Okay so, let's get this out of the way. I will admit it. The last patch of Lords of Illic is not the actual last patch of Lords of Illic. I have already spent some time creating a portrait of Queen Asteria, updating tile art, animations and working on a few maps. I hope you will forgive me.

 Which is not to say that I forgive Unity, it is just…

Making games is really fun. Making Lords of Illic is really fun. The claws of the art demon (or perhaps the game development demon) are holding me. Even so I no longer trust Unity so I don’t want to continue to make games in their engine long term. Last week I gave Godot a shot. I bought some starter courses for it and quickly found a couple things out.

1. I still hate online courses.
2. The courses are tailored for people less experienced than me.
3. Starting in a new engine is a slog.

It is quite depressing to start from scratch in a new engine. I gave it a couple of hours but… I didn't get anywhere. Then I decided to give Unreal a shot and as nice as the demo projects were, it wouldn't allow me to make an c++ scripts due to c++ compiler discrepancies. Then I remembered a game development talk I went to which was talking about making games in an app framework called Flutter. So I decided to install that and give that a shot as well. I haven’t spent much time with Flutter, but it is a reminder of how I don’t really like the app style frameworks and syntaxes. 

All of these changes in gears - not to mention all the different tools I have been hopping between at work - have been exhausting. Not to mention that I have also been trying to read more programming books. I want to learn more general programming principles which will transfer between these different contexts. All of which leaves me in an uncomfortable position of trying to learn everything all at once. I came up with a name for this - I called it “Technical Whiplash”. Where instead of injuring your neck by a sudden movement you injure your mind by changing between different contexts and ideas all the time. Perhaps injure seems a bit too harsh of a word but… Mental health is also a big factor in making games. If you don’t keep your mind healthy you can’t keep working. 

During the times when Unity was pushing the most unreasonable versions of its terms I had a thought. “If Unity wants people to pay for their runtime so much, isn't making a free game kind of sticking it to them?” If you think that is kind of stupid, I agree with you. Being defiant won't change the situation. As I have expressed before in my blog I have had ideas of new projects to start, but I wanted to see Illic through. So naturally I ducked back into Lords of Illic a couple of times. I didn’t want to continue to lay in bed awake at night thinking about loose ends. That said Illic has to end one day. I can’t keep on working on it year after year. My main justification for sticking with it for so long was that:

1. I needed to make my game work well enough to show it off
2. I can refine the underlying code to reuse

Since AVCon went well I think we can agree that A has been achieved. B has become moot since I can’t trust Unity enough for that kind of long term planning.

I like to think I am a realist. Since that is the case I need to accept the following things:

1. It isn’t worth spending my time tinkering to improve reuse of Illic’s code
2. I need to learn some new tools
3. I still want to spend some time polishing Illic

So my new plan is to reduce the amount of time I work on Illic while cleaning up the issues I can tackle. No big new features, but focus on art, maps and game designs. Which is to say that the parts of the game that people can see. So you can expect at least one more patch from me and Illic.

Until next time.