thewayne | Entries tagged with game development

Yeah, that's the word to be used: debacle.

A few weeks ago the makers of the Unity game engine, a very widely used game engine, announced a change to price per install which would have had major ramifications on small organizations, not to mention developers who had bought a license that they thought exempted them from such. It also would have exposed developers to 'hate installs' where someone could fire up a scripted virtual machine to install the game, delete the VM, create a new VM, reinstall the game, ad infinitum, to rack up charges against the developer.

A mass revolt of the install base began.

Some operations were too far into their projects to change engines. Some cancelled projects, others swore their next and future projects were going to other platforms. Word began to spread about another game engine called Godot that claims to be able to import all your Unity assets and you can hit the ground running.

There are two big new stories over the last couple of weeks and a huge one today. Initially, Unity was all 'We are surprised, but not bending'. On 9/22, the president of Unity, Marc Whitten had a press conference and said 'We're on a mission to earn back developer trust.' Which, of course, is weasel words to say 'We massively fucked up, it's obvious that it's really going to screw over the company, and we've got to suck up and try to get everybody back! Unity scaled back the fee structure, the question became whether this would be enough? The developers felt quite burned as they'd been assured that said structure would never have been changed in the first place.

I'm not going to go into the details of the new fee structure, you're welcome to read the Ars article. Regardless, a major serving of humble crow pie and the shareholders telling the board to dig in.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/unity-exec-tells-ars-hes-on-a-mission-to-earn-back-developer-trust/

https://games.slashdot.org/story/23/09/25/0245233/unity-president-apologizes-thanks-devs-for-feedback-pledges-sustainable-future

Literally the next DAY, the oldest Unity developer's group DISSOLVED! This group had been in existence for thirteen years, and they pulled the plug. Clearly it didn't happen as a direct result of the interview, you don't dissolve a group like this overnight - it takes some planning. BUG, the Boston Unity Group, was founded in 2010 and says that there's nothing preventing Unity from doing this backstab again.

From the Ars article: "Since its founding in 2010, the Boston Unity Group (BUG) has attracted thousands of members to regular gatherings, talks, and networking events, including many technical lectures archived on YouTube. But the group says it will be hosting its last meeting Wednesday evening via Zoom because the Unity of today is very different from the Dave Helgason-led company that BUG says "enthusiastically sanctioned and supported" the group at its founding.

"Over the past few years, Unity has unfortunately shifted its focus away from the games industry and away from supporting developer communities," the group leadership wrote in a departure note. "Following the IPO, the company has seemingly put profit over all else, with several acquisitions and layoffs of core personnel. Many key systems that developers need are still left in a confusing and often incomplete state, with the messaging that advertising and revenue matter more to Unity than the functionality game developers care about."

Again, it looks like the company going public and stock-based, having to answer to share holders and Wall Street, was the big moving force behind the per-install charges.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/oldest-unity-game-developer-group-breaks-up-over-lack-of-trust-in-the-company/

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/09/26/2151223/unity-dev-group-dissolves-after-13-years-over-completely-eroded-company-trust

Now here's the biggie from today.

The CEO of Unity has resigned from the company in hopes of 'avoiding a stock panic'!

So clearly it was all about the Benjamins from the beginning.

https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/10/09/2129255/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle

It will be interesting to see what the next chapters of this debacle look turn out to be. They can't revert their pricing/licensing scheme to what it was before this all happened: the shareholders won't let them, and they've already burned their developers. Any budding game developers are going to be looking at other platforms because they've now seen how Unity treats their devs.

Anyone want any action on 'Fire sale for the corp in less than five years?'

What timing! Looks like someone over there reads geek technical news and sees trends. Whouldathunkit?

The bundle will server you as an excellent introduction to the Godot gaming platform development system with 20 training courses for $25. They are listed as multi-platform.

These are not books, not 100% sure they're downloadable. The web site description: "Master Godot—the lightweight, fast, and free game engine behind hits like Sonic Colors: Ultimate. Whether you want to use the brand new version 4 or the battle-tested version 3, these courses will get you building platformers, RPGs, first-person shooters, city-builders, strategy games, and more—no prior experience required! Plus, you’ll learn how to customize your games by creating your own art and assets, all while supporting Girls Who Code with your purchase!"

