Godot CI Open-Sourced 🎮, Unreal Scaling Sims 🧵, Indie Success Playbooks 💸
🛠 Engine Tech & Tooling
Godot Devs Lose W4 Build CI in 2026 — But Gain Its Source
W4 Games, created by core Godot contributors, is discontinuing its Godot-focused cloud CI service W4 Build, with support ending in January 2026. The platform was built to simplify custom Godot builds, proprietary integrations, and automated workflows, so existing users now need to migrate or roll their own pipelines. To offset the shutdown, W4 will open source the core technology, giving the community a solid base for a replacement. A linked video further explores the impact on the Godot ecosystem.
Scalable Connected Sims: Threading, Redis, and Reflection in Unreal Engine
Two developers from Havelsan reveal how they built a connected training simulator where instructors manage tanks and scenarios from a browser while Unreal handles the 3D world. They explain why they chose Redis pub/sub over UDP, how they integrated hiredis into Unreal, and how FRunnables and async tasks keep networking off the game thread. Using Unreal’s reflection (FProperty) and modular data classes, they update massive amounts of entity data from JSON generically, while shared state machines ensure web and Unreal sessions never drift out of sync.
📈 Indie Growth & Studio Building
From YouTube Comments to $14M Studio: The Fateless Playbook
Instead of courting VCs first, the Fateless team asked their audience—and raised $6M in 10 weeks, then another $8M later. In this session, the founders explain how they evolved from a Raid: Shadow Legends YouTube channel into a studio with hundreds of thousands of engaged players before launch. They show how radical transparency, consistent content, and fast iteration turned fans into investors, evangelists, and testers. It’s a practical guide for devs who want to build smarter, faster, and community-first.
From Fumes to 50K Sales: The Momentum Framework for Indies
On the brink of running out of money, Cybernetic Walrus rebuilt its entire approach to development around a “momentum framework” focused on speed and early validation. Using Unity, asset store content, and strict MoSCoW scoping, they shipped horror game Order 13 in just 3.5 months and turned it into their first commercial success. Their follow-up, Roadside Research, exploded to 400k+ wishlists and 500k+ demo players. This talk breaks down the exact phases, tools, and marketing beats they used.
📺 Retro Tech & GPU History
Fabien Giesen on Turbo Pascal, VGA Hacks, and the Hidden History of GPUs
Graphics engineer Fabien Giesen traces his journey from learning BASIC and Turbo Pascal on 80s PCs to helping Valve prototype ultra‑low‑latency VR. He explains how DOS, VGA mode 13h, and small well‑documented libraries taught him real graphics programming, then describes hacking VGA cables and serial ports to measure input‑to‑photon latency in microseconds. Along the way he unpacks GPU command streams, Windows’ display pipeline, chip binning, and the tiny, overlapping set of teams behind modern CPUs and GPUs.