Godot Showreel 🎥, Organic Game Marketing 📈, Vulkan Samples Rework 🧪
📣 Community & Industry Pulse
Submit Your Godot Creations: 2025 Showreel Now Open
Godot is assembling its 2025 Showreel and wants your videos—published or in-progress games, apps, or tools. New this year, Development Fund members with an active recurring donation can vote alongside maintainers. Submit via the Godot Showreel website after reading the guidelines. Deadlines: submissions close Oct 1, 2025, and voting begins Oct 6, 2025—check past showreels for inspiration.
Discoverability Dominates: 2025 Games Marketing Shifts to Organic Influence
Bastion’s 2025 G2M survey paints a stark picture: 94.4% of studios say discoverability will be their biggest challenge this year. With lean teams and shrinking budgets—81% under £500k for major titles—marketers are pivoting to organic influencer and community-led tactics as paid media falls out of favor. Agency spend is up, hiring is uncertain, and authenticity is the new rule of engagement. The mission for 2025: own the spotlight in an overcrowded market.
⚡ UE5 Innovations & Assets
Thousands of Decals, One Emitter: Looman’s UE5 Projectile Breakthrough
Tom Looman is testing a data-oriented projectile system for Unreal Engine that ditches Actors, runs async collision, and supports multiplayer with client-side prediction. A single Niagara emitter controls thousands of decals via Data Channels, slashing Game Thread overhead and enabling decal instancing. If progress holds, he may open-source it and build a course around it. He also spotlights UE5.6’s performance gains, from Lumen HWRT at 60Hz to GPU Profiler 2.0.
Build Dark Fantasy Dungeons Fast with 3dex’s UE5 Kit
3dex’s Stylized Dungeon Environment Kit delivers a complete modular toolkit for building dark fantasy dungeons in Unreal Engine 5. You get walls, floors, doors, props, a sample level, and full UE5 project files for learning or production. Clean PBR materials hold up in wide shots, and a blockout-to-final workflow keeps iteration smooth. Great for learning, rapid prototyping, or commercial projects.
🛠️ Tech & Art Deep Dives
Building “Mountain Shrine”: A Practical Unreal Environment Art Breakdown
Environment Artist David Szieber breaks down his “Mountain Shrine” scene, from Koyasan-inspired references to stylized architectural details. He explains when Nanite shines (rocks) and when classic low-poly/UV workflows win (directional wood), plus a phone-scan-to-ZBrush cleanup for a temple guardian statue. Learn foliage tricks with SpeedTree and atlas cards, cohesive material layering with RGB masks, and a clean lighting setup using an HDRI skylight and subtle fill. Bonus: tips for scoping and working in 1–2 hour blocks.
Frames-in-Flight Done Right: Vulkan Samples Get Major Rework
Sascha Willems has overhauled his popular Vulkan samples to match real-world engine practices. The update replaces vkQueueWaitIdle with proper per-frame synchronization, adds fences/semaphores, duplicates per-frame uniform buffers and descriptors, and records command buffers on the fly. A 15k-line PR also fixes validation issues, streamlines the UI with chunked buffers, and removes ~2k lines. The result: cleaner, faster samples that enable true CPU/GPU parallelism.