Hello! I’ve been away for a bit, but working on this project where I can. Updates: I went through a ton of ideas for names and settled on Light Alive, for at least a temporary name.
More importantly: I’m switching engines! Unity announced a weird pricing structure, and it’s almost certain to never affect me due to the fact that this is my first game and I don’t anticipate it being a smash hit (although, you never know), but it was enough to make me think that Unity, as a company, is short sighted and more concerned with squeezing profit than treating its developers well for long-term gain from loyal customers. From what I’ve seen regarding their pricing model, concerns were brought up internally at Unity and ignored. I don’t think anyone really had an issue with Unity wanting money, that part totally makes sense to me. Unity devs gotta eat. However, the problem is that they went about it in the worst possible way and clearly didn’t think about the impact it would have. Alternatively, they did think about it, and decided to go ahead and do it anyway. Regardless, it shows a lack of good leadership and who knows what they’ll decide to do next week/month/year. As such, I decided to check out Godot! I’ve been messing with it for about a week and I’ve got the project mostly ported over. There are still some kinks to work out, but it seems like working in Godot is going to be way faster and easier than working in Unity. I wasn’t super eager to learn GDScript because I liked the idea of doing REAL engineering in C#, but then I asked myself “Do I want to be a master coder who does everything by hand, or do I want to make games to the best of my ability?” The answer, if I have to chose, is that I want to make games. If I spend years coding from scratch something that can be done in minutes in Godot, and the result is exactly the same, then I’d chose to take the Godot route. Not that there’s no value in learning how to do things the hard way, but my goal isn’t to become a Unity master, it’s to become someone who can make games on a small budget in a short(ish) amount of time. Additionally, using Unity isn’t coding from scratch, obviously, considering there’s a whole engine there for you to interact with. I read once that if you want to make bread from scratch, you first have to invent the universe. I really like that quote and I’m going to use that mindset to use the best tools I have available to make the best games I can.
Next time I’ll try to remember to take a video of what I’ve got so far! It looks almost identical to before, so it’s not super exciting… but I’m making moves!
Kind of Antsy 