UE5 Forests 🌲, Unity Tactile Controls 🎮, Crowd Mocap 🕺
🌲 Engines & Environments
Into the Forest: Michael Gerard’s Complete UE5 Foliage Masterclass
Environment artist Michael Gerard is launching Into the Forest, an in-depth course focused on creating a full birch forest scene from scratch. Across 57 hours of step-by-step video, you’ll learn SpeedTree foliage workflows, procedural landscape and path shaders, custom water and Megascans materials, and PCG-based tree and detail scattering in UE5.6.1. The later chapters cover wind, foliage variations, Niagara VFX, lighting, and final 4K exports. It’s aimed at artists already comfortable with Unreal and SpeedTree fundamentals.
Unity 6.5: Massive 2D, URP, and Mobile Performance Upgrade
Unity 6.5 is a feature-packed supported release that heavily upgrades 2D, graphics, and mobile performance. It introduces a new Physics Core 2D API, custom 2D lights and shadows, sprite profiling, and major Shader Graph/VFX Graph improvements. The Built-In Render Pipeline and dynamic batching are now deprecated as URP gains tools like a powerful Lighting Search window and on-tile post-processing for smoother, cooler play sessions. Under the hood, Unity advances toward CoreCLR, adds AI-assisted profiling, and ships key Android/iOS optimizations.
🎮 Animation & Atmosphere
Free 6-Minute Crowd Reaction Mocap Pack for UE5, Rokoko & iClone
Animator Anderson Rohr has dropped a new June motion capture pack featuring around six minutes of crowd reaction animations across 22 clips. You’ll get clapping, cheering, posing, selfies, texting, drinking, and more—perfect for background crowds in games, cinematics, and VFX. The pack supports Rokoko Default, Reallusion iClone, and Unreal Engine 5’s Manny skeleton. It’s available now on Gumroad as a free or pay-what-you-want download.
Recreate Iron Nest’s Satisfying Controls: Unity Spline Tutorial
Inspired by Iron Nest’s massive Next Fest success, this video shows how tactile, diegetic controls can make your game stand out. You’ll learn to create levers, infinite wheels, and snapping dials using raycasts, layer masks, and Unity splines to constrain motion along custom paths. The interaction logic is cleanly separated from visuals, making it easy to reuse across multiple controls and themes. Grab the free project files to plug these mechanics straight into your own prototypes.
❄️ Solo Dev Stories & Survival
Winter Hunts Us: A TV Writer’s Brutal Solo Survival Game
Czech TV screenwriter Ondřej Sysel is spending his nights building Winter Hunts Us, a grim tribal survival strategy game where none of your starting characters live to see victory. In this interview he explains how a decade-old idea, born out of boredom at his son’s swimming class, evolved into a turn-based epic about glaciers, hunger, and generational sacrifice. He shares blunt lessons about solo-dev naivety, marketing stress, and why constant scope reduction is now his core design rule. AI tools, he says, made the game possible—but nowhere near effortless.