This Week in Game Engines #35

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

This week we have Unity 7 news, AI workflows everywhere, why you should make a Game Engine, SimGolf was ahead of its time but I guess that's just my opinion, and much more!

I'm also changing the format of the newsletter a little bit, so the usual list of official blog articles and git updates will be at the end. Hopefully it's an improvement from the previous format.

Unity 7 News

From the Unity Unite event at Seoul, Unity announced the next iteration of the Game Engine, and how it is going to look like. From the article:

"Game creation has evolved, with teams of creators and coding agents now working side by side across every part of the craft. [...] Unity 7 works hand-in-hand with the AI tools developers already use, powering progression from idea to playable game faster than ever and helping teams of any size to build, monetize, and grow their games."

I mentioned this in the previous newsletter, but I've been following quite many Game tech updates now, and one thing that seems ubiquitous is how developers are integrating agent-workflows into Game Engines (usually via MCP servers). As one of the de-facto industry standards (specially for mobile games), it makes sense for Unity to gear up for a launch with this kind of feature-set in mind, specially when Unreal Engine announced similar workflow integrations with AI on their last State of Unreal event. Now it's a race for the best game engine AI integration, whatever that means a couple of months from now.

Interesting enough, Unity 7 won't have any breaking changes, and most of the article highlights are about faster CI/CD, better editor and deployment tooling, AI workflows, Unity monetization and growth services, etc. So unless the graphical updates are really impactful (hard to tell from the article), I see this launch relevant mostly to Unity enterprise clients, but much less groundbreaking for the smaller indie developers out there.

Unity 7 Beta launches at December this year, and the full release is scheduled for Q1 2027.

Unity CLI

Speaking about CI/CD improvements and long-requested enterprise features, Unity shadow-dropped during the Unite event its official Unity CLI tool:

"[...] Unity CLI is a standalone unity binary for managing and interacting with editors, modules, projects, and auth from the terminal. No UI needed; install via command line."

This is an amazing tool for automation, but in the spirit of the agentic workflows from Unity 7, this is a tool that "allow AI agents to operate Unity: observe a live project, act on it, and verify the result", and this is certainly the main theme of the article. Grantly, the blog post does show a really cool demo where an AI agent evaluate a live editor scene to fix an error of a collider turned off (a classic).

How is this different than Unity MCP Server? Besides the usefulness of Unity CLI in automation and tooling, I found it a bit hard to say which is going to be more useful for AI agents, but it does seem like Unity CLI allow a lot of per-project customization (allowing you to generate commands to run on the CLI), when Unity MCP server is in theory much more static on its feature-set. But from the announcements, it's unclear to me what is the feature-parity of both products (if I test that, I'll write a blog post about it).

How is this different than all the other Unity AI Suite they announced before? Unfortunately I still don't have emoji support on the blog posts, so bear in mind and imagination: :shrugs:

Indies, Interviews and Game Engines

A little AI palate cleansing: this week we had two very nice interviews with indie devs, and an article I should've posted a long time ago.

Don't Kill Them All - Interview

Made on Unity, this is a tactics game about managing an army of orcs and trying to not destroy everything in your path to get resources. Made by the Quebecois company Fika Procutions, they were interviewed by 80lv in a really nice article about game design, art, and technical challenges they had during production.

Nothing very Unity-specific here in the interview, but specially how they developed the 2.5D art of the game (which looks very nice) is an interesting technical bit of the article.

Space Scum - Interview

Made with GameMaker, this is also a tactics game, but this time about leading a group of mercenaries in a Sci-Fi world in which you might as well destroy as much as you can before getting destroyed yourself. Made by Sole Survivor games, they were interviewed in the GameMaker website.

Also a good article that doesn't go very deep into the technical challenges of the process, but it does give interesting insights on the extent the team went with the game, like automating combat simulations to test the game and having GameMaker automatically upload the results to Google Sheets.

Why making your own Game Engine

With two very cool indie tactics game, my mind drifting looking for other topics to post on the newsletter, and I remember playing a lot of Mewgenics when it launched this year. The game was programmed in Tyler Glaiel own game engine, and there is some really cool content about the technical bits of the engine. But one article I found from Tyler himself is worth posting again: How to make your own game engine (and why). The article really delivers everything it promises, from why (and why not make a game engine), the bare essentials you need to tame to start making a game, the layers you'll build on top of the fundamentals, etc. One of my top gamedev articles ever, really worth reading it.

Also, by taking a look at Tyler's official website, I discovered he also drew gamewebcomic.com. I have no idea how old is the website but it oozes 2000's energy, and since time is a flat circle, it aged like fine wine.

From the Web

• Around The World, Part 32: It's full of stars. Continuation on the gamedev series about making an open-world game about exploration and discovery at sea. Last post was about rendering the sky, and this one is exclusively about the night-sky. Great article with amazing technical bits.
• AutoRemesher – Free & Open Source Retopology Tool. GameFromScratch made a video about this new tool to quickly convert models to clean quad-based topology.
• Moonstone. A new Lua runtime and package manager, made with Zig.
• ⭐SIMD for Collision. From Box2D website but about Box3D development, it's an amazing technical article about SIMD usage in physics collision detection. The best article of the bunch if you are interested in game physics.
• The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 2: SimWorld. The second (but not final) part of the series exploring the history of Maxis, this time from SimHealth (a "literally a simulation of government bureaucracy") up until SimCity 3000. Would be my favorite article wasn't for SIMD optimizations on collision detection.

Human in the Loop

Henrique here.

I'm still receiving some feedback on the newsletter format, so stuff will move around for a bit until I find the best way to write about it. I'm also figuring out how to balance making content for the website, and making the website itself - I have fun with both, but I only have so many hours a day.

It's also a bit stressful to have to read so many AI related articles to find what is actually important to post here, and it kind of feel like this:

Hopefully I'm finding the right stuff.

Anyway, soon I'll be watching the live performance of Expedition 33 Concert, but newsletter next week will come as usual. 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.