Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

if you want to make a game engine, make a game engine

if you want to make a game, do not under any circumstances make a game engine

Unity posted a FAQ on their official forums (source: https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-plan-pricing-and-packaging-updates.1482750/) that basically amounts to confirming everyone's worst fears.

Q: How are you going to collect installs?
A: We leverage our own proprietary data model. We believe it gives an accurate determination of the number of times the runtime is distributed for a given project.

"Trust us bro"

Q: Is software made in unity going to be calling home to unity whenever it's ran, even for enterprice licenses?
A: We use a composite model for counting runtime installs that collects data from numerous sources. The Unity Runtime Fee will use data in compliance with GDPR and CCPA. The data being requested is aggregated and is being used for billing purposes.

Just an insane response. Unity is saying that they are basically guessing those numbers. They're also not answering the actual question of whether telemetry will be mandatory even for enterprise licensed runtimes.

Q: If a user reinstalls/redownloads a game / changes their hardware, will that count as multiple installs?
A: Yes. The creator will need to pay for all future installs. The reason is that Unity doesn’t receive end-player information, just aggregate data.

The problems with this are of course numerous.

Q: If a game that's made enough money to be over the threshold has a demo of the same game, do installs of the demo also induce a charge?
A: If it's early access, Beta, or a demo of the full game then yes. If you can get from the demo to a full game then yes. If it's not, like a single level that can't upgrade then no.

Unity is now basically dictating what type of demo or release strategy you can have, lest you be charged for installs of a demo.

Q: What's going to stop us being charged for pirated copies of our games?
A: We do already have fraud detection practices in our Ads technology which is solving a similar problem, so we will leverage that know-how as a starting point. We recognize that users will have concerns about this and we will make available a process for them to submit their concerns to our fraud compliance team.

"Trust us bro."

Q: When in the lifecycle of a game does tracking of lifetime installs begin? Do beta versions count towards the threshold?
A: Each initialization of an install counts towards the lifetime install.

Imagine an online multiplayer game that does a limited closed-beta network test to stress test their servers. Poof! That's potentially thousands of installs right there.

Q: Does this affect WebGL and streamed games?
A: Games on all platforms are eligible for the fee but will only incur costs if both the install and revenue thresholds are crossed. Installs - which involves initialization of the runtime on a client device - are counted on all platforms the same way (WebGL and streaming included).

Another nonanswer. How in the fuck are you tracking installs in the WebGL implementation?

Q: Are these fees going to apply to games which have been out for years already? If you met the threshold 2 years ago, you'll start owing for any installs monthly from January, no? (in theory). It says they'll use previous installs to determine threshold eligibility & then you'll start owing them for the new ones.
A: Yes, assuming the game is eligible and distributing the Unity Runtime then runtime fees will apply. We look at a game's lifetime installs to determine eligibility for the runtime fee. Then we bill the runtime fee based on all new installs that occur after January 1, 2024.

Utterly deranged, shameless, insane.

Aaand they're already doing a weak backpedal, now claiming that Unity will not count multiple installs and instead will only count initial installs (per device). Besides the fact that a mildly sophisticated attacker could still abuse this system to 'install-bomb' a developer (as hardware identifiers are easy to spoof), it doesn't exactly inspire confidence that earlier they were claiming they were going to be billing studios for runtime fees based on a "proprietary model" that couldn't distinguish between initial and later installs... which is to say, Unity is now promising to do something that a couple hours ago they were claiming was impossible.

Once again, fuck John Riccietielo, and I don't think anyone should take this bad spin job as meaningful. Unity is still planning to do something tremendously harmful to lots of studios, they're just now showing how ill-considered and lazy their stupid little plan was.

“Our made-up numbers will be smaller now, we promise *wink*”

you could make money betting on these antics

indie game dev is just about cheating, always, all the time, whenever it saves you a headache. just constantly doing the most illegal stuff. wacko art styles, hacky one-off scripts, doors that are also tables that are also clouds... games combine 15+ creative disciplines into a single medium and you do not have enough lifespan to do things with propriety

ok ok ok, i thought of a good example of this i ran into recently!!

