Unity Kerfuffle

No sexy pic’s, but I think it’s the next best thing!

What is this? What are we looking at?

I’m excited to show a sneak peak of our first internal development tool, the World Manager.

As you smart people of the forums can guess by this point, this is going to be a technical update to discuss our plans and progress with the project.

But before we can start, there is an elephant in the room: The recent changes in Unity’s Pricing and Plans.

For those that haven't heard, Unity has pulled a big F**k you to the dev community. If it’s not clear with the above picture, we are currently using Unity for our project’s development, and these price changes will affect us. To what degree, we don’t know, as the issue is still fresh and continuously changing with the community at large giving the Unity team plenty of push-back and getting some results.

What is our opinion on the matter, and what are our plans moving forward?

The sad fact of the matter is we have already spent about half a year coding and several hundred dollars in different assets that can't be ported to a different engine. Most of our current coding can’t be ported over to godot or monogame because up until now, we have been doing tool and asset integration. Moving to a new engine would require not only starting fresh with a clean slate, but loose time and energy just trying to learn a new architecture, and/or coding previously existing tools/features from scratch.

The deciding factor for why we went with Unity over other C# engines (Godot, Monogame or non C# engines) was time. Our plans for the project are ambitious: To develop a game that was not only fun and rich with content, but a game we could keep working on after a version 0.1 release (cough cough) and enjoy working on.

In order for the project to succeed, we need to release and add new content as easily as it would be for Renpy or Twine games, if not easier. Due to the complexity of the game’s design requirements, custom Dev Tools are needed to streamline the game’s production. Developing tools and code, but not game content, takes time away from the main project. And since we are not professionals, just hobbyists, enthusiasts, and people busy living our best lives; time and our own impatience is our greatest enemy.

As such, for the time being, we are going to continue using Unity as the most time efficient route while our motivation and optimism is still high. Making something is better than making nothing. We also are deciding this under the hopeful assumption that Unity will roll back or at least walk back the worst part of it in the coming weeks.

-Team