Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Game engine-maker Unity has announced plans to lay off 265 workers—or just under 4% of its roughly 7,000-person workforce—as it winds down a partnership with special-effects house Weta Digital and refocuses on its core gaming business.

Unity spent a cool $1.625 billion in cash and stock to purchase the tech division of the Peter Jackson-led Weta Digital just over two years ago , taking in 275 company engineers in the process. The vast majority of those engineers are now being let go as Unity has "terminated its obligations to provide certain services to Weta FX and also amended certain intellectual property rights between the parties," according to a recent SEC filing and Reuters reporting .

The Weta Digital acquisition came as game engines like Unity and Unreal were increasingly being embraced by Hollywood studios as the basis for their digital-effects work. The deal was also part of an expensive wave of corporate acquisitions Unity undertook after its late 2020 IPO . That buying spree included cloud gaming-service Parsec , mobile ad giant Ironsource , and 3D collaboration company SyncSketch , to name just a few.

Defold , a free game engine with the source code available under a reasonable open license has released a roadmap for 2021 and it's sounding pretty good.

While not actually open source, the licensing terms are still quite friendly and still far better than some other much more closed licensing like with Unity, Unreal and Game Maker but not as open as something like Godot. Defold is progressing on though and their roadmap for 2021 mentions their plan to continue to improve their Linux support.

Under the Platforms heading on their roadmap was this:

Editor on Linux

The Defold editor runs well on Linux but there are a few pain points and problems related to Linux distributions, window managers and graphics drivers. This year we plan to invest time in order to fix at least some of these issues.

Nice to see their developers are not only paying attention to reports but actually want to do better. Their roadmap is also up on GitHub so anyone interested can directly follow various support tickets and feature requests to see how it's doing.

Much more changes are planned too like pulling out their 2D skeletal animation Spine code and the Box 2D / Bullet physics systems and putting them into extensions. Currently both are tightly integrated and limited in how they can push them further, so having them as extensions will allow a lot more flexibility for both game developers and the people working on Defold directly.

They're also working on multiple features to improve performance of games built with Defold like object culling which developers need to do manually right now, improved texture compression, reducing draw calls for sprites and much more.

Sounds like 2021 is going to be big for Defold.

The Machinery, an upcoming game engine from people who previously worked on the likes of Stingray, Bitsquid, and Diesel engines released a new build with the first Preview of Linux support.

Joining the ranks of many game engines to offer it including Defold, Godot Engine, Unity, Unreal, Ren'Py and a great many more that would take too long to list. The team behind The Machinery certainly know what they're doing, given their previous work like Bitsquid / Stingray was used for some big games like Helldivers and Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide and more.

It's currently in Open Beta with the January 2021 (version 2021.1) going live that adds in (amongst other things) support for Linux in a Preview state.

Unlike other game engines, The Machinery seems to be selling itself on developers who want a ton of configuration. The developers mention about how it's "completely plugin-based" so you pick and choose all the parts of it you want to extend the editor and the engine as you see fit.

For the Linux release, the developer showed off how to get quickly and up and running keeping in mind this is the first public Linux release so it's nowhere near finished.

Watch video on YouTube.com

As for licensing, it doesn't appear to be open source and their website has no clear licensing information I could find. Use of the Beta needs you to agree to an EULA.

Highlights of the new release include:

• Linux Support (Preview) — The Machinery now runs on Linux.
• Bindless GPU Resource Management — Better performance in Vulkan backend.
• Raytracing Support (Preview) — Preview of our raytracing APIs.
• Asset Labels — Tag assets for better organization.

See more on their website .

For a more thorough introduction to it, you can see their previous older video:

Looking to make games? Defold is a pretty great option that has wonderful cross-platform support and it's free too, available under a pretty open license (but not open source).

With an editor that's available across Linux, macOS and Windows so you can develop anywhere you like. It can also export games to all three and HTML5, Android and iOS as well. A fully featured game engine, with the source code available to view if needed.

