I’m moving away from Unity

Because of reasons, I’m parting ways with Unity. It’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now as it’s not the “one person can make 3D games!” tool that I dedicated myself to over a decade ago (as it is “improved”, it asks more of me rather than less, which isn’t how tools are supposed to work). This latest news has just made it even easier to step away. Fuck military contracts.

So here’s me from now on:

• No new unity projects
• My unity systems won’t be updated (OK yeah, “lol how’s that different?” etc :P)
• I will only use unity for existing projects, and only when porting them elsewhere is unreasonable
• For those projects, I won’t spend any money that will go to Unity Technologies (eg, no asset store purchases)

What next then? Whilst I’d love to work with just pico-8 forever, it doesn’t quite have *all* the capabilities I need 😛

The first thing I’m looking at is Godot (you can see a stream of me learning of it and making a simple game here or here). It seems like the best option for the time-being, but I’ll be keeping an open mind and exploring other options as they come up. I’m feeling a little burned by comitting to one engine as if it is *the* one, and especially by my past evangelism for it. I’m now of the opinion that more options is better than one “definitive” option. Godot seems like it will be a relatively smooth transition from Unity but I don’t think I’m going to bind myself to it.

I’d recommend that kind of approach to others too tbh: don’t become dependent on your tools, especially when they are controlled by people who don’t represent you!

So, that is it for the forseeable, I’ll be trying new things! To close I’d like to thank all my patrons for their support. Patronage makes it much less scary to take time for learning and experimentation <3