The last year
10/23/2023
it has been a really long time since I've posted anything. Too long actually. I've been really busy with our day jobs and haven't had much to post about. So I'm hoping to get you caught up with this post so this might be a little bit long. Project space has essentially ground to a halt, mostly because I haven't had any time to work on it, but partially because it was a built as a tech demo and the demo was completed. I now have a little time extra, but am not going back to Project Space yet for a whole other reason which I'll talk about in a moment. I did have about three months of time where I could have done some significant work on game development, but I didn't. To be honest, I was unemployed for those three months, and was struggling to do anything other than looking for a job during that time. Looking back, I do wish I had taken at least a couple hours each day to game dev, but my heart just wasn't in it then. And now, lets talk about the real elephant in the room, Unity. If you've been following my progress then you're probably already aware that I've been using Unity3D as my game engine of choice. its not hard to look and find all the negative news about Unity that has came out over the last year, nearly all regarding their user terms of services and licensing fees. While the changes they've made or proposed would not affect me immediately, I can read the legal terms for what they are and how they could negatively impact me in the future. As a result, I've been spendiing what little free time I have learning a new game engine. For the last few weeks I've been reading the documentation and API pages for the Stride game engine and trying to build myself a base game project from which i can build the rest of my projects. Once I'm comfortable enough with the game engine, I think my next step is to start migrating my older projects over from Unity to Stride. This will completely free me from all the changes in Unity's Terms of Services. I've got a long way to go, and still have to test the option of using Stride for Android and XBox, but I'm at least making progress in that direction. All that said, I wouldn't expect any new games from me for a while, as I expect to spend the next few months translating my existing games over from Unity to Stride. By the time I'm done with all that, I should be well versed in using Stride, enough to start a new game project, though i have yet to think of what that next project should be. Lastly, I have deleted my twitter account. Since Elon Musk took it over and changed it to X, I have noticed that I am not getting notifications from the people I follow. It appears that I've only goten tweet updates regarding Elon's political agenda. Since twitter isn't notifying me like it should, felt like it was time to completely pull the plug on that service.