CUDCrawler and the Unity Debacle

Hoooooooooooo boy!

I was hoping to have A4 out by the end of September, but Unity threw a huge wrench into that! With their recent reveals about monetizing, I'm planning on pulling CUDCrawler off of Unity and using a different engine. Godot looks the most likely. It's not particularly strong when it comes to 3D games, but it will be more than sufficient for CUDCrawler, which I've never really intended to be a graphical powerhouse.

So what's this mean for dev time? Realistically, I can't give a timeline for how long all of this is going to take. While Godot and Unity both work with C#, the work flow is a good bit different, as are implementations of methods that I've gotten used to over the last decade of working with Unity. That having been said, outside of UI design (God help me...), most of the code I've written should be reasonable enough to drag on over. At the same time, I'm still going to have to learn the ins and outs of a new engine, and Godot handles things like game objects very, very differently from Unity.

I would love to keep working with Unity, but since going public, the company has very strongly shown how little they care for the people using their software. The writing has been on the wall for a few years now and I think that, at this point, the engine and its associated splash screen is a black mark. Certainly something I don't want to be associated with going forward.

For those curious about what A4 is going to contain, player-side it'll be a new dungeon to explore that's probably familiar ground for old dungeon crawler fans. The new dungeon will come with new monsters to fight, new items to find, and it'll be a bit more interesting to poke around in than the old mines.

The majority of work that's gone into A4 up to this point has been on the editor side of things and while most of that isn't player-facing, the results of it should, hopefully, be pretty evident when comparing the Ruins of Darkmoon to the caverns that versions A1 through A3 shipped with.

I will endeavor to update on here as progress on CUDCrawler's Godot update comes along. Things should move fairly quickly as I grasp Godot's workings and, after spending a day tinkering with the program, I've already got the basics of dungeon generation (take cell object, make 3-dimensional cube out of cell objects) working well enough. Just need to figure out how to feed it files now. It's a learning experience!