Unity RealBlend 🧱, UE5 Blueprints 👨💻, Genie 3 AI 🤖
🧩 Tools & Workflows for Game Dev
New Instatileset Tool Makes 2D Pixel Tiles Easy to Create
Godot developer Escualina has released Instatileset, a lightweight tileset creation tool tailored for 2D pixel art projects. Available both online and as a download, it lets you draw through intuitive input/output panels with hover-tooltips, then export your tiles directly for use in game engines. You can also save your input data to reload and refine tiles later. The article further points to BUKKBEEK’s free Pixel Renderer for turning 3D scenes into pixel art.
Goodbye Polybrush: Meet RealBlend for In-Editor Mesh Sculpting
With Polybrush deprecated in Unity 6.3 and beyond, a new tool is stepping in to fill the gap. RealBlend lets you create, edit, and sculpt meshes directly inside Unity, reducing the need to bounce out to Blender. It supports 5-layer blending for HDRP and optimized 3-layer setups for URP and the Built-In pipeline. Currently in beta and actively developed, RealBlend is cheaper for early adopters, who get all future updates at no extra cost.
🧠 Learning & Skill Building
Stop Fearing Blueprints: Learn Unreal Engine 5 Visual Scripting as an Artist
If Blueprints have been holding you back from Unreal Engine 5, this 9-hour course targets exactly that fear. Led by 12+ year industry veteran Alex Tjagnirjadko, Unreal Generalist: Blueprints for Artists teaches visual scripting from scratch—no programming background required. Through practical projects like interactive doors, scanning systems, destructible floors, and dynamic plant growth and fire, you’ll build reusable systems you truly understand. The course includes full UE5 project files and HD video guidance.
Vulkan Compute Pipeline Tutorial: From Shadertoy to Fullscreen Quad
Learn how to harness Vulkan compute shaders to generate real-time visual effects borrowed from Shadertoy. The video walks through setting up a compute pipeline, binding a storage image and uniform buffers, and dispatching workgroups to fill a texture. That texture is then sampled in a simple fullscreen quad pipeline using a three-vertex trick in the vertex shader. Along the way, you’ll see practical patterns for organizing Vulkan code into reusable pipeline classes and handling synchronization between compute and graphics.
📈 Industry Trends & Case Studies
Genie 3 and Game Dev: Tool, Threat, or Just Hype?
Project Genie’s flashy “text-to-world” demos spooked investors, but game industry veterans argue the tech is closer to a Figma-for-worlds than a full game engine. This panel explores how Genie 3 can speed up ideation, A/B testing, and UGC creation, while still falling short on specificity, gameplay depth, and production-ready workflows. The experts frame AI tools as another link in the existing toolchain, cautioning that without human intent, they’ll only flood the market with generic, forgettable games.
How No Rest for the Wicked Went from ‘Mostly Negative’ to 74K Sales a Day
Moon Studios’ Thomas Mahler recounts the wild journey behind No Rest for the Wicked: losing its publisher, buying the game back at huge personal risk, and then watching a major early-access update plunge it into “mostly negative” reviews. He explains how rapid balancing, a big “Together” update, and a bold combo of a -40% sale and free Steam weekend turned everything around, peaking at 74,000 copies sold in a single day. Along the way, he digs into pushing ARPGs beyond Diablo clones, critiques risk-averse AAA, and shares how classical art principles and custom Unity tools shape the game’s distinctive look and long-term roadmap.