Unity DOTS State 🧱, UE5 Performance 🚀, DX12 Docs 📚
🎮 Game Dev Deep Dives
Inside Ubisoft’s ‘Teammates’ Demo: When GenAI Talks to Game AI
AI and Games’ Tommy Thompson goes hands-on with Ubisoft’s “Teammates” demo, a Snowdrop-powered FPS where two behaviour-tree squadmates and a chatty AI assistant are all driven by a genAI stack. He unpacks how STT→LLM→TTS middleware plugs into classic game AI, enabling context-aware voice commands and deep accessibility tweaks. The piece also tackles ethics around AI voice, internal culture shifts, and why constant talking adds real cognitive load. It’s both a technical breakdown and a grounded reality check on genAI gameplay.
Entities for All, Tools for Few: The Real State of Unity DOTS
A long-time DOTS developer breaks down Unity’s new 6.x roadmap, where Entities becomes a core package and “Entities for All” lets regular game-object projects tap ECS performance. He digs into Burst determinism, swappable physics backends, and a new low-level 2D physics API, while also sharing adoption stats that show DOTS is still under 3% of Unity Steam releases. With Unity pausing its flagship world-building and animation tools, this is a candid look at whether DOTS is worth betting your next game on.
🧪 Unreal Engine Magic
Short-Range Teleportation & Passthrough in UE: Blueprint & VFX Guide
This featured Unreal Engine tutorial teaches you how to create short-distance teleportation and object passthrough mechanics using tags, efficient collision checks, and lean Blueprint traces. The included sample project ships with a built-in afterimage Niagara effect so you can instantly give your teleports extra visual punch. For devs wanting more control, it also highlights HeyYo’s Ultra Afterimage VFX, offering powerful shader and Niagara customization for dynamic effects.
Why Upgrading to Unreal Engine 5.7 Is a Big Performance Win
Unreal Engine 5.7 ships with a huge wave of performance-focused changes, and this post curates the ones that matter most for game teams. Highlights include an experimental Nanite foliage system using voxels and skinning, Lumen pushing harder into hardware ray tracing at 60Hz, and MegaLights graduating to beta with better performance. There are also practical wins in Chaos physics, Slate/UI, GC, multi-threading, and build tooling. If you care about frame time, iteration speed, and scalability, this is the upgrade guide you want.
🎨 Art, Animation & Style
Stylized UE5 Painterly Shader Course with Free Project Files
Indie filmmaker Elena F. has released a new Unreal Engine 5 tutorial series on crafting a stylized painterly brush-stroke shader. Split into four sections, it covers stylized base shading, specular and shadows, sketchy outlines, and smudged paint shells. Free UE5 project files let you jump straight into the material graphs and adapt the setup to your own work. The course is aimed at artists already comfortable with Unreal’s material editor.
Build Your Entire Character Animation Pipeline Inside Unreal Engine 5.6
Epic’s Stéphane Biava demonstrates a full real-time animation workflow built entirely in Unreal Engine 5.6—no external DCC required. Starting from a static mesh, he covers joint creation, skinning, layered weights, advanced Control Rig setups, Modular Control Rig, and deformers driven both in Sequencer and via deformer graphs. The talk also dives into animator-friendly Sequencer upgrades, layout control rigs, and upcoming features like direct mesh control and improved facial rigging. It’s a roadmap for using Unreal as your primary animation hub.
🃏 Systems, Rendering & Docs
Don’t Break Your Deckbuilder: Core Loops, Card Flow, and Smart Innovation
A veteran designer explains why some experimental deckbuilders feel flat, even when they seem innovative on paper. By comparing traditional constructed games to roguelike deckbuilders, they show how hand size, discards, and draw rules define both long-term strategy and moment‑to‑moment tactics. When you stop rapidly churning through your deck, new cards stop feeling meaningful. The talk delivers concrete heuristics for tweaking core rules without destroying what deckbuilding fans actually love.
Why DirectX 12 Docs Are a Mess (And Where to Find Them)
Unlike Vulkan’s single formal spec, Direct3D 12’s “spec” is scattered across websites, PDFs, and GitHub repos. This post catalogs the real documentation landscape: the main Learn pages, the old-but-still-crucial D3D 11.3 Functional Spec, DirectX-Specs for new API features, DXC’s wiki for HLSL behavior, and the evolving HLSL spec draft. With concrete examples and hidden gems, it shows both the pain of fragmentation and why there’s hope for improvement.