alt Hacker NewsUpdating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine
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There's not a lot of churn in Unity, but that's more because they mostly fail to ship anything of significance than due to excellence in backwards compatibility.
I was in the audience when DOTS was announced, and a decade later Cities Skylines II showed how ill equipped for prime time it remains (not that the developers were blameless).
He worked on the engine itself, and he had to go through this to port a simple game to the new version. I feel the situation would've been much worse if the game was not super simple. But people still ship excellent stuff with unity.
Superhot (2016), outer wilds (2020), and limbo (2011) received patches last year. How do the developers of these successful games manage that?
Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine), by the dev of Celeste: https://noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/
Not saying I agree with everything in that article or Unity doesn't provide hundreds of useful features.
Happy to see this on the front page!
The author is a friend of mine. A few weeks ago he mentioned this small game he made years ago was more successful than his ambitious projects. After that conversation he decided to update it and produced this wonderful blog post.
If you haven’t checked out the game yet it’s a lot of fun for the modest price.
Refreshing writing style, please never change. This was fun to read.
Unity 4.x to 5.x (removal of Beast lightmapper) remains the worse transition in Unity’s long history.
The more recent frequent breaking changes around URP custom renderer features and render textures haven’t been much fun either, but nothing as bad as losing a working lightmapper and light probes support (the replacement really want ready for actual use) while working on a project highly dependent on baked lighting…
- as a non game dev guy i had to really ask
- do you really need a game engine for making a 3D counter strike game?
- arent there libraries in c++ like raylib, jolt for physics etc?
- if you had to make a CS type game, what libraries do you think would be needed to get it done without touching unity, unreal, godot etc?
> Hey nerds: dark theme is dumb. Just light up your space. Eye strain comes from the contrast between a bright screen and your dark room background. Fix your lighting. Or if you insist on being a cave goblin then lower your screen brightness. Dark theme is overrated. Fight me.
Light theme might have a readability edge in daytime / well lit offices. But I'd bet most people using Unity are hobbyists doing it at home in their evening hours, when you want to dial down your blue light for the sake of sleep.
Fun. I've upgraded my game a few times over the years. It started in 2018 so I started with a version slightly older than that. Some of these changes seem familiar to me. I had a fairly similar experience as my game also has always been C# and simple. I have always carefully avoided any fancy new Unity features and just use the core engine to deliver my game to many platforms. Neat to hear the author worked on the deprecated renames which I also remember.
> Gun Rocket also stands out as my most lucrative personal project.
> I tried to boot up Gun Rocket to play it. But it refused. No matter how hard I clicked the game would not open.
> After trying a few times I realize if the ship isn't moving for about 0.5 seconds it explodes. Has that bug existed all this time? Oh bother. I hope not!
Grinds my gears that the game has continued to be listed for sale on Steam with years-old negative reviews pointing out exactly these issues, but the developer still has the gall to act surprised about them.
Was so refreshing to read some human generated content
Great read! Thanks for sharing.
I have been a elf(glibc)/linux gamer for more than a decade, and in spite of the unity drama, their engine is stellar good for broad elf(glibc)/linux distro support (small to massive mainstream)... until no badly built third party shared libs is used (very rare), dynamically loaded with a fallback.
But Godot has an issue here, "naked" godot games are fine, but the second they use "addons" as shared libs instead of being statically linked into the main exe, it is a disaster as most of them are built for massive mainstream elf(glibc)/linux distros. It seem also godot games tend to use much more nasty third party shared libs. addons/third party shared lib devs are mostly forgetting '-static-libgcc -static-libstdc++' compiling/linking options while generating their shared libs. For addons, they should provide static libs for game devs to link in their main exe.
> 2022 and 2023 were good years. Looks like they were fighting the good fight.
I'd argue that 2022.3 is still the best option if you don't want any drama from your tools. Using "old" versions of game engines is generally much safer than the latest. Let someone else figure out if the new model of parachute is any good before you try it.
If the tools are dominating your thinking during development, you've perhaps chosen the wrong ones for the job. There is no shame in using older tools to build games. This isn't like a banking web app. No AAA studio is going to give you extra consideration because you have unity 6 experience vs something slightly older. Valve certainly doesn't seem to give a shit. There's not much reason to chase a higher game engine version number.
If you are a solo/indie studio and you are using a newer version of a tool because it appears to enable something in your game, you are probably not going to do well. The engine does not make the game. It supports the game. Concerns like the "Unity look" are a consequence of the developers and artists doing a poor job, not old or subpar tooling. Environment lighting settings have their own hot key. Breaking out of the aesthetic mold is trivial if you make any attempt to do so.