Tekken 8 Effects 🥋, GDC Agenda 📅, Steam Next Fest 🚀
🎮 Game Dev News & Highlights
Epic Releases Free Niagara VFX Example Pack for Unreal Engine 5.7
Unreal Engine devs looking to polish their real-time VFX can now grab Epic’s free Niagara Examples Pack for UE 5.7 on Fab. The pack delivers over 50 Niagara systems, from cinematic explosions and muzzle flashes to footsteps, pings, markers, and hit dissolves. A built-in gallery gameplay level demonstrates exactly how each effect is used in-game. It also highlights practical patterns like Niagara Data Channels and Animation Notify Blueprints for impact and footstep logic.
Bandai Namco Shares CEDEC Talks: Tekken 8 VFX, Houdini UI & More
Bandai Namco Studios has uploaded five CEDEC presentations to YouTube, giving developers a closer look at their production tech and workflows. A highlight is a deep dive into Tekken 8’s real-time destruction effects in Niagara, including performance optimization strategies. Other talks cover UI creation in Houdini and the role of a lighting artist. The sessions are in Japanese, but auto-translation and downloadable slides help make them accessible to a wider audience.
🐟 Godot Tools & Visual Tricks
Animate Fish Schools and Foliage in Godot with MultiMeshPath3D
MultiMeshPath3D is a new open-source Godot add-on created by Bryson McBee during a game jam to easily move schools of fish along a Path3D, inspired by games like Abzu and Sword of the Sea. The node lets you distribute MultiMesh instances along a path and tweak scatter radius, offset, rotation, and scale for natural variation. It’s ideal for foliage, fences, tiles, and “fishies” alike. Bryson also plans future updates with per-instance vertex color control for richer visuals.
Smooth Godot Transition Shader Using Gradients by Binbun
3D artist Binbun showcases a Godot transition shader that lets you plug in your own textures for smooth, polished wipes. The shader uses gradient textures to control both transition direction and edge shape, while a small tool script passes rect size into the shader to fix UV stretching on radial gradients. It’s a neat, reusable effect for Godot projects, and Binbun also offers additional VFX and materials on itch.io for developers.
🧠 Industry Insights & Events
Inside the GDC ‘Festival of Gaming’: Kojima, Death Stranding 2, and More
GDC’s complete agenda is live, revealing a stacked “Festival of Gaming” week featuring Hideo Kojima, Sandfall Interactive, and AdHoc Studio. Kojima will address creators eyeing independence and show how Death Stranding 2’s voxel 3D map came together. Sandfall offers multiple talks, from an audio postmortem of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to a session on building a wide-scope game with just four programmers, while AdHoc explains how to turn a “dead genre” into a hit. The rebrand and broader climate spark debate, but organizers say overseas attendance plans remain strong.
⚙️ Gameplay & Design Deep Dives
Mastering Moving Platforms in Unity: Momentum, Pushing, and Slope Polish
Aiming for “bulletproof” 2D platforming, this video walks through adding robust moving platforms and conveyor belts to a custom Unity controller. You’ll see how to share velocity via an interface, preserve momentum when stepping or jumping off platforms, and let platforms push—and sometimes crush—the player with smart box casts and step checks. The episode also rewrites slope sliding and adds a visual interpolator so motion stays buttery smooth despite teleporting the Rigidbody. It wraps up the series with links to a playable demo and Patreon-only state machine code.
Stop Freaking Out: How Indies Should Actually Use Steam Next Fest
Marketing expert Chris Zukowski dismantles the biggest myths around Steam Next Fest and explains how indie devs should really approach it. He argues Next Fest should be your grand finale, not your demo’s debut, and shares concrete benchmarks like aiming for ~2,000 wishlists beforehand. You’ll learn how to design a 30‑minute, replayable demo, time updates and creator outreach, and avoid the post‑Fest launch stampede. It’s blunt, data-backed guidance for indies who want results—not just “hype.”