Insomniac Engine 🎮, JoltPhysics 5.5.0 🧮, Unity 6.3 Toolbars 👨💻
🎛️ Tools & Workflow Upgrades
Mastering Unity 6.3 Toolbars: Custom Time Scale Slider & Styling
Unity 6.3 LTS breaks many classic toolbar extensions, including popular time scale sliders—but it also introduces a powerful new toolbar API. This tutorial shows how to rebuild a modern Time.timeScale slider using `UnityEditor.Toolbars` and UI Toolkit, complete with a reset button, context menu presets, and explicit refresh logic. You’ll also learn to inspect the toolbar with the UI Toolkit debugger and safely restyle elements via a small helper utility. Turn the main toolbar into a first-class, customized part of your editor workflow.
New Jolt Release Boosts Profiling, Collision Accuracy, and Tooling Support
The latest Jolt Physics update tightens up both your tools and your simulations. A new per-body simulation stats flag reveals exactly which objects are tanking performance, while ragdoll constraint priorities can now be auto-calculated to favor root joints. Shapes get safer defaults with automatic convex radius reduction and configurable triangle thickness for soft-body collisions, alongside major fixes for mesh/heightfield collisions and long casts. The release also adds Visual Studio 2026 support and resolves several platform-specific compilation issues.
🎮 Game Dev Journeys & Engines
Building a ‘Hearts-Like’ While Working Full-Time: Inside Luminous Nights
Solo dev Yahos (“Yaya”) is spending years building Luminous Nights, a Kingdom Hearts-inspired “hearts-like,” while holding down a full-time game job in Japan. He talks candidly about 4am routines, “no zero days,” and scrapping an open world to keep scope realistic. The interview also digs into how YouTube devlogs, KH influencers, and a tight Discord community fuel wishlists and feedback, and why he’s diversifying with courses and assets instead of betting everything on a single game.
Inside Insomniac’s Engine: Performance, Pipelines, and Actually Finishing Games
Veteran engine programmer Andreas Fredriksson (Insomniac, ex-Unity/Frostbite, TBL) traces his path from C64/Amiga demoscene wizardry to leading high-performance engine work on AAA titles. He dives into the brutal details behind the EON Amiga demo, Insomniac’s highly deterministic asset pipeline, and a clever process-virtualization system that dodges modern antivirus overhead. Along the way he shares blunt opinions on refactoring, scheduling (“halfway means 80% done”), Unity DOTS, and why strong creative direction matters more than elegant code.