As is traditional in the lead-up to January, we sum up the outgoing year with representatives from gaming and related companies. Next in line is an interview with Alexander Ptichkin, the creator of the Russian 2D engine PointJS.
How was the year for the engine as a service?
Alexander Ptichkin, PointJS: Since there are not many game engines worldwide and new ones rarely emerge, PointJS remains essentially the only active solution of its kind in Russia. In the context of sanctions and import substitution, it is showing steady growth.
The use of the engine has significantly increased in schools and institutes, including educational programs where I've had the opportunity to teach.
What important new features were added to the engine in 2025?
Alexander: PointJS is not focused on constantly adding new features; it's already a complete and mature product. Of course, one could always refine the final 5%, but overall, the engine was fully developed back in 2018, with a complete set of functions and commands for creating games of any complexity.
This was demonstrated by the MMO game in Telegram, Zombie Tap — currently the most complex project developed on the engine. It includes inventories, scrolling, multilayer characters, original animation, server-side components, statistics, and other elements.
This project has become a full-fledged portfolio of PointJS's capabilities.
As for innovations this year, they are targeted but important:
- Despite having its own visual level map editor in the IDE, I wrote a script allowing integration of maps from Tiled Map Editor — a popular map editor, especially in pixel-art games.
- Two new commands were added to scale characters relative to a specified point with layer offset.
- A script was developed to export animations from Anime Studio Pro (Moho) into JSON format and play them in PointJS. Notably, the Moho developers have not implemented this functionality for over 12 years — I created my own extension based on the PointJS engine.
Have the requirements or expectations for tools changed from developers' perspectives, and perhaps have the developers themselves changed over 2025?
Alexander: Demands have noticeably increased since AI has enabled more rapid development. However, not everyone has the experience and understanding to correctly interpret what AI offers and apply it effectively.
As a result, some developers become even more confused trying to use tools they aren't ready for yet. Meanwhile, those who understand the syntax and structure of PointJS are starting to create more complex and large-scale projects.
How has the game engine market changed over the year?
Alexander: Essentially, it hasn't changed. The market is already fully formed and divided among engines for any tasks. Finding someone today who decides to create a new game engine "from scratch" is almost unreal — just like reproducing the path of creating 1800+ educational lessons on games and animation, which took me about 10 years.
In the past, such projects could be pursued purely out of enthusiasm and for free — I did that myself. But those were different times. Today, such long-term and complex projects can't be sustained on enthusiasm alone.
What trends in engines are you expecting to strengthen or emerge in 2026?
Alexander: I don't anticipate any radical changes. Everything will overall remain as it is, although games with slightly different narrative approaches will appear, where a significant portion of the storytelling and content will be driven by AI.
What can be expected from the engine in terms of functionality in 2026?
Alexander: Primarily, even deeper integration with AI and increased automation. AI has already allowed me to significantly develop the engine and add new features without involving outside professionals (although I am a programmer myself).
I won't reveal specific details yet. To a greater extent, this concerns the PointJS IDE development environment — it can be significantly enhanced by integrating even more ready-made solutions.