Unreal Mobile 📱, Unity Content Directory 📦, BRUTAL C# 🛠️
Engines and Development Tools 🛠️
Mobile Development in Unreal Engine 5.8
Epic’s Paul Georges, Arvind Neelakantan, and Ari Arnbjörnsson discuss the state of mobile development in Unreal Engine 5.8. The episode covers mobile support for MetaHuman, the Procedural Content Generation framework, Substrate, and Lumen, along with profiling on iOS and Android and a preview of Unreal Engine’s mobile roadmap. It also includes a live Q&A.
Unity 6.6 Content Directories offer an alternative to asset bundles for local content
Unity 6.6’s Content Directories provide granular asset loading, unloading and deduplication for local content. Existing Addressables projects can switch groups and rebuild without changing loading code. In Unity’s Slime Rancher 2 tests, startup fell from 45 to 30 seconds and incremental builds from 30 to three minutes. Remote distribution is targeted for Unity 7; mixed projects can retain asset bundles for remote content. Unity says it has no current plans to deprecate asset bundles.
BRUTAL C# framework becomes free under modified MIT license
RocketWerkz has made its BRUTAL C# game development framework free, with source code available under a modified MIT license that adds attribution requirements. Used for Kitten Space Agency and as the foundation for Ludeon’s RimWorld Waylith engine, BRUTAL provides native API interop, Vulkan bindings and libraries for mathematics, memory management and job scheduling. Founder Dean Hall describes it as a deliberately focused framework for building games or engines, prioritizing performance and flexibility over simplicity.
How df_game_data serializes nested data while preserving constant-time indexing
df_game_data uses a stack of data buffers and deferred file offsets to serialize nested fixed- and variable-size data while preserving constant-time array indexing. Its author explains how offsets become pointers during loading, with endian conversion and schema-hash checks. The MIT-licensed game data middleware compiles C/C++-style schemas and edited records into binary files and generated C or C++ loading headers. Optional features include hot reloading, record lookup by name and disk obfuscation; backward and forward file compatibility remain proposed additions.
Game Systems and Production 🎮
Game industry panellists explain when to end or pause development
Burny Games’ Elena Lobova argues that even games with decent results may warrant cancellation when other projects offer greater potential. Kokoon Games’ Henri Lindgren says its AI-native pipeline produces PC vertical slices in one to three weeks for community testing before further investment. Consultant Jasmin Verollet-Dahncke warns that rapid prototyping can cause broken builds and costly rework later in development. Psyon Games’ Niko Pyrhönen stresses validating paying clients before production and says some projects remain available as demos or pause until a suitable partner emerges.
Stellar Jockeys details tactical destruction systems in Brigador Killers
Brigador Killers combines bullet penetration, simulated vehicle collisions and cascading building collapse to let players create routes through fully destructible levels. In an interview, Stellar Jockeys explains how bespoke effect stacks replace much of the original game’s generic rubble, while reduced contrast on damaged props helps keep combat readable. The sequel supports infantry and vehicle combat and uses a Blender-based sprite pipeline, with assets and effects made using Plasticity, Substance Painter and EmberGen. It is available in Early Access on Steam.
Steam Discovery and Promotion 📈
Steam plans personalized discounts and events recommendations for early 2027
Steam plans to replace its manually scheduled discounts and events placements with dynamic, personalized recommendations in early 2027, with no firm implementation date. Code Monkey reports that Steam’s experiments displayed ten times as many games in that section per day and increased store page visits, wishlists and cart additions. The change would give more discounted games and sale events opportunities to appear on the homepage and elsewhere on Steam. Scheduling of new curated placements has been paused.