1y ago

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

www.wired.com Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle::Even though the company behind the wildly popular game engine walked back its controversial new fee policy, the damage is done.

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nanoUFO @sh.itjust.works

1y ago

Unity May Never Win Back the Developers It Lost in Its Fee Debacle

www.wired.com /story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

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The thing is, they don't even have to lose all their developers. They just have to lose enough so that introductory gamedev classes start being taught in Godot, indie devs start seeing Godot as a viable option and employers start posting listings looking for Godot experience. Unity was the default engine for lower-budget games for years, and now that's gone.
- one of the best things out of all this is how many new people are now making youtube tutorials on Godot. The huge amount of new monthly donations to the Godot Foundation is also great
- Should I start learning Godot? I’m not a game dev, but I know C/Cpp and game dev has been interesting to me.
  
  Nobody can tell you in advance how far your interest in game dev will take you. Only one way to find out: start small (some tutorials, build some crappy first) and see if your interest sticks around as you up the challange.
  Maybe game dev in Godot will end up being a significant chapter in your life, maybe it will just be a small sidequest. But once you've given it an honest try, no matter the outcome, you at least will know if it's something for you or not. That in itself is already worth something.
  And who knows: maybe Godot is just your entry gateway to something else you discover along the way, which you wouldn't have discovered if you hadn't taken on the challange in the first place.
  
  I side quested JS/React and went back to embedded. But the side quest definitely allowed me to understand more things and the variations in coding languages.
  
  If you know C++ already, Unreal is a much more natural starting point than either Unity or Godot.
  Unreal is what gets used in many AAA shops - it's not a monopoly by any means but it is the most common off-the-shelf engine in the industry. Unity's main edge is that it's easy to learn but if you are comfortable in C++ then there's no real benefit to Unity.
  Godot uses GDScript, which is a custom scripting language that's meant to be easy to learn. It's FOSS so you don't need to worry about being screwed over - but it's a lot less mature than something like Unreal which can ship on everything you can think of.
  But my advice is to make small things. Don't hyperfocus on a dream game. Just make things that will take a weekend (maybe a week at most). Then move on to something else.
  When I was getting into game dev, I made a couple simple projects then jumped into my dream game. I spent so long making that one game that I never finished.
  When I got hired in the industry, they cared more about what I released than what my education or job experience was. Because that one big game was never finished, I wound up with my smaller "just getting started" games on my resume; stuff I had made but wasn't proud of. But those games were at least finished and available to the public... and they were what got me hired, not my magnum opus overscoped unfinished indie game I never completed.
  
  Thanks! My C/Cpp knowledge is from embedded programming, arduino and now moving to just Cpp coding. I keep hearing people say python is easier or such thing is simpler but I just can’t see c/Cpp as unapproachable. Plus at least with embedded python gets translated to c for the core to run. Right now I’m playing with LVGL for embedded screen interfaces. It’s fun. I’ll dig into unreal when I get a moment of boredom/hyperfocus.
  
  If you want to use C/C++ you may be more interested in O3DE, although it's a AAA specialized game engine that's not very user friendly. If you're new to game dev in general, then Godot is definitely the easiest to get started with, but you should use GDScript and not C/C++.
  EDIT: or just make your own little game engine with OpenGL or Vulkan, That's probably the most effective way to learn nearly everything..
  
  There is C# support in Godot. I'm not sure how many tutorials have been made with it in particular, but I think there's plenty. Plus their docs go over the API differences so shouldn't be hard to use in any case
- I hope to see a lot of the features added to Godot that Unity refugees have been requesting and working on (because, yknow, open-source) and would expect to see at least 25% Godot 25% Unity 50% Unreal in the job market. Although honestly it is more likely that Unreal takes up a larger share of the market going forward, whereas in the past it has been like 60% Unity positions and 40% Unreal positions (due to Unity use on smaller projects, indie games, and use in the VR training industry).
  
  2D projects also used Unity at a very high rate. Unreal has never really been considered suitable for 2D work. I'm not sure if Godot is.
  
  Godot has been used mainly for 2D as it didn't support 3D until fairly recently.
  
  Godot actually has supported 3D since at least 2.1 when I started using it in 2016.
  But really sucked for a long time. It's pretty good now.
  
  For general 2d development, Godot is much better than unity already. It doesn't have everything that unity does but what it has is much more efficient and easy to understand.
  Though the opposite is true for 3d.
  In short: Unity is a 3d tool where you can pretend one of the dimensions doesn't exist to make 2d games (but it's still running a 3d environment behind the curtains, you're just not seeing one of them), while godot is a 2d tool that gives you an optional third dimension for some stuff.
  
  Wrong.
  Godot has fully independent 2D and 3D engines. Each one has it's own backend, that is specialized for that purpose.
  
  Yes, but the general feel with the 3d stuff in Godot is that it's just an added dimension on top of things that were thought for 2d. In unity everything feels like it was thought for 3d. It's a bit hard to explain.
  
  Waiting for the ability to target mobile in c# and for embedding to work.. should see that in the next year I think with the renewed focus on it.. we don't use many unity features but those two are kinda showstoppers right now.

120 comments