Today thanks to a chat with GPT4 about funny translations in 90s rail shooters, I learned why the phrase “Don’t Come” showed up so often in games of that time.

Konaide (“来ないで”) –

So I only JUST found this Blender plugin that adds Unity-Style / Unreal-Style / Godot-Style right-click + WASD camera movement control and it helps me SOOOOOOOOOO much with my workflow for level design and the like, you have no freaking idea
https://github.com/SpectralVectors/RightMouseNavigation

So anyway I used Ultimate Doom Builder to export my Bubble Menace RAMP 2023 map submission to an obj model, then I imported that model into Blender (using the Legacy OBJ importer, it breaks when I try to import with the newer OBJ exporter and re-save in an yother format), I went through and deleted some parts of the geometry that should really be re-created as separate objects, and then I exported that to .obj and brought it into Godot.

Pretty neat!

Dunno if I’m really gonna commit to expanding this into a full Thing, but I am very amused to see how much nicer this workflow can feel..

I just want to take a moment to point out for anyone who thought Unity apologized for what they did to take another look at the wording.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/unity-pledges-to-tweak-controversial-runtime-fee-policy-in-the-coming-days

They are sorry that people are confused / in angst over the change.

• They are not apologizing for changing the contract under devs with only 3 months of notice.
• They are not apologizing for trying to hide the other changes to their terms of service and licensing agreements.
• They are not apologizing or their very clear attempt to extort more cash without adding any additional value.
• They are not apologizing for allowing their C level staff push this through when many of their workers pointed out that this would not be received well by literally anyone.
• They really aren’t apologizing for anything they’ve done, they merely express that they thought they would gain more than they’ld lose from this.
• They are not sorry for violating people’s trust.

Like, I get it, if you’ve been working on your game for years now and are just planning to launch in the next 6 months, you might not have any options. But Unity has made it clear they want to establish their own flavor of techno-feudalism. Get Out While You Still Can. Maybe kick up your own “Tea Party” while you’re at it. Yeet that engine into the ocean.

And just like that, in the span of a day, Unity has found a way to completely kill the appeal of small studios and indies using their engines for low priced games.

Honestly, it feels like they did this specifically to try to grab extra cash out of things like Vampire Survivors and any freemium game, because the excuse of “this covers the cost of us distributing the runtime” falls flat when people can download the runtimes from literally any of *several* other hosts. And if Unity tries to block people from getting the runtime elsewhere, then the sleezy cashgrab nature of this would be even more obvious.

Anyway, I kinda hate to see this. I’ve been learning Unity Engine since around 2010, and started putting significantly more time into learning it to mod games like Starbuster and Freedom Planet 2 in the past fourish years. I’ve been hearing plenty of other devs moving to Godot, and GalaxyTrail in particular has been pretty vocal about shifting to Godot. And I had been dabbling in Godot myself a bit and in some ways it’s a lot easier to deal with than Unity.

But yeah like. AAA gaming has been missing the mark for years, and if the game engines are about to go hike up the prices, then fine. Godot, MonoGame, Enigma, Three.js, and Phaser are all literally like _right there_ and work just fine.

Aaaaand on top of that, thanks to the recent explosion of LLMs, translating my WIP game projects from Unity to Godot or MonoGame is a lot easier than it would have been without those tools.

“Finally, Whitten suggested only about about 10% of developers who use Unity will have to pay fees because of the thresholds the company has established.”

yeaaaah. And I bet they got that 10% figure using the same method they were planning on using to track install counts, right? In which case, why would anyone who was building on Unity’s tech trust that number?

I don’t know why all at the same time Unity, Twitter, Reddit, Audacity, and Nintendo have all completely forgotten that the people using their tools are often normal humans and _not_ the megawealthy and _not_ “just AI bots” but my suggestion for anyone who happens to find this article is to stay far faaaaar away from these big companies when they offer tools to build with. They are not your friends. No matter what promise they’re making, as long as the conceptual motivation of “infinite profit” exists, they will always be a threat. Open Source and other freeware might be kinda rough and flawed, but at least they have a better grasp that they’re making things for people.

I saw this ad with the pokemon playing with balloons and it was so cute that I nearly screamed. Check out 1:05