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.
We got some great open-source news this week (including an MMO going open-source!), a combo of Godot Showcase interview with Unity's Humanity Grant, and the amazing Lisp Game Jam just around the corner!
I'm also testing a long-form kind of content (so I'll go a little bit more in-depth in the summary of the articles). If you have any feedback, do ping me on Mastodon!
Very interesting week for humanitarian projects being developed on Game Engines, with Godot Showcase interview on project Somar and Unity's Humanity Grant announcement. This is a great opportunity to take inspiration on those projects and what is the tech-adjacent things you can do with Game Engines besides games, with plenty 3D exploration tools and VR/XR experiences. It's also the first time I'm hearing about some amazing games on Unity's Humanity Grant post, including Tekoha, a beautiful brazillian game I already wishlisted on Steam.
Two similar news but on different contexts (it was nice both happened in the same week though!).
BitCraft is a "MMORPG set in a procedurally generated world shared by all players", per their website. I never played BitCraft, but loking at the website, it not only looks quite nice, it has 7 years of development history to back it up. They're detailing the reason of going open-source on this blog post, including why this is not a common practice (specially for MMORPG games).
This is an announcement they'll start the process of open-sourcing the game after its Steam Early Access launch, so they haven't published the game's source code yet. This is a bit of a personal analysis, but I think the risk pays off considering the game uses SpacetimeDB, a database tech from the same company that made the game - so making the game open-source not only create a great leverage from a good SpacetimeDB example, but also opens the possibility of more developers using SpacetimeDB SAAS solutions. Still a daring decision though, I'll definitely keep my eye on both BitCraft and SpacetimeDB.
And on related news, Miziziziz also published some handy Godot tools on his GitHub! GameFromScratch already covered the tools in a great video, so you should check it out:
You can find the source code for the tools on this GitHub repository. The repository also provides great demonstration videos for the tools.
Miziziziz is a great indie developer and youtuber, and a very prolific Godot content creator. His games are distinctly visceral, and all his youtube videos are PACKED with content (he has a really good video on how to make tutorials that do not waste anybody's time).
As a member of the Emacs cult, I'm aware I'm 100% biased when I say that programming in Lisp is quite a lot of fun. But the first game I programmed in Lisp was in the previous Lisp Game Jam (you can check the result online here), and it was a really refreshing experience, out of programming from Godot/Unreal/Game Maker/Unity engines. In my game, I wrapped RayLib code on a thin layer of C along with some scripting language glue in the form of the great S7 Scheme library (I have the devlog here), but I've seen people making games using Fennel (on top of LÖVE), making games with Chickadee Engine , and even making a game on Emacs itself.
By the way, David Thompson, the organizer for the Lisp Game Jam and creator of Chickadee, has some amazing articles on his website. A really good one to inspire you should be this overview of the last Lisp Game Jam results and what people used to make their games.
If you want to learn a new programming language paradigm that you might fall in love with, flex your programming skills, or want to have fun making more games I can play on my Emacs OS (please send them to me), I can't recommend enough participating on the upcoming Spring Lisp Game Jam. It's a 10 day no-pressure Game Jam, and there is a lot of interesting game engines you can check on EnginesDatabase to use there!
I've been keeping up this site for a while now, so I think it's time to give a bit of an update on the things that I changed recently.