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š Market Moves & Launch Highlights
Silksong Shatters Records: 535K CCU and Storefronts Crash
Hollow Knight: Silksong exploded out of the gate, peaking at 535,213 concurrent Steam players and entering the platformās all-time Top 20. Demand overwhelmed digital storesāNintendo went offline, while Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox served errors. With 4.8 million wishlists, itās Steamās most sought-after game of 2025. The original Hollow Knight also surged, hitting a new CCU peak near 73,000.
a16z Speedrun Opens Cohort 6: Up to $1M, No Board Seats
a16z has opened applications for the sixth Speedrun accelerator, running Jan 26āApril 2026 with a Demo Day in April. Startups receive $500k for 10% via SAFE plus an additional $500k in the next round within 18 months, with no board seats taken. The 12-week program includes legal setup support, hiring resources, and a strong founder community. Applications close September 28, 2025.
š ļø Tools & Engine Insights
Unreal Engine C++ Tricks Youāre Probably Not Using (But Should)
Discover underrated Unreal C++ features that save time and bugs: data-driven combo boxes via GetOptions, Gameplay Tag filtering for designer-proof UIs, and TInlineAllocator for faster, less-fragmented temp arrays. See a practical ParallelFor pattern (with profiling caveats), adopt Go-style cleanup using OnScopeExit, and replace custom loops with Algo namespace gems like MaxElementBy and BinarySearch. Many of these power-ups are hiding in source commentsāgo find them.
PixiJS v8.13 Boosts Performance and Teases gl2D + Figma Sync
PixiJS 8.13.0 restores faster, safer text texture caching tied to shared TextStyle instances, adds an LRU cache for text measuring, and supports SVG subpath fill rules for better vector renderingāplus deprecation controls and 20+ bug fixes. Looking ahead, the team is building gl2D, a web-first JSON scene format for cross-tool interoperability. A companion Figma plugin will export responsive gl2D scenes, streamlining designer-to-developer workflows.
šØ Design & Technique Deep Dives
From Box Blur to Dual Kawase: A Practical Guide to Fast Blurs
This deep-dive traces the evolution of real-time blursāfrom box and Gaussian to separable Gaussian, downsampling pipelines, and the Dual Kawase Blur. Along the way, it benchmarks performance, explains why FFT-based blurs arenāt practical in games, and exploits āfreeā bilinear filtering for speed. The finale, Dual Kawase, delivers motion-stable, gaussian-like results ideal for bloom without heavy memory writes. Perfect for graphics programmers optimizing post-processing in modern HDR pipelines.
Simple Bark Systems, Big Feels: DK Bananzaās Smart AI Trick
Donkey Kong Bananza hides a clever narrative system beneath its chaos: event-driven barks that evolve Pauline from anxious to excited as players progress. By tying lines to events, level context, and history thresholds, the game grows character and relationship without heavy dialogue trees or LLMs. Itās classic, lightweight AIārules, metadata, and sharp writingāakin to CoD2ās barks, God of Warās companion hints, and Hadesā systemic dialogue.