"Defold is a completely free to use game engine for development of desktop, mobile and web games. There are no up-front costs, no licensing fees and no royalties. The source code is made available on GitHub with a developer-friendly license. The Defold editor runs on Windows, Linux and macOS and includes a code editor, debugger, profiler and advanced scene and UI editors. Game logic is written in Lua with the option to use native code to extend the engine with additional functionality. Defold is used by a growing number of developers to create commercial hits as well as games for game jams and in schools to teach game development. Defold is known for its ease of use and it is praised for its technical documentation and friendly community of developers."

Pictured - Defold running nicely on Linux

Quite a capable game engine that mainly targets 2D games with support for OpenGL, Vulkan and Metal. It has fully scriptable rendering pipelines with low-level access, a particle effects editor, 2D and 3D particle effects, spine models, a tile editor, a full extension system, Lua scripting and Haxe support, 2D and 3D physics (Box 2D and Bullet) fully integrated and much more.

It's been around for a long time and now with it on Steam, perhaps more developer will take a look. What games have been made with it? Some more recent commercial indie game releases include Fates of Ort, Interrogation and Faerie Solitaire Harvest.

Find it now on Steam and see more on the official site .

Game Maker and later GameMaker Studio is a very popular game engine with indie developers and YoYo Games just recently sold it off and it appears they did so at a loss.

Originally created by Mark Overmars, who later teamed up with YoYo Games who have carried it on since 2007. Later in 2015 the YoYo Games studio was acquired by Playtech for around $16.4 million dollars. News doing the rounds now though, is that Playtech have actually sold YoYo Games to an unnamed buyer:

Playtech has previously stated that it is a strategic focus of the Company to simplify its business and dispose of non-core assets. It is pleased to announce that it has now completed the sale of YoYo Games, part of the discontinued Casual and Social Gaming business, for a consideration of approximately USD 10 million. With the completion of the sale of YoYo Games, Playtech has now disposed of all its Casual and Social Gaming assets.

So they not only sold it for less than they originally purchased it for but the buyer has yet to be formally announced, even with that financial statement being released a week ago. Not just that though, for an entire game engine and company that's a tiny amount of money - which should ring some alarm bells.

Clever people from the official YoYo Games forum already found who might now own them, thanks to the UK Company House records system we can see that multiple people involved in the Opera browser company now sit as directors of YoYo Games. These records appeared the day after the Playtech statement.

For game developers, the game engine you rely on suddenly changing hands with no prior notice and no announcement a week later must be a little frightening. Games often take multiple years to create, so for developers well into the thick of using GameMaker Studio hopefully the result will be a good one. Perhaps though, the time is ripe to check out Godot Engine since it's free and open source.

We reached out to YoYo Games for a statement yesterday, will update if they reply.

The Godot team just keep on adding in big new features to make this one of the best free and open source game engines around and the next Beta update for Godot 3.2.4 is out now.

Here's the main list of what's new overall for Godot 3.2.4:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (it was implemented for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).
• Rewritten and greatly improved FBX importer .
• Improved Web editor prototype and AudioWorklet support for multithreaded HTML5 builds .
• New option to snap 2D transforms to whole coordinates , helps prevent jitter on pixel art camera motions.
• Configurable amount of lights per object , now defaulting to 32 instead of 8.
• macOS ARM64 support in official binaries for Apple M1 chip (only classical build for now).
• Optional GDNative support for HTML5 .
• MP3 loading and playback support .
• WebXR support for VR games .
• Minimap support in GraphEdit .
• Fixes to Mono on WebAssembly .
• New CPU lightmapper (new in beta 6).
• New dynamic BVH for rendering and the GodotPhysics backends (new in beta 6).
• Multiple fixes to one-way collisions (new in beta 6).
• New AspectRatioContainer Control node (new in beta 6).

While their main focus is on the much bigger upcoming Godot 4 which has a big rendering overhaul and Vulkan API support, they're clearly not done here. Project Manager Rémi Verschelde mentions how there's "even more in the works that will be included in future beta builds". Full info here .

