Godot 4.6 RC1 🎮, Bevy 0.18 🕹️, GDC Luminaries 🎤
🚀 Engine & Tooling Highlights
Godot 4.6 RC1: Feature-Packed and Ready for Production Testing
Godot 4.6 has reached its first release candidate, with all planned features shipped and major regressions fixed, making it ready for real-world production testing. The update locks in a new editor theme, inverse kinematics, standalone library support, and updated Web, XR, and Android editors. From this stage on, the team will only tackle showstopping regressions and relies heavily on community feedback. Downloads for all platforms are live, along with a call for testers and financial backers.
No Blender Needed: New KamiPita 2.0 Hair Tool for VRChat
KamiPita, a popular VRChat hair adjustment tool for Unity, just hit version 2.0.0 with a major quality-of-life upgrade. You can now deform meshes directly in Unity, making it far easier to fix hair clipping and fit hair made for other avatars—without ever opening Blender. The tool also supports saving and sharing presets so you can reuse or distribute setups across avatars. It’s available on Booth, with machine translation sufficient to navigate the Japanese page.
🎮 Industry Trends & Events
New GDC Luminaries Track Brings Google, Nvidia, Bandai Namco to the Stage
GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 is introducing the Luminaries Speaker Series, a three-day program built for senior decision-makers in the games industry. This new track will feature high-level sessions on transformative technologies, IP ecosystems, and global shifts shaping the business of games. Leaders from Google, Mattel, Nvidia, Bandai Namco Studios, Savvy Games, and Lightspeed Venture Partners are already confirmed. Running March 10–12 in a 500-seat theater, the series is exclusive to Game Changer pass holders.
2026 AI in Games: Steam Floods, Player Revolts, and Xbox in Trouble
Tommy Thompson lays out ten blunt predictions for how AI will reshape games in 2026. He forecasts one-third of all new Steam titles disclosing AI use, mostly as low-quality shovelware, while AAA quietly double down on generative tools despite intensifying player backlash. On-device AI is set to surge—especially around the Switch 2—while overhyped agentic AI mostly stalls. Alongside this, he argues Microsoft’s AI obsession will further erode Xbox as a platform and that upcoming UK AI laws will satisfy no one.
🧠 AI & Workflow Experiments
Bevy 0.18 Brings Big Visual Upgrades, Raytracing Boosts, and Better UI
Bevy 0.18 is out, delivering major visual and workflow upgrades to the Rust-powered engine. The release introduces atmosphere occlusion, customizable atmospheric scattering, and long-awaited PBR shading fixes for noticeably better rendering. Solari, Bevy’s experimental real-time raytraced renderer, gets a wave of new features, while UI gains automatic directional navigation and advanced font support. Fullscreen materials, built-in camera controllers, and scenario-driven Cargo feature collections round out a very developer-friendly update.
Working With a Delusional AI: Faster Iteration, Better Learning
Sebastian Schöner reframes AI agents’ tendency to always say “yes” as a feature, not a bug. By rushing ahead and implementing ideas, the AI counters human hesitation and pessimism, making it far easier to experiment with different designs. While the output is often flawed, that’s the point: everything is flawed, so the goal becomes learning more in less time. With AI handling the tedious details, the author focuses on big questions and freely discards or reworks entire approaches.