The last couple weeks have seen a lot of brouhaha around Unity’s proposed runtime fee. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then read this, but long story short the changes left a bad taste in mouths across the game industry, including mine. This is making me investigate new options to use for developing personal projects.
Now, nothing’s really changed for me at work, and I’m still going to be using Unity deeply every day. However, I’m probably going to switch to a different tool for personal projects. I have, after all, already made one big switch in my career (from Flash to Unity) so this is just something I do every decade anyway.
Here’s a big list of alternatives. From that list, two obvious candidates for new dev tools are Unreal and Godot. I’m likely to explore both eventually, but neither is where I’m starting actually. I’m most curious about Heaps.io, and will test that out first. The main reason I trend toward preferring Heaps over other options is because it is the most cross-platform option I’ve seen, and can even build to WebGL. I like making browser-playable HTML prototypes and demos.
However, while I have the best feeling about Heaps.io, that option does have the obvious downside of a new programming language. I’m not scared of learning a new language, but continuing to use C# sure would be nice. That’s why I’m also planning to test using MonoGame. That supports almost as many target platforms, but is programmed in C#.
On the downside for both of these options, they don’t have a nice editor like Unity. I’m a programmer so not concerned about working code-first rather than visually (plus I have tools like my dropper for Blender to do level editing) but ultimately this is why Stride3D is another option I’m investigating.
So many options!
