.

I still feel uncomfortable navigating the AI landscape when there are so many people saying polar opposites, but at the end of the day, if I have the time and space to enjoy something, I feel I should just follow the fun. And right now, crafting this website is a lot of fun, so I'll just keep going and see how this gamedev corner is going to turn out.

Now that I finally have a comment section, hopefully I'll be able to prepare some other surprises for next week. See you then :)

Missed something?

If you have any suggestions, send me feedback on Mastodon, drop an email at henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com, or just comment below! And if you want to add a new game engine to the website, consider suggesting a new Game Engine.