The bundle will be available for twenty days!

https://www.humblebundle.com/software/everything-you-need-to-know-about-godot-4-encore-software

Unity used to be THE game engine that developers went to. It was multiplatform, and it was pretty much free for small developers to get in to for early projects. Big developers paid more for it, which makes sense.

Well, that all changed this week.

There's an old joke that when you take your car to your mechanic and you need a whole bunch of stuff done, like your brake fluid filter replaced, that the mechanic needs to make a boat payment. Well, in this case, it's like Unity's entire board needs new boats.

They are going to start charging users of Unity's engine $0.20 every time someone INSTALLS a game using the Unity engine! The developers/game company eats that fee. It slides slightly, like if you're a huge company like Bethesda or EA, it goes down once you're above a certain threshold.

But let's look at a couple of very real events. A game company developed a game with the Unity engine, I believe it was called Vampire. They sold it on the Steam platform for $0.99. Steam automatically takes a 30% cut. Had Unity been taking $0.20 at that time, the developer would have been taking a loss on every single unit.

Second scenario. For whatever reason, you hate Bob at Bob's Game Studio. Maybe he left a snarky comment on a social media post that you didn't like. So you write a script that will create a virtual machine that will then download Bob's game, install it, then delete the VM and repeat endlessly. Costing Bob $0.20 until you decide to stop the process. And hey, why not rent some Amazon cloud servers and spin up a few dozen VM servers to do the same thing?

Among the worst parts of this is that Unity promised to never do such a thing, now they're doing it. And to top it off, they're saying that this fee will be RETROACTIVE. The game that you made on a previous version of the Unity engine? Start coughing up those 80% of a quarter.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/game-developers-unite-against-unitys-new-per-install-pricing-structure/

Developers are furious. So much so that Unity has had to close two offices because of threats against the company and its people. Closed at least through the end of the week. They have 15 offices in North America, 39 world-wide.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/09/potential-threat-shuts-two-unity-offices-after-per-install-fee-announcement/

But there is a bright spot on the horizon: Godot. Yes, you don't have to wait for Godot. (sorry/not sorry: couldn't resist)

There's a new game engine in town that goes by Godot. It's fairly mature, up to the V4 stage with the v3 engine in long-term support. It is multi-platform including iOS and Android, supports C#, C++, Rust and a number of other languages. AND it's free and open source. You can use Blender with it and several other languages to create assets for it.

Absolutely guaranteed that computer game developers will be switching to it by the legion.

Humble Bundle frequently sells programming bundles for game developers for Unity. I wonder how long until they sell them for Godot and whether the frequency of offering them for Unity goes down.

https://godotengine.org/

I knew Ars Technica would have a write-up on the passing of Klaus and how much Catan means around the world.

Monopoly is/was held as a pinnacle of board games. I hate it with a deep and abiding loathing reserved for things that I deeply and abidingly loathe. It is a horrible game. This article quotes a statistic that says the average Monopoly set is played ONE POINT FIVE TIMES. Now THAT is a truly horrible game! It isn't FUN because you're constantly getting screwed, people are eliminated one by one. It is a runaway winner game: once someone gets certain properties and has hotels on them, game over.

There are house rules that can slow this down, but the progression is largely going to be the same.

Catan, and other games like it, brought cooperation into competitive board games. And you can feel like you're in the running until the very end, so you have a reason to pay attention to what's going on. In the case of Catan, you are encouraged to cooperate and trade resources with others in order to complete your personal goals. The infamous "I have wood for sheep" became a part of gaming vernacular because of Catan, in this case, someone wanting to trade wood for needed sheep.

