Slay the Spire devs followed through on abandoning Unity

Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 731 points – Slay the Spire devs followed through on abandoning Unity
gamedeveloper.com

Unity's Runtime Fee debacle cost it the trust of several indie developers, and led to Slay the Spire 2 being made in Godot.

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I've got to imagine Epic is pretty pissed at Unity right now. Both had a pretty sweet gig "competing" against each other.

But since Unity's brain-dead maneuver, we suddenly have a foss alternative to both, and they might actually have to innovate now.

As much as I like to shit on Epic, but UE 5.x is pretty much innovative with each minor release. Watching the release videos of what the engine can do in realtime is always impressive. They are used as realtime backgrounds for movie sets.

I think it's funny you try to show how good the game engine is by saying it's used in movies. Like sure it's impressive, but graphics don't make a game. Give me one good game with simple graphics built in Godot, rather than 100 fancy locking $80 micro-transaction infested always online games.

Your argument has nothing to do with UE5‘s or Godot‘s strengths and weaknesses. You could literally flip it and it would make just as much (or little) sense: Give me one good asset library game in UE5, rather than 100 custom asset containing $80 micro-transaction infested always online Godot games. See? The argument doesn‘t actually say much about the engines, just about monetization which you can handle completely independently from the software. If your project makes a million or less, UE5 is free to use for anyone. That makes it pretty good for tiny indie devs and hobbyists actually.

Do you mix game development with engine? Of course an engine doesn't make an innovative game by itself. An engine is - hence the name - only the means to an end to help develop a game. Innovative games are all over the place in regards to the engines they use; from in-house/custom to products like unity, unreal, etc.

That you have the impression that engines like UE and Unity are "less innovative" by judging released games just shows how many games are developed using these engines - especially Unity. It's so damn easy to build games with it, that many people do, even when they only build something simple. And that's fine ... it means that more people can channel their creativity into game development, even when it doesn't yield anything ground breaking.

It also shows, though, that developers can focus more on the game development and have to deal less with engine development and now even asset creation, since these engines also bring asset catalogs. So it's really quite a good time to dive into game development, which fosters creativity and in the end there will also be innovative games among them.

Yes but at the same time Unreal doesn't really compete with Unity at all when it comes to 2D games. Unreal is primarily meant for 3D games and maybe you could make a 2D one work in it but Unity has a lot more resources for 2D games. That's why games like this switched to Godot instead of Unreal cause Unreal wasn't really an option. I could be wrong but when Ive made some projects in Unreal it didn't really seem to have any options for 2D games like Unity has.

It's got all of the functionality you need but nothing in UE is "boilerplate" for 2D, meaning they don't have the functions built for you to use out of the box. Godot has all the boilerplate for a complete novice to use after a few tutorials videos. Haven't used Unity for maybe a decade so idk about them.

Unity's modus operandi is to develop a feature halfway and then deprecate it and replace it with something that's not yet released. Such a mess of a product.

They also spend valuable resources hounding developers into paying them, citing made up sales estimates.

Unity wasn't innovating but I think it's unfair to say that epic were not.

Part of the problem is that Unity don't actually use their own engine.

Considering Epic is funding Godot iirc, I'm sure they're more than happy with their competitor shooting themselves in the foot.