Blender Game Engine 🎮, OpenGL SSR 💡, Analyzing Audio 🔊
🎮 Engines & Tools Evolving
UPBGE 0.50 Turns Blender 5 Into a Full Game Engine Again
UPBGE 0.50 is here, officially bringing the Blender-based game engine fork up to Blender 5.0. This release adds experimental GPU skinning via compute shaders, a blazing-fast “dupli base” object spawning path, and Vulkan-ready 2D post-processing filters. Logic nodes and Python components get stability and usability upgrades, while rendering tweaks improve WYSIWYG parity between the viewport and standalone player. It’s effectively the spiritual successor to the old Blender Game Engine, now running on a modern Blender core.
Painting Sound: Sebastian Lague Builds an Interactive Spectrogram Tool
Sebastian Lague builds an audio-analysis sandbox around the Short-Time Fourier Transform, turning raw waveforms into rich, interactive spectrograms. Along the way he explains the core tradeoff between time and frequency resolution, experiments with window functions to tame spectral leakage, and shows how to reconstruct audio from STFT data. The episode peaks with a paint tool that lets him “draw” beeps, speech-like sounds, and even hidden messages directly into the spectrogram. It’s a playful, code-deep intro to practical DSP for curious developers.
🧠Rendering & Performance Deep Dives
Indie OpenGL Engine Degine Shows Off Next-Level SSR & Mocap Pipeline
Indie developer Andres Hernandez has pushed a big visual upgrade to his OpenGL-based 3D engine, Degine, adding SSR that supports reflections of reflections and transparency. The latest demo showcases a full mocap pipeline using an iPhone, QuickMagic, Cascadeur, and Live Link Face, with final polish done in Blender. Degine is slated to go open source later this year, and you can track its progress via the developer’s YouTube playlist and X/Twitter.
From Thousands of Draw Calls to One: Vulkan Indirect Rendering Explained
OGLDEV dives into Vulkan indirect rendering, showing how to offload draw-call management from the CPU to the GPU. The tutorial starts from a descriptor-indexed setup, then removes per-mesh descriptor sets in favor of a single global set and a metadata SSBO containing mesh offsets, counts, and materials. You’ll see how to build and use an indirect buffer of VkDrawIndirectCommand, adapt vertex and fragment shaders, and refactor the pipeline. The result: a single vkCmdDrawIndirect replaces a whole loop of mesh draws.
🎨 Visual Tricks & Game Feel
Fake 3D in 2D: Learn Sprite Stacking for Pixel Art Games
Game developer Teo Chhim shares a straightforward sprite stacking tutorial that makes flat 2D scenes look surprisingly three-dimensional. By simply offsetting and overlapping layered sprites, you can fake depth and even create the illusion of rotating textures. Chhim uses this trick in their GameMaker murder mystery, Detective Fantasia: EXCALIMURDER, a Game Boy-inspired whodunnit where Excalibur is the murder weapon. They also post other handy pixel-art guides, including ocean levels and rotating rooms.
Why Your Game Gets No Wishlists (And How to Fix It)
If your Steam wishlists aren’t moving, this breakdown explains why “just post more” isn’t the answer. The creator lays out a practical rule for when to launch your Steam page, shares hard-earned lessons about never sending keys to curators, and stresses that weak ideas and bland visuals cripple marketing from day zero. He demonstrates how to pitch games through emotional hooks instead of feature lists, and urges devs to focus on one or two platforms they truly know. It’s a blunt but actionable crash course for first-time indie devs.