Fortnite UI MVVM 👨‍💻, Unity Platform Toolkit 🧰, Epic–Unity IAP 🤝
đź’Ž Crafting Visuals & Materials
How to Fake Translucent Crystals Without Real Transparency
Technical artist Zeshi Chen explains a practical way to make crystal-like materials look translucent without using costly real transparency. The method darkens base color and then stacks multiple emissive layers: Phong lighting, BumpOffset noise, crack normals, and masked specular. Simple refraction-style sky sampling and an optional fake transmission effect add depth and internal glow. The whole setup is performant, easy to implement, and highly tunable for both realistic and stylized environments.
How MVVM Viewmodels Let Fortnite Ship Flexible, Reusable UI
A Fortnite tech designer explains how Unreal’s Viewmodel plugin brings the MVVM pattern to UMG, decoupling UI layouts from game data. By treating viewmodels like a shared “pantry,” their team can redesign screens, add secondary views, and retheme passes with minimal engineering time. The session walks through binding direction, conversion functions, and how to correctly handle multi-property logic with custom pure conversion functions.
🧠AI, Ethics & Game Development
Good AI, Bad AI: What Arc Raiders Teaches About Ethics in Game Dev
Arc Raiders is a hit, but its AI-powered NPC voices have ignited a bigger debate than its gameplay. AI and Games’ Tommy Thompson unpacks how licensed TTS models, Ubisoft’s AI art, and Call of Duty’s AI calling cards all reflect a broader AAA trend: using generative AI to quietly cut costs while delivering “good enough” content. He contrasts this with genuinely additive AI, like Embark’s ML animation system, and offers a four-scenario roadmap for how studios are likely to mix human and AI VO. For devs and players alike, he proposes an “ethical consumption” test for future AI-heavy releases.
Leading Engineers at Riot, Epic, and Scopely: Hypergrowth, AI, and Hard Truths
Veteran tech leader Mike Seavers (Riot, Epic, Scopely) breaks down what really happens when a studio rockets from a few hundred to thousands of employees. He explains why the director role is where many promising engineers fail, how to spot and fix broken leadership, and why “boring” tech often wins. Seavers also shares blunt views on AI—arguing devs who ignore it will be irrelevant—and how game studios must mature if they want to stay competitive.
🛠️ Tools, Platforms & Pipelines
Unity’s New Platform Toolkit and Core Standards Target Long-Term Stability
After the 2023 Runtime Fee fallout, Unity’s Unite 2025 keynote is all about trust and predictability. Unity 6 introduces a Platform Toolkit that converts a single line of C# into platform-specific implementations, reducing the pain of multi-platform launches. New Unity Core Standards will govern third-party SDK quality and security, crucial for games that run for 10+ years. With upgraded IAP dashboards and payment integrations, Unity wants to make live ops and monetization less daunting for smaller studios.
Epic x Unity: Shared IAP and Fortnite Publishing for Unity Devs
At Unite 2025, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney announced that Unity’s new in-app purchase SDK is coming to Unreal Engine, giving devs a unified way to handle cross-platform purchases and entitlements. The move answers growing fragmentation as mobile platforms open to rival stores and payment methods. Unity developers will also gain the ability to publish games directly into Fortnite and appear in its discovery system. Both companies present the partnership as a push toward fair, open, and interoperable game platforms.