Steam Passwords Exposed 🔓, UE5 Glitter ✨, DevGAMM Lisbon 🤖

✨ Tech Art & Shaders

UE5 Dynamic Glitter Shader: Angle-Driven Sparkles, No Heavy Geometry

Lead 3D Artist Daniil Spivak built a UE5 glitter shader that shimmers based on the camera’s viewing angle. Using a custom, channel-packed texture—R/G for per-sparkle normals, B for visibility angle, and A as the pattern mask—the effect stays lightweight without complex geometry. See videos and node graphs on the project page, and explore more on his ArtStation, including a detailed Borderlands-style shader guide.

Slicing Meshes with Style: UV-Reconstructed Cross-Sections by Alex Ameye

Alex Ameye unveils a shader that slices meshes with planes or spheres and reconstructs UVs for clean, textured cross-sections. Using front/back-only passes and clipping to isolate the cross-section, it then ray marches from the back face to the camera to recover world position and UVs. The result enables “magical” reveal effects when characters pass behind foreground objects. Ameye also shares related tutorials on stylized water, edge outlines, and stencil buffer debugging.

🔧 Dev Alerts & Mechanics

Check Your Build: SteamCMD Passwords Exposed in DefaultEngine.ini

A Reddit report warns that a popular Unreal–Steam plug-in may ship your Steam business credentials in plain text. Using the 1-Click Steam Setup can save username and password in DefaultEngine.ini within packaged builds—even demos. The plug-in’s creator says the fields are optional and plans to auto-wipe them in builds. For now, remove the credentials from DefaultEngine.ini, reupload to Steam, and set live to limit exposure.

Deterministic 2D Platformer Movement: Kinematic Raycast Controller in Unity

Sasquatch B Studios rebuilds their Unity 2D platformer controller from the ground up, switching to a kinematic, raycast-driven approach for tighter, deterministic movement. The tutorial covers inspector refactors, a rewritten HandleHorizontalMovement, and adds edge forgiveness (coyote time) plus a Head Bump Slide mechanic.

📅 Events & Conferences

From Madeira to Lisbon: DevGAMM’s Power-Packed 2025 Game Week

DevGAMM returns to Portugal with a two-part program: the C-level Madeira Games Summit (Nov 3–4) and the Lisbon B2B conference (Nov 6–7). Peter Molyneux headlines alongside speakers from Riot, Sony, Ubisoft, 11 bit, and more. Expect an 80+ game showcase, a $135K awards pool, a Steam event, and structured Engage! meetings.

AI and Games Conference: Final Talks—Pathfinding, On‑Device AI, and RL

The AI and Games Conference 2025 has finalized its line‑up with sessions on navigation, on‑device AI, and production‑grade RL. Kythera covers building custom nav stacks alongside research on explainable, effort‑aware pathfinding. Studio Atelico and Arm dive into small LLM agents and mobile inference, while Riot and Databricks share practical RL at scale. AAA spotlights include Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s reactive NPCs and Total War’s combat outcome prediction.