cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/11796632
TL;DR the developers of slay the spire created a fun free card game within 3 weeks to explore and learn the Godot game engine. You can play it here: https://megacrit.itch.io/dancing-duelists
Absolute chads
I’m sure Unity execs had a meetingwhere they thought studios wouldn’t switch engines over their bs.
I’ve heard the same bs before…
f"switching to {competitor} would be way too much work for {customer}, they’ll make a fuss but they’ll stay with us" is something I’ve heard in some form or another for every big account that’s been lost.I threw away a year long project within an hour of finding out about the change. I’m starting over in Godot and while I’m still upset I also know more than I did and feel I can make it better.
Guess unity didn’t account for indie devs already having one foot in the FOSS world, so why not both feet?
Strong-arming your customers is a terrible strategy in the long term. You’re counting on your customers staying not because they like your product, but because they have no better choice available, or the switching cost is too great, so they’re forced to stay. This can get you extra short term profit but almost ensures long-term doom. Your customer is going to drop you like a rock at the first opportunity, and eventually that opportunity will always come.
Absolutely.
But greedy short-sighted fucks will chase short-term profits over long-term relations or sustainability.
Every single customer account I’ve been involved with and that we’ve lost, I have a paper trail of warnings I’ve flagged but were ignored.
Squeeze them enough and they’ll drop you at the first occasion.
On a related note, does anyone know what Megacrit is doing nowadays, do they have a new project going on?
They’ve been working on a new game ever since Spire stopped getting regular updates. The project was in Unity though and this little dancing game was a three-week “jam” game so that Mega Crit could try out the Godot engine and see if it was a viable alternative to Unity for their next real project. Turns out they do like Godot and have ported their in-progress game from Unity to Godot and can now continue development!
They released this jam project like two days ago. I highly doubt they’ve ported their in-progress game to a new engine in that short amount of time, that’s a significant effort that could take months.
Yes and no. I’ve seen people roughly port smaller games over in a single weekend. I’d probably take a guess of about 1-2 weeks, not multiple months. Godot is surprisingly similar. Obviously it’s not all gonna be best practice, but since it also supports c#, you can more or less just copy and paste the code and slowly sift through compiler errors, replacing old Unity stuff with new Godot stuff. It’s a pain, but not quite as much as you’d expect
Take a read for yourself: Brian Bucklew porting Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot
Ah sorry, didn’t mean to be fully past-tense there. One of the programmers swapped off the jam project after two of the three weeks to begin the work porting their next game to Godot, because 2/3 of the jam time was enough for Mega Crit to go “ok yeah we like Godot”