I want to say that I wish I could've read this 25 years ago, but really, I wasn't ready to take it to heart back then. In fact, even though I've had a couple of minor successes with free games that I deliberately didn't get too attached to, I still have extreme difficulty just sitting down and making something--anything--rather than falling into a death spiral of over-thinking and grandiose designs. I might have to re-read this a few times to make it sink in.
Sort of. If you earned >$1 million in revenues in the past 12 months, you have two options:
Pay 2.5% of your monthly revenue
Pay a runtime fee based on your monthly downloads
So basically, they made it optional, but you still have to pay 2.5% which is still significant. Otherwise you can use the runtime fee and report data yourself (it will probably be cheaper)
Not a chance. I've been using Unreal for a few years now, and as soon as Godot has the features I need I'll go back to it. The company behind Unity has shown they don't care about their engine, just the money they can extract from it. And who's to say they don't change their terms at some future time when things have quieted down, and the dust has settled, to retroactively introduce this run-time fee back into the mix for older versions as well.
That's only a short-term solution. That LTS only lasts so long, and both Apple and Google now require that you recompile your app with the latest APIs every 2 years or less.
I was recently contracted to make a neat prototype of a game. It's a twinstick shooter with MOBA elements, you got minions coming out of towers attacking other minions and the goal is to destroy towers to make your way in and destroy the enemy base.
There's not much currently, but you can follow my progress on mastodon if you want: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@dragbone
I hope I can find a name for it soon 😅
Nintendo is pretty rabid about their IPs, they would personally deliver a cease and desist to a toddler drawing a Switch with crayons on cardboard, but if you mean this minigame, then you’ll probably be fine.
It seems so generic, if you really use nothing that belongs to Nintendo and maybe tweak the physics a little bit, it should pass at least as legally distinct.
And frankly, the game devs probably also took the idea from somewhere else, as I said, the mechanic seems pretty generic.
Godot is my goto engine for 2D and 2.5D stuff. It's fairly easy to pick up, it's free, and open source, and there's plenty or tutorials for it.
It uses GDscript which is a python like language, so it's not too difficult to learn. That's usually my recommendation to newbies.
But, I'd say try different things, and you'll figure out what you like personally. You may find something totally different suits your personal taste and interests best.
I think that the demographics of gamers have been skewing older and older, and it's finally reached the point where a critical mass are past the age where they place significant value on the "newness" of a game.
You can still find 13-year-olds decrying PS3 and 360 games as being "unplayable" due to their perceived technological shortcomings, but every year they represent a smaller and smaller slice of the total market. The surveys I've seen lump 18-35 into one group, but I'd be interested to see the results of splitting that into two groups at around 26-27.
I’m not much active in these communities, but I think there are a few which aren’t very popular but are enough for the job… I just remember that after the Unity outrage, people were recommending moving to Godot.
I wouldn't be able to compare them from a feature perspective, but it seems like Flutter itself is a cross platform general 2D app development toolkit, and people have used it to make games despite that not being its focus.
This Flutter Casual Games Toolkit looks to be a layer on top of Flutter to make that easier to do. Which is as reasonable a reason as any to create a toolkit like this.
But Godot as an engine predates the release of Flutter. So I would imagine starting fresh with no Flutter experience or jumping from Unity you would be probably better off with Godot.
Looking into their page, it gives me an impression that its doing something similar to UEFN and things like Nintendo's "game builder garage" - meaning they're trying to make game development easy by avoiding coding as a requirement.
They used trivia crack as an example, looks like it would be very good for knocking out simple games quickly - I'm thinking Facebook style games like farmville, but for any serious development or if you're looking for employable skills, you'd want to go with unity or Godot
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