This Week in Game Engines #38

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 6 years of Bevy ECS, making 2D games using Ruby language, to-policy or not to-policy AI, optimizing Mario Kart builds using Pareto Frontier (I always picked Dry Bones because he looked cool but I guess I was in the wrong this whole time), and much more!

Looking back at Bevy history

If you never heard about Bevy, you probably don't have a game developer friend making a game in Rust. Bevy is the face of Rust gamedev ecosystem, and one of the most popular ECS frameworks out there.

To commemorate the 6 years anniversary, @cart (Bevy creator and lead) wrote a bit about the long strides Bevy made in those last 6 years in a blog post.

Exofactory, a Real Game™️ made with Bevy

Bevy has come a long way for sure, and most of the recently announced features (UI Widgets, Bevy Scene Notation), are a preparation for the official Bevy Editor use-case, the biggest development hurdle but a necessary one if Bevy wants to have the same community support as other open-source engines such as Godot. It's not a popularity contest of-course, but popularity sure helps a lot when you need funds to sustain an open-source project.

Solari Renderer

One of the most impressive advancements from last year was the progress of Solari, Bevy's version of a real-time raytraced renderer. You can read more about its development here, but I find the motivation to make a raytracing algorithm fascinating, specially when you consider that Bevy is (currently) an indie-developer game engine. From @jms55 (the main maintainer behind Solari):

"With fully dynamic global illumination, reflections, shadows, and direct lighting, developers can see how their scenes should be lit. Then they can work backwards to replicate those results with baked lighting, screen-space techniques, and other less performance-intensive approximations."

Open-source Engines and the new reality

As a popular open-source project, Bevy suffered from the generative AI PR-mageddon, where generative AI agents push (a lot) AI code as PR's, which creates maintenance stress and makes it difficult to introduce new maintainers to the codebase. This made Bevy Foundation take a strict "no-AI" policy to manage the fallout, but you can see from this PR that things are never simple. From one of the main maintainers @alice-i-cecile:

"Unfortunately, as we do not possess an oracle, we cannot definitively say whether or not any given commit was or was not written by an LLM. Concealing this is trivial, as is adding annotations that are indicative of LLM-generated work. We cannot definitively say, for either legal or ethical reasons, that even without this commit, all of Bevy's code is LLM free."

Per anniversary post, Bevy is drafting a new policy, currently in internal discussions with maintainers and the Bevy community, to better clarify where it stands on AI contribution. Worth remembering that not too long ago, Godot also changed its own contribution policies, adding:

• No autonomous AI agent use or vibe coding
• No use of AI to generate substantial pieces of code
• No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication
• All PRs must be reviewed and approved by a human before merging

That is the new community management challenge for every popular open-source project out there, and Bevy is no exception.

Ruby2D and the smaller Engines reality

A smaller announcement but an announcement nonetheless, specially from a programming language much less representative on the gamedev ecosphere than Rust.

Ruby2D is finally going v1.0.0, with a new foundation using SDL3, a better DSL for graphics, a new Audio class, gamepad support , and much more. The full changelog is here and believe me when I say there is a lot of stuff listed there.

From the Ruby2D homepage

One thing I want to comment about is the official post from Ruby2D creator @blacktm, specially when I just wrote about the community problems AI brought to Bevy, it's interesting to see the "other side" of the story - Ruby2D was only possible because AI tools helped the main developer chug the code, rewriting it to his vision. On their own words:

"It’s hard to overstate how substantial this all feels. For those of us with years of hard-fought experience and domain knowledge, these agents are a radical unlock. [...] The reason I walked away from side projects was that they demanded more than one person could sustainably give. That constraint is just… gone"

It's an interesting and much more optimistic take, even when @blacktm themselves pointed out how uncertain it all feels like in the next paragraph.

From the Web

• The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 3: The Sims. The third part on Maxis history from my favorite digital historian, and how much The Sims eclipsed everything that Maxis have done before.
• How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026. A Javascript-to-C to Libdragon project, an amazing devlog of making a Nintendo 64 game.
• ⭐️Mario Meets Pareto. Learning about the Pareto Frontier optimization using Mario Kart in a very slick website.
• 🤖WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale. Insane diorama-like world creation tech from Tencent magicians.
• 🤖There's a dungeon under this blog. Hard to say how much AI assisted this project was, but the underlying tech using WebRTC to create a pure client-to-client online game is very cool. Spoiler alert: do the good'ol Konami code using the keyboard to access it.

Human in the Loop

✨🎉✨ I learned the emoji shortcut on Mac! ✨🎉✨

I got really stressed updating the website backend, thankfully it almost looks like I know what I'm doing. The website survived its 2.5 years using SQLite, I thought it was time to finally migrate to Postgres.

Good lord how massively boring the whole process was, even with the help of LLMs. But it is finally done, and after changing some other bits and bobs, the website is finally ready for the next rollouts.

I'm also sharing the posts on LinkedIn. Bear in mind I'm using LinkedInish to share the posts, so it's all very cringe and over the top. But in LikedIn, do as LinkedInizens does I guess, because otherwise you will have no visibility. If you think that is not true, here is me posting about newsletter before (notice the number of impressions):

This is me going full cringe, one week later.

Fuck my life I guess. At least now I know the Add Emoji shortcut, because apparently I'll need to use it quite a lot.

Anyways, that's it from me today. See you next week!

Missed something?

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