Some Backstory

I have been using Unity for the last 4 years. I started learning it in 2019 and have loved the workflow, tools, and especially the community. Before the last couple of weeks I had dabbled in other engines, mainly Unreal Engine, but I always preferred Unity, and it was the only engine I considered for Big Boat titles. However I can sadly no longer say that. Big Boat has shifted its projects to the Godot Game Engine.

Why Leave Unity

If you somehow avoided the news, Unity made some poor choices. At the beginning of September they released a blog post listed some changes to their pricing model. Now, I know Unity needs money, they have a ton (probably too many) employees and they make a tool that is incredibly useful, but that was not the way to do it… I won’t dive completely into their runtime fee, many others already have. But they have lost my trust. They have proven that in this new era of the $U ticker, developers are not their main concern. I am glad they walked back their pricing model, but it does not change my opinion on them. I am not saying I will never use Unity again, I do think that Game Engines are tools and certain projects require certain tools, but I really hope I don’t come across a project that needs Unity.

Why Godot?

Why not? It is an open source engine maintained by passionate people who benefit from actually providing their users with worthwhile features. I have been loving my time with Godot. It isn’t perfect, but for me, and my studio, it is what I need. I am pretty far along into porting over our in development game right now and things are looking good. Open Source was not a requirement for me, I would not have mind dealing with Unreal Engine’s pricing, but Godot fits me and Big Boat the best for the games that we currently want to make, so Godot is the Engine we are using right now.

What is this “Project”

This is the game that Big Boat has been working on since the end of 2022. It is still early, but it was getting to the point where I was starting to get ready to announce it with the whole works, steam page, trailer, and all of it. That will take longer now, likely not until the end of the year or beginning of 2024, but it will come…