My future with Unity

Unity has been doing rounds again after announcing its new pricing plans. I figured it's as good of a time as ever to talk about my future with Unity. Please keep in mind that regardless of the timing, my thoughts were not really influenced by the recent questionable business decisions. This post has been a long time coming. I've been thinking about it for the past year or so.

TLDR: I decided to abandon Unity and rewrite Astortion in Bevy.

I want to be brutally honest with you. Using Unity for these past few years has been a nightmare. The engine is clanky, tedious, and bloated. It drowns under the pressure of backward compatibility. Has no clear direction as to what it wants to be. And still manages to lack fundamental features you'd expect a game engine to have.

Regardless, my ongoing plan was to push through it - develop Astortion as fast as possible and then move on to a different engine.

But I failed to do so.

As I mentioned in the post about Foundations, over time I grew attached to Astortion. What initially started as a quick little game idea became the "dream game" of mine. I really want it to be a great experience for you and all the other players. Phoning it in like that just wouldn't cut it.

My current vision for Astortion is a bit unusual, especially when it comes to rendering. Trying to realize it in a general-purpose engine like Unity felt like a constant march against the wind.

The Foundations break gave me plenty of time to think and I came to the conclusion that there's no point in going any deeper into the mud. The sunk cost fallacy is strong with this one but I suppose it's time to give up and move on.

Now, I know that this whole post can be countered with a simple "skill issue." Clearly, people manage to make wonderful games using Unity, it's not that abstract to assume that I am the problem and not the engine. And I don't necessarily disagree with that. Maybe I'm just bad at using Unity. Still, at the end of the day, I tried and failed, so it's about time to try other things.

So what's next?

The plan is to rewrite Astortion in Bevy.

While Bevy is also a generic-purpose engine, its modular architecture lets me take just the parts I need. In the case of Astortion that would be the Entity Component System, Window and Input handling, and Asset Management. The renderer would be custom-made using WebGPU. The UI rendering would be done using Vello.

I already did some R&D and it seems really promising. I'll make the final decision once Foundations is finished. If you'd like to discuss this feel free to do so on our discord server.

What about Foundations?

We'll finish Foundations as planned. There are some delays but the game should take at most one more month to finish.

I'd like to use it as my final goodbye to Unity. Together with the source code of the game, I'll release all my tools like Typewriter and Cartographer and call it a wrap.

Was everything so far a waste of time?

I don't think so. I've learned a lot about game engines and programming in general while using Unity. Thanks to it, I now know precisely what I need to realize my goals. Among other things:

• The knowledge I gained when creating my pixel renderer is extremely relevant when it comes to WebGPU.
• Typewriter already has a lot in common with the ECS architecture, so migrating it should go smoothly.

Will this affect the release date of Astortion?

Unfortunately yes, at least by a few years.

I cannot overstate how sorry I am for this. I know that lots of you support me because you're excited about Astortion. And Gamedev YouTubers have a track record of taking years to finish a single game without ever delivering. I promise that I'm not the type of person who would switch engines like socks just because I got bored/distracted. I'm as dedicated to finishing Astortion as ever. I hope I didn't betray your trust but if I did, I'm sorry. If you no longer feel like supporting me that's completely valid and I understand.

Some positives

Rewriting the game will be a great opportunity to rethink some fundamental gameplay decisions I made in the past. I'd like to put a strong emphasis on playtesting and being more transparent about the decisions I make. I'll talk about it some more after Foundations.

But that's it for now. Thank you so much for reading and for your continuous support. Please do let me know what you think about this decision.