Unity Roadmap 🧭, Godot XR Upgrade 🥽, Unreal Real-Time Animation 🎬
🎮 Engine & XR Progress Report
Godot XR Levels Up: New OpenXR Features, Jam Winners, and Quest Release
Godot’s XR ecosystem just had a big moment: “The Museum of All Things” hit the Meta Quest store, turning Wikipedia into a room-to-room VR museum. The latest Godot XR Community Game Jam delivered inventive “It takes two” entries like the chaotic “Wiener Wobble Dog Park” and precise “Things You Can Do With Two Hands.” On the tech side, Godot is an early adopter of new OpenXR APIs for spatial entities and frame synthesis, and now leads all engines with support for 95 official OpenXR extensions.
Unity’s 2026 Roadmap: Stability, CoreCLR, AI Agents, and Live-Ops
Unity’s Unite roadmap keynote outlines a multi-year plan to make Unity more stable, performant, and live-service friendly. Expect production-verified LTS releases, signed third-party packages, and a gradual migration to CoreCLR alongside ECS becoming a core engine pillar with smoother GameObject integration. New Platform Toolkit APIs promise “write once” integrations across consoles and mobile, while Agentic AI tools, a rebuilt economy/IAP stack, and a live content system aim to cut friction from development through monetization.
🧩 Tools & Productivity Boosters
Fix Your Prefabs and Scenes: New Essential Tools Bundle for Unity
A new Essential Tools bundle from Ciro Continisio tackles three everyday Unity headaches in one shot. BlackBox for Prefabs adds a safer Prefab workflow with encapsulation and protection from accidental Apply, while Scene Notes lets teams leave tasks and docs right in the scene. SubAssets Toolbox rounds it out with native, drag-and-drop sub-asset workflows without writing code.
Blender Studio Releases Project Storm: Production-Ready Character Rig for 5.0
Blender Studio has released Project Storm, a high-quality, fully animation-ready character rig for Blender 5.0, available to Blender Studio subscribers. The body is built with CloudRig, the same add-on used in Blender’s Open Movies, while the facial rig combines shapekeys, ribbon guides, and lattice deformations for highly expressive performance. Storm ships with a pose library for face, hands, and full body, all accessible via the Asset Shelf to speed up animation. New tools were also introduced to better support this facial rig workflow.
🎥 Real-Time & No-Budget Pipelines
No-Budget, Billion-View Pipeline: Real-Time Animation in Unreal Engine
Cory Williams, creator of the hit kids’ series “The Silly Crocodile,” shows how he built a wildly efficient real-time animation pipeline in Unreal Engine using almost no budget. With just an iPhone, Live Link Face, simple Blueprints, and sprite-based mouth shapes, he improvises episodes that now pull 20–30 million YouTube views a month. Alongside the tech, he digs into intention, audience, and therapy-through-character, explaining why he even turned down a $5M offer for the IP.
Godot XR Levels Up: New OpenXR Features, Jam Winners, and Quest Release
Godot’s XR ecosystem just had a big moment: “The Museum of All Things” hit the Meta Quest store, turning Wikipedia into a room-to-room VR museum. The latest Godot XR Community Game Jam delivered inventive “It takes two” entries like the chaotic “Wiener Wobble Dog Park” and precise “Things You Can Do With Two Hands.” On the tech side, Godot is an early adopter of new OpenXR APIs for spatial entities and frame synthesis, and now leads all engines with support for 95 official OpenXR extensions.
🧠 Game Design & Creator Mindset
Edmund McMillen on Crunch, ‘Friend Slop,’ and Honest Game Design
Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel sit down to talk about the realities of indie gamedev in 2026: crunch, “friend slop,” and whether devs really need to suffer for great games. They explain why replayable systems can make streaming and balance work in your favor, and how they built Mewgenics with thousands of animations, singing cats, and board‑game‑style tuning. If you’re torn between quick wins and a multi‑year passion project, this is equal parts design lecture and therapy session.
Unity’s 2026 Roadmap: Stability, CoreCLR, AI Agents, and Live-Ops
Unity’s Unite roadmap keynote outlines a multi-year plan to make Unity more stable, performant, and live-service friendly. Expect production-verified LTS releases, signed third-party packages, and a gradual migration to CoreCLR alongside ECS becoming a core engine pillar with smoother GameObject integration. New Platform Toolkit APIs promise “write once” integrations across consoles and mobile, while Agentic AI tools, a rebuilt economy/IAP stack, and a live content system aim to cut friction from development through monetization.