Writer, game developer, queer artist of failure. Half of @fpg: Future Proof Games.


Future Proof Games
futureproofgames.com/
Before the Future Came: A Star Trek Podcast
beforethefuture.space/

posts from @gaw tagged #indie game dev

also: #indie dev, #indiedev

My fury at Unity has been renewed as I'm trying to get a legacy project running on a modern Android API. Some things I'm shouting into the void:

  • Why is basic Android game capability dependent on a third-party plugin from Google instead of, like, the IDE?
  • Unity was seriously on JDK 8 until the year of our Goddess 2022?!
  • How is there not just a simple guide in the documentation for getting 2019 projects running on modern Android? It's just a build target.
  • Why does updating my Unity version require modifying my source files just to find out how hard migration will be? In Python/Django, for instance, I can just upgrade my packages and see what kind of errors pop up. How do they still not have any sort of in-place backward compatibility for old project files?

Ren'Py just works seamlessly for Android. It's maintained by one lead dev and random contributors. Unity is orders of magnitude more complex, of course, but they also had $1.39B in revenue in 2022. How is "make sure old Unity projects are easy to keep working on major digital storefronts" not their #1 priority? I know, I know. Capitalism.