Welcome to This week in Game Engines! This is a recurrent blog post on gamedev news, articles, and related tech development content from the week before.
This format of weekly news was greatly inspired by This week in Rust. Most of the content is automatically added to the post via official RSS feeds from Game Engines websites, and miscellaneous gamedev content is hand-picked from suggestions and news aggregators such as hackernews, lobste.rs and gamedev.city.
This week, a new game made with the Murder Engine has been announced by the triple-i initiative, Godot 4.5 is in-the-making, an interview with the developers of Distant Worlds 2, an interview with the solo developer of Lushfoil Photography Sim, and many more updates!
Announced at the triple-i initiative game showcase, the absolutely and beautifully eerie game Neverway is going to be made in the Murder Engine! This was confirmed by me randomly asking the developer herself @isa on Mastodon. She is THE developer of Murder Engine, and it's making Neverway along with @saint11 (the artist of Celeste!).
(I guess now I can see how Neverway came to be on @isa's first Murder Engine announcement on Mastodon)
Maybe that's why I run a website about Game Engines, but I get really excited celebrating the Gamedev craft with more games being made with different engines other than the usual GUGU* (Godot, Unreal, GameMaker, Unity). This is really cool tech, the game looks amazing, and I hope I can see even more about what Murder Engine is capable of!
*I made the accronym on the spot but I'm kind of regreting it right now.
Two really good articles this week are about Lua - one comparing Lua performance to native C99 code, and the other about Fennel, a scripting language (used in TIC-80, but also compatible with all engines that use Lua) that is a subset of Lua like Typescript is to Javascript. One interesting bit of "Why Fennel?" is that it basically states that Lua performance is blazingly fast, so both articles are a bit complementary to each other.
On that note, A case for Lua performance was written by the developer of the Tofu Engine, recently added to Engines Database. They have other really good articles on their website, so check it out!