This Week in Game Engines #39

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

This week we got big EnginesDatabase updates, Godot showcase submissions, amazing reasons to build your own Game Engine, amazing reasons to make a game for old consoles, amazing reasons to support the website, and much more!

Big Engines Database Updates

I wrote about this in a post earlier this week, but I finally implemented an idea that popped in my mind a long time ago: to make an Engines Database Links Aggregator (like Reddit, Lobste.rs and Hackernews)!

The best UI I could make in a hell of a weekend

This is something I've been planning on doing since gamedev.city shutdown, because I use links aggregators (and many, many RSS feeds) to curate gamedev material every week for the newsletter. With an integrated Links Aggregator, now anyone can comment, vote and submit new links so I can talk about them in the next weekly newsletter.

But that means that I'd also need to take care of spam, so I finally sat down to finish one thing that was also on my backlog for quite some time: an official way to support the website!

On the same hell of a weekend of the previous UI, no less

Right now, anyone can comment and vote on links but only supporters can submit new links on the Links Aggregator. It's pay-what-you-want, so you can pay me 1$ to have 30 days of access and submit gamedev links. I promise I won't get sad (even if I only get 0.07c of that 1$ because of flat fees, go figure) but at least I won't have problems with AI spamming the website, and I give users a good reason to support the website and help me keep the lights on.

What you gain by building your own Game Engine

A really great article this week was What You Gain by Building Your Own Game Engine. It's an article that touches many references of other gamedevs trying to answer the same question (most of them already appeared on the newsletter before), and it's a great read with some great points:

• Learning how Game Engines work helps making better tech decisions.
• Proprietary engines always carry a license risk.
• You can explore and create novel tech easier by building your tech stack by scratch.
• After making your own awesome Game Engine, you can submit it on EnginesDatabase*.

*not really a point of the article but it certainly crossed the author's mind.

What interests me the most is novel tech. It's hard to appreciate the differences when you only specialize in one Game Engine, but let's take for example 3D Light Engines, something I briefly talked about before. From the top of my mind:

• Unreal Engine uses Lumen. It’s a fully dynamic system that combines Surface Cache (a simplified, low-resolution light representation of the scene) with ray tracing.
• Unity uses Adaptive Probe Volumes (APV). Instead of making developers manually place "light probes" to catch indirect light, APV automatically builds a smart 3D grid of them. It places probes densely around complex geometry and sparsely in empty air to save performance.
• Godot uses SDFGI (Signed Distance Field Global Illumination). Built especially for large open worlds, it calculates real-time light bounces by treating the scene as a giant, simplified math equation.
• Flax Engine uses DDGI (Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination). It creates a moving grid of light probes that constantly follows the player's camera. It gathers light at these points in real-time and uses clever depth math to prevent light from accidentally bleeding through solid walls.

Flax Engine DDGI renderer Screenshot

Those are different techniques with their own set of tradeoffs, but it's quite hard to understand them unless you test it or develop it yourself.

What you gain by making retro games

Similarly, there is an argument to be made on why you should make Retro Games (for real, older game consoles).

Fantasy Consoles are quite popular because there is an interesting creative challenge in making games with limited resources (modest rendering and resolution, a couple of sound channels), but Fantasy Consoles makes it much easier by avoiding the hardware complexity entirely and usually providing a easy-to-use API in a friendly language (Lua, Python).

Retro Consoles, on the other hand, provide real hardware limitations, specially if you're planning to export for the real thing. There are some Game Engines that abstract some of the challenges, like GB Studio, where you can implement some functionality easily by some clever Engine abstractions, but you will be ultimately quite limited unless you start delving deep into what the console provides you with.

A screenshot of GB Studio

I don't want to start an utilitarian argument on how useful it is to make Retro Games for your portfolio or whatever - to be fair, you will accumulate some knowledge on retro consoles that is not going to be useful at all if you are making a game for modern hardware. But my point is, if you think you are going to have fun developing a game for an old console, and this gives you the motivation to tackle the hard engineering challenges, you'll still gain a lot of close-to-metal knowledge that is applicable to optimization challenges. Motivation goes a long way on giving you enough fuel to finish difficult projects. Plus, running your game on the real hardware is an amazing feeling.

