A rare show of vulnerability on hackernews. I commend you and echo the sentiment!
I really appreciate you sharing your story. Know that it does not define you and you are absolutely loved and are worthy of love, especially from yourself.
As a game developer who's primary tool I utilize is Unity I always find outside sentiment about it funny.
There's no doubt that Unity has put its users through the ringer over the last few years or so.
That said I still for the most part enjoy working with it. I think Unity had the right idea in regards to a lot of the toolset but unfortunately it's suffered in regards to stability.
With Unity 6+ though it really feels like we're starting to see the fruits of Unity labor. UI Toolkit, input system, rendering pipeline the package manger and more are finally starting to feel stable.
Additionally the engine itself feels far more rock solid then it had in years.
A rather large piece for me also really just enjoys programming in C#.
I'm actually super pumped that we have a great open source game engine to keep Unity on the straight and narrow. I'm also pumped that we have an amazing tool like Unreal for things more AAA in nature (although that's certainly not all). I personally think Unity is perfectly sandwiched in the middle of those options.
With the right ideas and execution I think it's going to be really exciting to see where it ends up.
I 100% agree. It's funny to me that for a website that's focused on people and companies creating new things, people here can be extremely hostile and jaded to the idea.
I've been using unity for almost a decade now and enjoying it despite the many caveats and idiosyncrasies I come across.
The bottom line is, I definitely don't want to throw away the decade of experience I have using Unity if I can help it. Ultimately I want them to learn from their mistakes and move forward. While Unity has had a fair share of missteps ultimately it's the devil I know.
I'd like to ask (only out of genuine curiosity): Do you also build your own engines or are you fully entrenched and dependent on Unity? I would feel very disappointed if I spent a decade on something only to depend exactly on that one thing and not be able to create it myself, especially when it's such a tractable problem in a sub-year time frame even with learning happening. The fit you could have with your own engine with a bigger up front investment of time and energy seems like it would easily pay off vs. just using Unity for years and years.
Not only sunken costs, but building an engine is no easy task. It’s easier to write a game than to write an engine (most of the time).
I do think this is the right approach. This is the approach I took. I was dependent on an engine for a long time until I realized it was just a facade and that I already possessed the knowledge to do it myself. So when XNA died, and MonoGame wasn’t mature yet, I had no choice but to write my own. Some of that effort went into MonoGame’s early days, most of it didn’t (I respect keeping the API the same but we, devs, could have done better to improve it).
Unity made it easy to build games without having to know the underlying proponents that do what they do. Instead, it’s presented through a massively opaque interface called a MonoBehavior. Because of this opaque abstraction, it’s almost impossible for a Unity game developer to know exactly what’s going on under the hood.
My first game engine took me 3 years to get to a point where I could ship something. My second was 1 year. My latest was 3 months.
Eventually, it becomes just adding another interface to your GPU abstraction to support wgpu or DX14, or Vulkan2, or Metal, any graphics api becomes just a Buffer, a Queue, and a sync lock.
