This Week in Game Engines #9

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 we have some Unreal Engine goodies, great posts about programming languages, and why you should write your own Game Engine!

Game Engine News:

• Godot: Dev snapshot: Godot 4.5 dev 4
• Defold: Defold release 1.10.1
• Phaser: Ali Roboshoot
• Phaser: Balance Ma'atters
• Phaser: Split Push
• Phaser: Lootcycle Inc.
• Phaser: Splinta Brix
• Phaser: Illumicati
• Phaser: Ammo Flow
• LibGDX: libGDX 1.13.5
• Unity: VRChat Avatar Marketplace Launch
• Unreal Engine: From streets to screens: pioneering virtual production fo...
• Unreal Engine: Experimenting with satire in Chump Squad’s Lab Rat
• Unreal Engine: Introducing the new 2.5D Game Course on Unreal Academy
• Unreal Engine: Haruki (陽輝) - Unreal Engine 5 Cinematic Short (4K)
• Unreal Engine: In Absence - Love When It No Longer Speaks
• Unreal Engine: Watch the Unreal Engine Sizzle: Beyond Games
• Unreal Engine: Watch the Unreal Engine Beyond Games Sizzle
• Wonderland Engine: Wonderland Engine 1.4.0 - GI Probe Volumes, Reverse-Z, Ar...
• Wonderland Engine: Custom Component Record Array Properties
• Wonderland Engine: Release 1.4.1
• Wonderland Engine: Wonderland Engine 1.4.1 - Hotfixes and Impactful Optimiza...

Git Activity:

• UPBGE: Weekly UPBGE Build
• jMonkeyEngine: v3.8.1-stable
• MonoGame: MonoGame v3.8.4-preview.3
• GDevelop: 5.5.231
• Defold: v1.10.1 - stable
• Phaser: Phaser v4.0.0 Release Candidate 3
• Solar2D: 3720
• PlayCanvas: v2.7.5-preview.0
• Drag[en]gine: github-build-number-216
• KorGE Engine: v6.0.0
• Excalibur.js: 0.31.0-alpha.1402+f57c6f6
• Decker: v1.55
• Intersect: 0.8.0-beta.540
• KAPLAY: 3001.0.18
• p5play: v3.30
• Shape Engine: v4.0.0 Major Release
• Spartan Engine: Spartan v2025.05.13.03.44
• Lisien: clayote pushed to android at clayote/Lisien
• Blazium: [nightly] Blazium Engine v0.5.84
• Robust Toolbox: v251.0.1-fixtures-fix

Must Reads this Week

There are many Unreal Engine articles this week (including two short films!), and I want to highlight two of them: the first one is an interview with the developers at Chump Squad, making the game Lab Rat in Unreal Engine 5 (screenshot from the game above!). The second article is about PXO AKIRA, a tech being developed with Unreal Engine to improve filming dynamic scenes that feature moving vehicles (and that has a very rad name). Short films, Indie game developers and a million-dollar production value tech, a perfectly balanced Unreal Engine week.

And an extended recommendation from last week, but the GameDev.JS jam finished with plenty of browser games to play, and Phaser website highlighted some of the winners!

Deep Space Pathfinding

A post that appeared on gamedev.city this last week was this great devlog of the game Deep Space Exploitation, and how the developer JuhrJuhr approached the Pathfinding challenge of the game. The devlog gets into detail on how it tackled the problem without becoming a programming tutorial, and it's a great highlight not just about Pathfinding but also on how to make great devlogs (specially for other game developers). If you're not convinced you should read it, you should at least check the devlog post to see the enticing Pathfinding gifs.

No Game Engines and lots of Programming Languages

A lot of highlights about Game Engines and Programming Languages from this last week that I think deserve a read:

• Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine). Kind of ironic since this is a website about Game Engines, but Noel Berry (from EXOK famous) made a great post about why you should make your own engine and tools (screenshot above), and how you would approach that. It's a prime example of rolling out your own tech for your own games, and something more game developers should be encouraged to do. [1]
• Odin: A programming language made for me. Odin is a programming language with an increasing amount of followers, specially on the GameDev scene. This is a post from one of the "Our Machinery" developers (a now defunct Game Engine) about the Odin programming language, and the low-level background from the "Our Machinery" engine is really insightful to understand how powerful Odin is.
• The Language that Never Was. Jump-scare alert, but that's a 24k (!) words post about gamedev programming languages, but also about many other things. Surprisingly light and funny, but also goes a bit personal at the end. Don't be scared about the tiny scroll bar at the right, this is quite a worthwhile read.
• Mystical. A bonus read and not related to gamedev, but Denis Moskowitz created a programming language that can be parsed to-from "magical circles", with sigils and everything.

[1] On a side-but-related-note, Spring Lisp Game Jam 2025 finished this weekend with a bunch of games made with very custom engines and tools, including my own little browser Snake game made with Macroquad (Rust) and Lisp. Making a game with Macroquad was really fun and it felt like playing building blocks with a very easy to integrate tool!

Missed something?

Newsfeed is obtained automatically using RSS feeds from the game engines official websites. If you are the developer of a listed game engine, consider adding an RSS feed on your website! If you want to add new game engine to the website, consider suggeting a new Game Engine!