RPG Maker Forum Shutdown 💀, PixiJS 8.19 ✨, AMD Dev Tools 💸
🧱 Game Dev Community & Tools
RPG Maker’s Official Forum Is Shutting Down — With No Archive
The official RPG Maker Web Forum, a core hub for indie RPG devs for nearly 15 years, is being shut down and fully deleted as the community moves to a new platform, RPG MAKER GUILD. The current forum goes read-only on June 18 and goes offline on December 11, 2026, with no public archive or account migration planned. That puts 34k+ plugin threads, 45k+ legacy support threads, and 1.4M+ messages at risk, forcing users to manually save anything they want to preserve.
PixiJS 8.19 Brings Live HTML Textures and Smarter AI Tools
PixiJS’s June release focuses on both cutting-edge features and real-world polish. Version 8.19.0 introduces HTML-in-Canvas textures, mirroring interactive DOM elements like forms and animated content directly into your game’s GPU-rendered scene. The update also adds official AI agent skills, SVG export for Graphics, alpha-aware sprite masks, smarter fill patterns, and proper blend mode inheritance for ParticleContainer. Together with many bug fixes and new contributor shout-outs, this release showcases PixiJS’s growing maturity at over 500k weekly downloads.
🚀 Launch, Monetize & Grow
You Launched on Steam. Now What? Brutally Honest Post‑Launch Guide
Most launch guides stop at “publish your game” — this one starts there. Learn why you should delete most curator key emails, how to plan year‑long discount campaigns that actually trigger wishlist emails, and why your first 10 paid reviews matter more than you think. The author shares real revenue numbers, bank and currency conversion traps, and a sane approach to post‑launch updates versus making your next game. It’s a blunt, practical checklist for surviving your first Steam release.
Reclaiming IAP Margins: How Unity’s New Commerce Stack Frees Your Game
Unity’s revamped IAP stack is built to help game studios escape rigid app store “walled gardens” and win back as much as 20–25% of their margins. By wrapping native store SDKs in a single C# layer, developers can ship one build, swap payment providers via feature flags, and plug into web shops and alternative processors. The talk also digs into regional compliance, carrier billing, and how SciPlay uses these tools to deliver smoother, more targeted purchase flows for players worldwide.
💡 High-End Graphics & Performance
Bringing 1,000 Ray-Traced Lights to Mobile: Inside Neural Dawn
Arm and Sumo Digital reveal how they brought Unreal Engine’s MegaLights and ray-traced shadows to mobile for their new game, Neural Dawn. They walk through the engine and GPU optimizations that make thousands of fully dynamic, ray-traced lights viable on Mali-based devices. The team then shows how Arm’s neural upscaling and denoising turn a low-resolution ray-traced image into crisp 1080p at stable frame rates. It’s a dense, practical look at mobile ray tracing, content constraints, and building gameplay around light.
AMD Supercharges Radeon Dev Tools for DX12 and Ray Tracing
AMD’s latest Radeon Developer Tool Suite update is a big win for DirectX 12 and ray tracing game developers. RGP 2.7 now shows HLSL source directly in the profiler alongside ISA, adds instruction‑level thread divergence metrics, and natively ingests PIX markers. Ray tracing and memory tools get better TLAS/BLAS visualization, filtering, and export options, while a new RDP command‑line tool enables fully scripted GPU captures for CI and automated performance workflows.