I didn't hate Monopoly when I was young, but I never liked it. It just wasn't fun. Now, this was back in the '60s and '70s, Euro Games hadn't really been invented yet and we were stuck with what we had. As I grew older and experienced a wider panoply of games, I saw the flaws for what they were: eliminating players/zero-sum, and runaway leaders. And now, I don't know of any games that I own that have these characteristics. When I get a game like Monopoly, or someone gives me a set, I harvest the money and the pawns and consider keeping the board, all for repurposing for game designs that I work on. It never gets played.

Last year my middle niece got married, and their registry asked for board games. I looked at that list and said 'Nope, no way. They're getting some QUALITY intro board games from me!' And among them, I gave them Carcasonne, a brilliant tile-laying game about building castles and towns in medieval France. Every game is completely different, you play to the end and it's a lot of fun. You score points every turn, which helps you feel like you're accomplishing something. My nieces, sister, and parents already had a lot of experience playing Quirkle, a color/shape tile-laying game, where, again, you score points every turn and there are a couple of twists that can really boost your score! AND you draw tiles from a bag, which is cool.

Now, Catan itself, I'm not a huge fan of. Perhaps if I played it more some of the deeper strategies would sink in and I'd do better at it. But it's a good enough game and I have a couple of copies including some expansions that I bought when game stores went out of business. But socially, an infinitely better game than Monopoly. Everyone participates, even when it's not your turn: while only the turning player can make trades, you might have extra sheep you can offer up and better your own position while helping someone else.

Even if I'm not a huge fan of it, Catan is a great game and well worth people's time. It is not hideously complex, and it's a fast game to learn and play, it typically finishes in about an hour. When was the last time you were able to play multiple games of Monopoly in an evening and enjoy it?

RIP, Klaus. Ya done good and made a huge number of people happy.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/klaus-teuber-made-catan-and-it-changed-the-worlds-expectations-for-board-games/

The comments on this Ars article are excellent and a recommended read. You really get a feeling for how many people his game touched.

And one last comment. While Klaus did a great job, he is just one of the great game designers out there. Reiner Knitzia is right up there with an insane number of games to his credit, as is Friedman Frisch with the great game Power Grid. Both win awards. There are far more out there than I'll ever be able to name.

Klaus was a dental lab manager in Germany, passed Saturday after a short illness.

Oh, and he invented a board game known as Settlers of Cataan, one of the biggest selling board games in the world.

Three times he won the Spiel De Jahres award, the German Game of the Year award.

NYT may be paywalled:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/05/business/klaus-teuber-dead.html

https://news.slashdot.org/story/23/04/05/165209/klaus-teuber-creator-of-the-board-game-catan-dies-at-70

I expect Ars Technica will have a story later today that isn't paywalled, I'll update when I find it.

Came across a tool that's designed for writing, what is in effect, solo adventures. And since it supports both stored variables and a random number generator, there's no reason why you couldn't write a combat randomizer in the background. It's called Twine, and the development system and is multi-platform: Windows, Mac, Linux via Python. And it's free to use and free to release. You can put your developed stories on web sites or burn them to CD.

I can't say that I've worked with this, but it looks like it has huge potential and definitely seems worth looking in to. It has a GUI interface where each block has a name and text with code for options, the code branches to other blocks. Seems fairly straightforward. It was used to develop a recent Hamlet Choose-your-own Adventure that was massively funded on Kickstarter.

This is pretty cool.

http://www.gimcrackd.com/etc/src/

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/12/hamlet-choose-adventure/?pid=8876&viewall=true

An interesting article that I found from the blog of game reviewer and designer Paul Tevis. It discusses the challenge of balancing a game, specifically a massive multiplayer online game, but I think it conceptually applies quite well to any form of game design.

http://www.eldergame.com/2010/11/how-to-balance-an-mmo-and-how-to-stop/

Specifically, movies that involve court intrigue and samples of people sucking up or otherwise currying favor. I just realized that this could also include political/business drama movies, the same sort of sucking up occurs in both politics and business, though I guess politics iz politics regardless of era. Right now I'm thinking about Ever After and Three/Four Musketeers, but I definitely need more. Any suggestions? This is for a game that I'm developing, if you're interested in this (broadly-speaking) genre, I might be able to pull you in to the development process.