Bevy 0.17 Raytracing 🕹️, DevGamm 2025 🎤, Spartan Foliage 🌿, Monetization Shift 💸
Engines & Graphics Upgrades 🎮
Bevy 0.17 Lands Raytracing, DLSS, and Editor-Focused UI
Bevy 0.17 arrives with experimental raytraced lighting (Solari), DLSS on RTX GPUs, and a raymarched atmosphere for more realistic visuals. The release also debuts headless UI widgets and Feathers, an opinionated tooling layer laying groundwork for the upcoming Bevy Editor. Devs get faster iteration with Rust hotpatching for ECS systems, plus tilemap chunk rendering and performance boosts like BVH culling. Web asset loading, frame time graphs, and UI gradients round out a feature-packed update.
Retro CRT Vibes and Mesh Blending Land in Wicked Engine
János Turánszki brings a new CRT post-process to Wicked Engine, dialing in authentic retro visuals across multi-screen scenes. He’s also exploring the buzzworthy screen-space mesh blending technique seen in Unreal and Blender. The showcase includes rectangular lights playing videos, hinting at flexible emissive lighting workflows. Wicked Engine continues to evolve as a fast, modern rendering playground.
Tech Feats & Experiments 🤖
CraftGPT: A 5M‑Parameter LLM Built Entirely in Minecraft
Minecraft redstone maestro Sammyuri built CraftGPT, a tiny language model entirely inside the game. The 5,087,280‑parameter, 6‑layer network (64‑token context) spans 1020x260x1656 blocks and even needs LOD mods to view. It’s wildly impractical—about two hours per reply at 40,000x tick rate—and often off-topic, but it’s a jaw‑dropping demonstration of computational creativity. The project is open-source on GitHub for anyone curious about ML under extreme constraints.
Spartan Engine Nails Massive-Scale Foliage: 64M Grass Blades at 60 FPS
Spartan Engine’s latest breakthrough fixes foliage thinning at scale, keeping dense, wind-swept grass consistent across huge terrains. The Ghost of Tsushima-inspired “Forest” demo packs 64 million simulated blades over 64.1 km² plus thousands of trees and rocks, holding around 60 FPS. Built in Vulkan C++, Spartan is free, open-source, and ships with a full editor and demos—now a community platform for pushing rendering and large-world tech.
Events & Opportunities đź“…
DevGamm Lisbon 2025 Unveils Full Lineup, Peter Molyneux Keynote
DevGamm Lisbon 2025 has revealed its full speaker roster for Nov 6–7 at the Myriad Hotel. The B2B conference features leaders from Sandfall Interactive, Warhorse, 11 Bit, Ubisoft, Riot Games, Unity, and more—covering hits from Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Peter Molyneux delivers the keynote in a fireside chat with James Binns on creativity and resilience under tighter budgets. Part of DevGamm Week, it follows the Madeira Games Summit on Nov 3–4. Tickets are available.
Supercent RE:BOUND 2025: Second Chance Publishing for Live Games
Supercent has opened RE:BOUND 2025, a selective publishing program giving live mobile games a second shot at global scale from Oct 1–31. Backed by a $100M+ annual marketing engine and a data-driven creative pipeline, Supercent offers deep support across core loop, monetization, UA, and live ops. A $10M MG pool will be allocated case-by-case, with tailored deals. Any live game—any genre, platform, or launch year—can submit via the official site.
Business & Publishing Insights đź’Ľ
From Whales to Fandoms: The Next Era of Game Monetization
Microtransactions aren’t dead, but their dominance is fading. The next phase favors subscriptions, D2C web shops, and creator co-creation—models that monetize relationships instead of one-off purchases. Niche passes, owned player data, and revenue-sharing tools can turn fans into long-term advocates. Studios that invest in community and fandom will unlock steadier, more diverse revenue.
How Networking and a Better Pitch Landed Pixel Washer a Publisher
Pixel Washer started as a weekend jam in the LÖVE engine and, through consistent posting, a sharpened pitch deck, and smart PR connections, landed a publishing deal with Acclaim. The dev credits Sean “Bacon and Games” for elevating the pitch and Pirate PR’s Robby for the intro. With marketing now handled, development can stay the focus. It’s a candid roadmap for how visibility and relationships can turn a small idea into a signed deal.