[Development] The Devil we know~!

Hey y’all,

So early December last year, we decided to start using Unity again.

After the whole Unity blow-out from their terrible runtime fee in September 2023, we walked away from Memento, our Unity based engine, to work on our own engine called the OPPAI Engine.

In this post, and as part of something we want to do more on the Patreon, we’re going to go over how we got to this decision, why it matters, as well as cover some things we haven’t really talked about.

We also feel it's an important one to share with y’all, because we talked about a lot of things as a team that helped us make the final decision, that we normally don’t cover in posts.

So let’s begin.

What is Memento and the OPPAI Engine really?

The Memento Engine is our Unity based engine, and is a combination of our own code and tools built within Unity, leveraging Unity’s existing features to manage and create our games.

Memento is the result of 2+ years of work (by Zuri and Unknown) after rewriting our original engine, Zurizuri (4+ years), that was used to create the original Paizuri University and other games.

Memento is also split into two major libraries, the Visual Novel and Roleplaying libraries. With the Visual Novel library being the most stable.

The OPPAI Engine, at its core, is a framework used to build a library of features, that also integrates carefully selected open-source (freely licensable) third party libraries, which allow us to create standalone games and tools.

Using this framework, we’ve created 2 major runtimes, the Visual Novel runtime for running games, and the Developer runtime for Tools applications that let us create and manage Visual Novels.

It is all of our skills and experience from working in Unity with Zurizuri and Memento, put into our own game engine. With the goal to do everything we can do in Unity, just a little differently and plus a little more.

Both do the same thing in different ways, and both have benefits over each other.

But there is one key difference that is taken for granted, that people who play games don’t often know about.

The OPPAI engine is whole-ly our own, and isn’t subjected to terms and licensing changes like Unity, or other proprietary game-engines.

For example, if Unity makes up some new rules, increases their pricing, implements an insane runtime fee, or rolls out updates and changes that break or remove things. We have very little choice but to accept those changes if we want to continue to create games using Unity.

With the OPPAI Engine, those things don’t affect us as much. But it does mean we have to build and integrate everything ourselves, from what platforms we support (Windows, Mac, Android etc.), to tools that make it easier, to what third-party libraries to use and their licensing.

Why the change of heart?

Now that you know about our engines, why are we going back to using Unity? Why the change of heart?

We talked about it a lot, and it wasn’t a simple decision.

Last year, in October, Unity backpedalled on their dumb runtime fee. And after talking about it for weeks, the removal of the runtime fee is partly why we’ve decided to go back.

But there is more to it. Especially when we dug deeper into it.

A lot of our feelings about Unity are about how they do business. Not the developers who make it, or the tool itself. We learned anecdotally that many of the developers at Unity are incredibly passionate about games, tools and creativity. And those passions deeply align with our own.

Now, this doesn't mean we trust Unity as a business, especially since there are no guarantees that they won’t pull some kind of stunt, like the runtime fee, again. Those feelings haven’t changed.

But we weren’t in a good place to make such an important decision to begin with. At the time, we were enduring a number of life events, and Unity’s “plans” were the icing on an already terrible cake.

We’ve always wanted to make our own game engine, and since a lot of the code we had in Memento was with that in mind, we made the decision to jump from the Unity ship. But what happened with Unity pushed us to do it out of duress.

Over time, things started to feel a little like “Moby Dick”, hunting some kind of White Whale. We started to feel what was important wasn’t being addressed, and what wasn’t important was leading us somewhere we didn’t want it to go.

After the events we’d experienced last year adding on top along with the health scare, the risks of what we were taking on became all the more clearer. Continuing to make decisions under duress, is how you fuck things up.

So we stopped, took the time to step back, and figure things out.

From all that, we’ve decided to go back to using Memento in Unity to work on the Paizuri University remake and focus on creating games.

What about the OPPAI Engine?

In the last year and a bit, the OPPAI Engine has grown in leaps, and has laid down a solid foundation for important features to be worked on, creating the space for us to experiment. There has been lots of learning, approaching old problems in new ways, as well as working on lots of things we’ve never encountered before.

It’s been exciting, and has opened new opportunities for us to expand our knowledge about how to create games and other cool possibilities in the future.

But in our rush to get OPPAI back to where we were in Memento, it hasn’t exactly been fun. It has meant we’ve had to step outside our comfort zones often, and learn some pretty crazy stuff that takes time to absorb before it suddenly makes sense.

We would like to just use the OPPAI Engine for everything we’re creating. But if we want to do this right (which we do) it’s still at least a year (maybe two) from being ready.

So we’re going for a hopefully smarter approach to OPPAI’s development, using Unity and Memento to focus on creating games, while we take our time with OPPAI and absorb what we need to learn in the background.

This also ensures OPPAI as our Plan B, just in case… I don’t know… certain organizations figure out new ways to screw people over again. ¯\(ツ)/¯

And by doing so, we can set our sights on the lewd stories and the cute art that creates our games. Not just an engine.

All starting with the Paizuri University remake.

And that’s it!

If you managed to get through all that, thank you. It’s a long one. But in case it was too long, we’ll just summarise.

We’re going back to Unity to use Memento to focus on the Paizuri University remake, with the OPPAI Engine being developed in the background until it’s ready.

If you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to make them below.

Decisions like this don’t happen often, but when they do, there’s a lot of stuff that has to happen behind the scenes that we often don’t talk about, at least not in detail like this. Which we’d like to change, so we hope you found that insightful.

And with that, this will bring Zuripai Games and the Patreon relaunch a little closer.

We hope y’all excited for everything to come.

~ Zuri Sama & The Zurpai Team ~