There's a certain boss fight in Bossgame that has a lot of story beats within the fight, like big plot points are happening, it's a climax of the story, everything is very important. this is pretty much the only fight in the game like this, every other mid-fight conversation is very minimal - characters only speak in one-sentence popups and yell short "battle quotes"

So basically i had NO way of portraying a complex plot mid-battle. I thought about possibly changing scenes to the standard "phone text cutscene" but that code would be a pain and it'd kill the pace. I thought about just doing dozens of the one-sentence popups, but that would take ages and wouldn't have the dramatic feel i was hoping for

SO, what i did: after beating phase 1, i made the boss spawn an empty object, which had a script that would spawn other objects on a timer. Then i had the boss pause its AI for ~55 seconds. the controller object spawns a giant solid black plane to hide the battle, and a bunch of image & text objects play directly over top the battle. the whole cutscene is all just weird one-off objects spawning over each other in sequence.

From there, i just winged the rest. Like, i couldn't really figure out how to convey who was speaking at first, until i realized I could just make massively size up the 48px character heads. i made everything slide around a bit for dynamism and damn, it just... came together. the cutscene is surprisingly complex for me just spawning things over top a battle (i think you can even still press character buttons during it...)

programming a battle cutscene manager would have been a pain to do for a single battle, so i just slapped it all together with gum and it worked!! in fact, i think the limitations inspired me to try some creative workarounds and helped me come up with ideas!! basically, sometimes hacking is great.

This may not be the answer you were anticipating, but: I wish I'd known that, by and large, you can pick a lot of it up as you go if you're good at self-learning.

I went into gamedev with, functionally speaking, my only coding experience being a single camp as a kid that taught me basic and visual basic. I'd messed around a little more with modding graal online, but realistically, to say I had "programming experience" would be misleading. I was an animator, pretty much ONLY an animator, who knew what a "goto" was, basically.

Late in development of clockwork empires it was becoming pretty clear that the art team's work was winding down but we needed more people to help work on the gameplay. Artists were handed books on writing lua and told to do a few chapters. As someone who has a particular penchant for how-to books, this was like lighting a match for me. I came back from this "learn how to write hello world" tutorial with, somewhat infamously, an app containing a physically-bouncing, flaming Monkey Island screenshot.

Things only escalated from there. I grabbed any bit of task I was even mildly interested in (I was interested in all of them) and ended up taking responsibility for more-or-less the entire economy balance, writing and scripting the full tutorial and "civilopedia", and a ton of in-game event work for Clockwork Empires. By the end of a few years I was doing all kinds of things in lua that probably should not have been allowed by law. And then gaslamp ended.

I took the opportunity being out-of-work to voraciously consume the entire unity tutorial suite in a week and then start working on my own clone of Tetris Attack, written mostly in C#. I ended up putting it on hold because of freelance work, but my job description has ended up becoming more and more amorphous over the years - for radial games I wrote entire gameplay prototypes myself, fixed bugs, whatever was needed. Once you know how to do such a large swathe of gamedev it's really hard to just say "not my problem" when an issue crops up. Maybe that's the fun of solo dev to some degree; it's hard not to feel fancy as hell when you can be an entire production team by yourself.

Anyway, now we come to my current job at ivy road, where I've leveraged my job as animation lead and my coding knowledge to basically become the queen of gameplay animation. Typically speaking, when I get an idea in my head of how I want something to look, it's my job to not just animate it but to put it into the game and make it feel the way I want it to feel, whether that's hand-tuning input timings and buffering, setting up procedural animation using curves and Blueprint (I will have so much to say about this after we launch), or even building out tools for other devs to simplify their intersection with my work.

None of this is what I trained for in school. I went to school for film animation. I trained how to make animations in maya and export them, and that's about it. The rest is sheer enthusiasm and a lot of internet searching, reading, and sometimes just trying different avenues to make something work, over and over, until one of them finally does. You can brute force a lot of technical skills just by being interested in doing something practical with them.

Anyway, that's the thing I kind of wish I'd known going into games. You don't have to pigeonhole yourself! I can be an animator-rigger-coder-designer-person rather than just one of those things, and flourish. And that's pretty great, IMO.