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MNL Progress Report #48
🕑 Added 2023-09-17 02:52:39 +0000 UTCHey there, nudies! Big news post today.
If you're tuned in with gaming news, you may have heard about a recent debacle with Unity. For a quick synopsis, Unity will effectively be punishing game developers with a new policy retroactively charging a fee for every time a user installs your game, regardless if it's on multiple platforms, refunded, or even pirated. This fee would essentially destroy lower tier developers like ourselves (as adult games like ours are notoriously pirated), but is also disastrous even for the bigger groups and companies. As a form of insurance, Unity will allow you to raise the bar on when these fees will be applicable by upgrading you to one of their Pro plans... at a cost of $2,000 per developer.
Unity also went out of their way to hide their old Terms of Service statements so that developers would effectively be tricked into agreeing to these new terms upon upgrading to the latest Unity engine. Even if Unity were to go retract all of these issues, it would effectively be worthless without a completely new ToS. And even then, they've shown that they will disregard, legal consequences be damned. These new fees make Unity unviable for us to develop on, and we have lost all trust in the company. We cannot continue to work with a company that will throw out harmful, disastrous new policies on a whim.
As painful of a decision as it was to make, My Naked Life will no longer be developed on the Unity engine, and Birthday Suit Games will not be using Unity for the indefinite future.
But that's okay. We switched to the Godot engine and LOOK AT THIS
INVERTEX DID THIS IN GODOT IN TWO DAYS.
We've already finished importing our environments, models, and animations, and even this early on, they look really fucking good??? Godot's lighting system is really great! And take a really close look at Amber! Not just at Amber... AROUND her! Look at that OUTLINE!
It needs some fine-tuning, but Invertex managed to apply this really cool sketchy outline to our character models! It really emphasizes that comic-style so much, and it just looks so SICK
We've even got jiggle physics back in! Amber's looking better than she ever has!
We can even apply a lighter, more static version of the sketchy outline to our environment as well! It brings a sense of cohesion to the whole thing while still letting our characters pop in these environments!
I can't stress enough that it's been only two days, and we've already made so much progress! It's only going to look better from here! On top of that, a good bit of code was able to be imported over, and we've streamlined some of the troublesome building elements that was giving us so many problems in Unity. It's not going to take us long to catch up to where we were, and once we do? Things will go MUCH faster than it did during the Unity era.
I'll be honest with you. When the Unity news hit, I was a disaster. I scrambled for 24 hours without sleep trying to figure out how to go from here. We had a lot of internal discussion, weighing every option we could. I really feared for the worst. Now, I'm more excited than ever. We struggled quite a bit under Unity, but we also learned so much that immediately carried over to this new engine. It lit a fire under us, and our passion only burns brighter. You guys are going to see some EXTREMELY cool stuff in the future, and I can't wait to show you... but I sadly must.
That's all for now! See you next week!
Comments
Nunya Biznezz
I wonder if part of unity’s decision was connected to Silicon Valley bank going under a few months back, by no means does it justify what they’ve done at all, but in part it comes off like they’re hurting for money mixed with greed and trying to exploit being the go to source for game development.
Double Deadline
Looks amazing. So glad to see you doing well with the alternative engine. Mind blowing to see how insane Unity's upper management has become.
Nemo
So glad you guys have found an alternative that will let you keep going. I was super worried when the news dropped about smaller devs like you. We all know this is gonna take some time to bounce back from, but it looks like it'll be an improvement in the end, so take all the time you need. Best of luck moving forward!
Jackson Tom
I'm happy to see that you managed to overcome this unity problem, wish you luck in your endeavors.
Devin
It looks like it helped improve the game in the end. We won't blame you if you need time to get back to where you were! This wasn't your fault; this was capitalism failing gamers and smaller developers once again.
KiTA
As a proud potatoian, I have to say I'm very happy to see that Amber's last shirt references my home.