In other somewhat recent Godot news, the team recently blogged about their work on a glTF 2.0 scene exporter. What is glTF? A royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by engines and applications, overseen by The Khronos Group (the same behind OpenGL, Vulkan and so on). Godot has been able to import glTF for some time now but the option to export it from Godot enables developers to quickly put it back into something like Blender, to make any changes needed to then bring the updates back into Godot. All very useful sounding.

Also if you missed it, be sure to check out their 2020 overview video. The progress is outstanding:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Godot Engine is probably the most promising free and open source game engine around, and they clearly had a very productive 2020 with big plans for 2021.

Just before the year was up, and as we took our holiday break, developer Fabio Alessandrelli wrote up about the ongoing and impressive progress on the Web Editor and the HTML5 export. The progress on it has been somewhat mind-blowing with it now having GDNative supported with HTML5 exports from Godot, and the web editor itself has now hit what they say is the Beta stage and you can try it out at this new temporary address .

For the web editor, they're looking to keep it up to date and in sync with the latest work on Godot 3.2.4.

Pictured - me testing out the Godot Engine Web Editor

The Godot Engine team have made huge progress elsewhere too. While work continues on the current stable branch, with Godot 3.2.4 due out properly sometime soon that brings in some big stuff like 2D batching for GLES3 for better performance, a greatly improved FBX importer, a configurable amount of lights per object and so on the work also continues on Godot 4 with Vulkan API support too.

So much is going on they created a thoroughly impressive showcase video of Godot's 2020. Have a look below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

As another promising free and open source game engine written in Rust, Bevy continues maturing and there's a brand new release up for you to try out with lots of advancements.

What actually is it? The developer says quite clearly that it's a "refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust" with a data-driven custom Entity Component System, a 2D and 3D rendering system, support for all major systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux plus mobile), hot reloading to get instant feedback, a custom built-in UI system and more. It's looking really smart.

Going over the vast changelog of everything that's new and improved in Bevy 0.4, here's some highlights:

• A WebGL2 rendering backend, meaning games built with Bevy can now run in the browser. They also now have a showcase of their examples running in the web.
• Live shader reloading so you can update changes to shaders at runtime.
• GLTF loader improvements that now supports the Camera.
• Dynamic Linking for improved compile times.
• Huge rendering optimizations.
• 3D textures support.
• A new built-in Logging and Profiling system.
• HiDPI support

See more on the Bevy website .

Want to see a game being built with Bevy? The version 0.4 update post mentioned a game called colonize , it's an in-development Dwarf Fortress / Rimworld-like game in the early stages - and it's also free and open source. Worth keeping an eye on or joining in perhaps if you're looking for a new Rust game dev project

The Raspberry Pi sure is a versatile device and thanks to GameMaker Studio 2 from YoYo Games , it might even end up as more of a gaming unit with newly added support for exported games.

In the version 2.3.1.542 release of GameMaker Studio 2 that went live on December 16 ( details ), it mentioned in the release notes how it now supports "Ubuntu ARMv7" as an output type for their editor. We discovered this thanks to the developer of Shield Cat mentioning on their Patreon post how they've been updating their game to hit higher performance on the Raspberry Pi.

Curious about more details on this, we reached out to YoYo Games to clarify some details of this new feature. Their CTO, Russell Kay, mentioned this in reply to why they started supporting Linux ARM devices:

We are big fans of the Raspberry Pi and have been looking to support the device in a cost effective way with the release of the OpenGL driver and the higher power (CPU and GPU). It became viable for us to release and support the Raspberry Pi target, since it was generic we expanded it to include devices that support the armeabihf architecture, assuming the device has the correct libraries that we require, but our primary target is the Raspberry Pi running raspbian.

With that all now in place they said this in reply to future upgrades to their Linux support in GameMaker Studio 2:

We will improve our Linux offering over future versions, but we are not able to announce specific changes at this stage.

Game Maker Studio powers some really popular games, and it continues to be a very popular game engine for indie developers. Released titles like Hyper Light Drifter, Minit, The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED], The Swords of Ditto, Stoneshard, Nuclear Throne and a great many more were all built with it.

Will be fun to see if many developers decide to put out more Linux builds of their games when using GMS2, both on the desktop and for the fantastic Raspberry Pi device family.