Unreal Combat Tutorial 🎮, GASP Animations Update 🕹️, Unity cpp2better 👨‍💻
🧱 Build Better Games, Faster
Build a Reusable Combat System in Unreal Engine, Free in 4 Hours
Evans Bohl has released a free, under-4-hour Unreal Engine tutorial showing how to build a fully reusable combat system from scratch. The video walks you through attack animations, enemy health bars, better hit impact, and clean system architecture. It’s designed to teach both practical combat features and solid coding practices you can reuse across projects. If you like his approach, Bohl’s LinkedIn showcases more advanced Unreal experiments and systems.
Stop Over‑Architecting Your Game: Lessons from a 20‑Year AAA Veteran
Veteran dev Ricard Pillosu (ex-Crytek, now co-founder of Epictellers) argues that most real game code is “a mess but it works” and that trying to pre‑architect everything is a trap. He shows how to break systems like turn-based combat into simple, decoupled layers your brain can actually manage, and why experience is often overrated next to luck and good teamwork. He also explains why his 30‑dev CRPG studio bet on Godot and why building your own engine still matters for true code mastery.
🌀 Unreal Engine Deep Dives
Unreal’s GASP Update Brings Mover, Rollback Movement, and 400 New Animations
Unreal Engine’s free Game Animation Sample Project has been upgraded for UE 5.7 with a strong focus on modern movement. The update integrates the experimental Mover plug-in, Epic’s planned successor to Character Movement Component, supporting rollback networking via Network Prediction or Chaos Networked Physics. GASP now also includes a new Mover-driven character, a fresh locomotion dataset, and 400 extra animations. It’s a powerful, no-cost starting point for prototyping next-gen character gameplay.
From Hobby Project to Indie Studio: Inside Ogre Pixel’s Journey
Ogre Pixel director Steve Durán shares how a personal Unity hobby project evolved into a Mexican indie studio with a diverse portfolio across mobile, PC, and consoles. He walks through key milestones like Warcher Defenders, Apple Arcade’s Jumper Jon, Lonesome Village, and A Tiny Sticker Tale, leading up to their new title Castlebound. The team now runs fully remote, coordinating art and code via GitLab, SourceTree, and Discord. Durán closes with a strong belief that heartfelt indie games will keep their place with players well beyond 2026.
🤖 AI, Tools & Tech Trends
Forget “Made With AI” Labels: Cascadeur’s Founder on Real AI Use
Cascadeur’s creator Eugene Dyabin explains why he sides with Tim Sweeney against mandatory AI labels on game marketplaces, calling them unverifiable and irrelevant to player experience. He details Cascadeur’s AI-powered Inbetweening system, which generates motion between key poses while letting animators tweak every detail and convert results to standard keys. Trained on Nekki’s own mocap and animation data, it avoids typical ethical pitfalls. Dyabin believes this kind of specialized, assistive AI will lower barriers and reshape how games are made.
Blender, Unreal, and AI: Inside ArtStation’s Latest Industry Data
ArtStation’s State of the Art session from Unreal Fest Stockholm delivers a data-driven look at where game art is heading. Drawing on platform-wide statistics, plus input from schools and studio recruiters, the talk breaks down which skills and tools are on the rise, and what’s falling behind. It highlights what studios actually look for in portfolios today and how educators can better prepare students for real pipelines. A practical watch for anyone hiring, teaching, or building a career in game art.
🎨 Art & Assets Like a Pro
Studio-Quality PBR Scans with Just a Camera and Flash
Epic Games and M-XR showcase a practical workflow for capturing true PBR assets using only RealityScan and M-XR’s Maro technology. Instead of expensive polarized rigs and photometric stereo setups, you use a camera, a flash, and disciplined capture: RAW, locked manual exposure, low ambient light, and lots of coverage. RealityScan handles alignment, mesh, UVs, and scale, while Maro generates full measured PBR maps. The result is studio-grade, tactile materials ready for Unreal Engine, accessible to indie teams and hobbyists.
Unity Performance: Is cpp2better the Boost You Really Need?
cpp2better promises leaner il2cpp output, but this post shows it’s no magic bullet. The author walks through key questions: Are you CPU-bound, and is a significant chunk of your frametime actually spent in il2cpp-compiled C# rather than Unity’s native engine? Are you using DOTS or Burst and stuck with a slow “everything else” tier? The article ends by stressing that the biggest wins come from better scope, algorithms, and caching—long before codegen tweaks.