I by and large loathe how commonplace big do-it-all game engines have become in indie game development, with unity at the forefront of this movement.
Even if everybody and their mom used the same awesome product, I'd still be upset because because of the market stranglehold that eventually creates - Unity in this case is worse because it isn't even an awesome product. It's a mediocre product with an actively hostile business strategy.<p>I admit this is entirely emotional, but when I learned that Hollow Knight[0] was made in Unity, it broke my heart. A 2D game with a consistent art style (read: write the shaders once and forget it), made up entirely of flat surfaces with only a handful of different methods of movement, no physics to speak of, and only a couple hundred different types of enemies, most with large overlaps in AI save for bosses. Gorgeous game, strong art direction, thoughtful lore and story, but any game developer could probably write the <i>engine</i> for such a game in a couple weeks.<p>But every indie developer I've talked to about game engine development acts like it's a dark art. That it's just <i>impossible</i> for mere mortals to do such a thing, and if you do, then you'll never <i>ever</i> release a game, or you'll spend <i>literal years</i> on the engine. Again, I predict a couple weeks.<p>Back to the article, I dislike that 'game development post-unity' just means 'picking out a new engine'. Everybody's jumping ship to Godot or Unreal or whatever else because we all <i>need</i> a game engine. But <i>why</i>? Why is this song and dance necessary? I feel like since the author is a game engine programmer himself, this option should have come up higher on the list along with the non-engine libraries and frameworks.<p>0. <a href="https://www.hollowknight.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.hollowknight.com/</a>