ALLO ALLO AGAIN!

So in case you missed it, Waha's Robot Daze did pretty well! At the time of writing this, we're near 8k views after just a couple weeks, we were featured at one of the best games of August, and we freakin' won Robot Day, baybeee! Wooo! Big thanks to everyone who played the game and said nice things; it's been a pretty great project so far and we're not even close to done with it; more on that in a bit.

We've added an ARCADE MODE to Robot Daze, which is 50 puzzle rounds, back to back. If you want to just get to the action, that's the option to choose. It starts easy, but it ends more difficult than anything in the main story campaign towards the end, so even if you've played before, new challenges await you! Check em out why don't ya.

Nine Hundo: Getted

Normally I'd make a post just for this, but thanks to the game, I've hit the More Sizeable Nine Hundo in followers! Yowza! Hachi Machi! Now that's what I call a lot (nine) of hundos! Thanks to everyone that's stuck with me this year. I didn't post as much as last year, but there's still time, with all those october drawing challenges coming up.

About Unity and the future of Waha Games

On a more serious note, I think it's worth talking about recent news regarding Unity's sudden and extremely unpopular decision to begin charging what they're calling a "runtime fee" to developers that cross a certain threshold of revenue and installs. We're not making any money from Robot Daze and we're not anywhere near meeting the 200k threshold on installs (though it seems that a WebGL game getting loaded in-browser does in fact count as one). This decision, if it isn't reversed, will affect midsize studios most, which we are not. That said, when a company expresses its desire to use bait and switch tactics to rob its userbase, using metrics that I'm not sure they can even legally collect or can be reasonably verified, it doesn't matter if we're the ones getting boned this time. The fact of the matter is that Unity is a shady company run by bad people. They're partnered with a major spyware developer, their CEO is the same guy responsible for dragging EA down into the microtransaction muck, and as a member of the Taiwanese game dev scene, it's especially problematic for me how often and how zealously Unity carries water for the Chinese government at our expense. There was no goodwill or trust there to begin with, and now that they're showing how far they'll go to cheat their users, they've gained a negative trust. I trust that if we continue to use this engine, they will get around to holding our projects hostage and scamming us, too. It might not be today or tomorrow, but they're going to do it.

For all of my professional life, I've had no choice but to use Unity since it is (or was) the engine of choice for indie studios for well over a decade now. As a consequence, it's what we're most familiar with, and that's why Robot Daze was made using it. Not because it was the best engine, just because it's the one we knew best. We built the game with the intention of using the framework to make more games, and so this puts us in a bit of a conundrum. It might be wise for us to port everything to Godot, (something easier said than done) sooner rather than later, so that we don't have to worry about some company swooping in and literally making it too risky to try selling one of our games someday. I don't have anything solid to report yet, but it's something we're talking about. There are over 200 animations in Robot Daze that I'm pretty sure need to be redone by hand, but if it will wash our hands of Unity once and for all, I'm willing to do it. This does mean that our plans for Part 2 might be delayed, though. Nobody's been banging my door down asking when it'll be out, but I might have made it sound like it was gonna be easier to make than part 1, and now I've got no idea. Sorry about that.

Hopefully the next update will have better news. Til then!