A video of a little GameBoy game I made, Time Flies.

I recently wrote a post about some of the best Retro Game Engines, so if you're interested in this challenge, you might find a Game Engine that suits you there (or making your own Retro Engine from scratch with the toolchains you need!).

Crown Engine 64

Not 64 bits, but version 0.64 of the Crown Engine just recently launched.

This fell on my radar thanks to the Aggregator, but since we are on the topics of "why making your own Game Engine", this is an interesting indie Game Engine that I know has quite an active Github repository (I set up a bot to check Engine releases on Github, but I do a manual update on the new versions to know what's new. Almost every newsletter had at least a couple of Crown commits to check).

I couldn't test it myself yet (I'm mainly driving a Mac, and Crown is Windows/Linux only), but there are some interesting bits I got interested in the documentation, like REPL integration with Lua and a focus on easy hot/live reloading the game. Also, interestingly enough, it's one of the smaller engines that has an official Foundation behind it.

Godot Events

Last but not least, don't miss out on two Godot announcements:

Godot 2026 showreel submissions

Godot has an annual showcase of projects that goes as far back as 2021, and it's a great opportunity to show your Godot project to the world, specially if it highlights how far Godot can go. 2026 Showcase submissions are finally open, so if you have a Godot project, now it's time to polish and send a video until the submissions end at October 1st.

November GodotFest in Munich

Another annual event, GodotFest is calling out for speakers, with a deadline for talk proposals on August 31st. You can check the event website here.

Also from Engines Database Aggregator

• Easy Stylized Line Art Technique For Blender. Grease Pencil magic and a really cool line art effect on Blender 3D models. Not exactly Game Engine ready, but really good as an Art style reference.
• Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full. The Quake Shareware CD-ROM mess-up that introduced a lot of young hackers to crack(ing cd-roms to get the full game).
• VCS Game Maker – Atari 2600 Game Engine. Wrote a bit about Retro Engines last week but this Atari 2600 engine was still unknown to me.
• ⭐️Sokoban AI Solver. A "classic" (not generative) AI using A* algorithm and some clever heuristics. A really nice demo with a good explanation on how it works.

Human in the Loop

Hey! Henrique here.

This newsletter was lengthier than usual! Not sure if this is a good thing. Hopefully you feel like it is? That means you like reading about Game Engines every week and I'm reaching my niche.

Before closing thoughts for the week, I wanted to write about small victories. I mentioned before that maintaining this website is quite a big challenge, but I keep myself motivated with the small victories, the things that add a bit more fuel to the fire. Every since I started working full-time on the website, I got:

• Working email subscriptions (email infrastructure is a nightmare of compliance and I hate the modern internet).
• The first users registering on the website for realsies, not because they were my friends and I begged them to signup so I could "test the backend" (I just wanted the small motivation boost of one extra user in the database).
• And now, I finally got the first users backing up the website for realsies, not because they were my friends and I begged them to pay me on Gumroad so I could "test the backend" (I promised I would pay them back! Someday).

The last one is quite special to me, because it's the first time there are users supporting the website. Not that I never got any money from EnginesDatabase - back when I implemented affiliate links for educational material, I got some money from people clicking links and buying courses (this feature might come back, since it might help people finding good educational content). But they were not supporting the website, they just bought something that collaterally helped me out. Now, for the first time, users chose to support the thing I'm dedicating most of my time for, which is more than I could ask for in such a short amount of time.

Acknowledging baby steps requires one to celebrate the small victories, because that's the only thing to hold out for in a long journey. And I'm quite happy to celebrate my small victories today. For the supporters, thank you!

If you also want to support, you can check the Become a supporter page. But you can also give me feedback (either on the comments, or if you are shy, drop me a message at henriquelalves@enginesdatabase.com and I promise you'll hear back from me), and share the newsletter with other people you think might be interested in reading about gamedev tech. That goes a long way in building this small gamedev corner of the internet.

Whew! That's a wrap. See you next week :)

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.