Roblox AI Tools 🤖, Building Stories 📖, UE5.7 PCG 🌍
🚀 Creation & AI Innovation
Type ‘Tank, Cyberpunk City’: Roblox Debuts AI 4D Creation Tools
Roblox’s new 4D Generation tech promises to turn text prompts into playable content, from drivable cars to full cyberpunk cityscapes. Built on its proprietary Cube Foundation Model, the system focuses on interactivity, aiming toward a future where AI can generate entire scenes—assets, environments, code, and animations—in one go. Early access players in the Wish Master experience have already created over 160,000 items. The move underscores Roblox’s aggressive AI strategy even as many developers question genAI’s impact and the platform faces fresh safety concerns.
Turning UGC into Revenue: How Smart Payments Power Creator Economies
As UGC, creator programs, and influencer campaigns become core to mobile game monetisation, studios are quietly turning into global payments companies. This piece argues that mass payouts—tiny, frequent payments to thousands of creators worldwide—demand serious finance and operations thinking, not just clever game design. By bringing finance teams into product planning early and investing in scalable mass payment platforms, studios can automate onboarding, compliance, FX, and fraud checks. Done right, reliable payouts become a competitive edge that turns fragile UGC experiments into long-term revenue engines.
🎮 Narrative & Game Design Craft
Designing Game Stories That Players Actually Care About
Legendary narrative designer Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment, Fallout: New Vegas, KOTOR II) unpacks how he builds game stories around mechanics, theme, and team collaboration. He explains why smaller, reactive casts often beat giant worlds, how misaligned side quests turn into “filler,” and what went wrong on Dying Light 2’s lore. Avellone also shares concrete tips for aspiring writers—from studying history to learning VO workflows—to craft stories players genuinely care about.
Designing Destructible Cars in UE5: Art, Tech, and Performance
Steel Hunters uses abandoned cars as key scale markers for its giant mechs, so the team built a destructible vehicle system that looks dynamic but runs on a wide range of PCs. This breakdown covers the full pipeline: modular low-poly modeling, shared texture atlases, Custom Primitive Data–driven color and damage states, and integration into a global biome weathering system. On the technical side, client-only destruction, async ticking, and a fast vertex-shader deformation scheme keep performance stable—even when dozens of cars explode at once.
🌍 Next‑Gen Worlds & Unreal Engine
Level Up Your UE5 Skills: Epic’s GDC Festival of Gaming Lineup
Epic Games is heading to the GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 with a UE5-heavy session lineup. Talks cover hitting and sustaining 60 FPS in Unreal Engine 5, optimizing games for mobile deployment on iOS and Android, and building large procedural systems with fast iteration. There’s also a deep dive into designing cross-platform experiences for Fortnite using UEFN tools and a spotlight on student projects that became real indie games. Readers can even enter a quiz-based giveaway for five GDC 2026 tickets.
Next‑Gen Worldbuilding: UE 5.6–5.7’s Big PCG and Biome Upgrades
Procedural worldbuilding in Unreal takes a big step forward in versions 5.6 and 5.7, capped by PCG becoming production-ready in UE 5.7. Developers get faster GPU-driven workflows, a more powerful node graph UI with templates and in-context data preview, and a rebuilt biome system that supports blending, layering, and localized updates. The new PCG Editor Mode turns splines, point painting, and volumes into fully customizable, no-code tools tied directly to PCG graphs. On top of that, the Experimental Procedural Vegetation Editor generates high-quality Nanite foliage with bone-driven wind and voxelization for truly next-gen environments.