TL;DR the developers of slay the spire created a fun free card game within 3 weeks to explore and learn the Godot game engine. You can play it here: https://megacrit.itch.io/dancing-duelists
I didn’t know Slay The Spire was made in LibGDX.
I used LibGDX years ago when developing my own engine on top of it for android gaming, but gave up after a year when it became evident I had to refactor more and more because I didn’t know what I was doing when I started.
Have they posted anything about their experiences developing this? I’m curious on their thoughts of Godot vs Unity. This might be the most established studio to ship something in Godot.
Godot is pretty heavily documented at this point. I would recommend finding videos from over a month ago (so it isn’t just posturing), but it is consistently a solid “B” engine as it were.
But the real issue hasn’t changed. Because of licensing and ideological reasons, adding in hooks for console development remains a mess. And that is not something that any company (… okay, Rami Ismail/Vlambeer would totally talk about this and burn a few bridges in the process) is going to really talk about because it is a lose lose. It pisses off the platform owners AND will be viewed as “unfair” by the fanboys.
“unfair” by the fanboys
There can’t honestly be a lot of them. I’m sure even folks who donated don’t have that much of their personal ego wrapped up in a game engine. Not to say there aren’t none, of course, because there’s always people who really will cling to anything.
I see you’re new to the Internet
One of the MegaCrit devs, Casey Yano, wrote a little blog post on his experience of it: On Evaluating Godot
To be fair it would have been interesting to read this from someone who actually liked using Unity in the first place…
That was an interesting read, thanks!
Thanks for this. Good article.
Apparently, yes! https://caseyyano.com/on-evaluating-godot-b35ea86e8cf4
Cassette Beasts was also made with Godot! https://godotengine.org/article/godot-showcase-cassette-beasts/
Cassette beasts is so damn good! It’s pokemon, but better and unique.
It’s an amazing game! I never felt pressured to collect all the beasts, but at the same time looked forward to trying to level the cassettes up! If they ever do sequels, I hope they figure out an alternative solution to what is now Pokemon’s massive design strength/flaw.
“Hey, here’s some shit we threw together without knowing what we were doing” is a weird marketing tactic.
I’m sure they’re doing it more to promote Godot rather than themselves, but it looks really weird with my consumer hat on.
Edit: FFS, I wasn’t trying to disparage them. The hostility in the replies here is really disappointing.
Edit 2: Or maybe I’m just in a bad mood today.
A comment the devs made on the steam announcement (under slay the spire) regarding someone being angry that this was prioritized over slay the spire 2:
Hi there, this is just a small, free game we made in a few weeks for a game jam in order to get acquainted with the engine that our next big game is currently being ported to. We figured our fans would be interested in knowing what we’re up to as we work on our upcoming title since switching from Unity has extended its development time.
We’re currently back to work on our next big game, this time refreshed and with lots of new tools under our belt! Hope people have a fun time trying this out if they’d like to!
So it’s not like this is a big new genre for them, but it’s also not meant to be a commercial for Godot.
Why?
Downplaying the time and effort put into creating a product isn’t usually how you hype it up.
I feel like you’re missing the point that sometimes people make stuff for reasons besides maximizing the amount of money they make
If you put something out there, you want to maximize something. Probably attention in this case.
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Or…or! They were practicing on an engine they were unfamiliar with by making a low-stakes proof of concept.
That’s because it’s not a product. It’s an experiment for figuring out what they as a studio might be able to do with something new and untested. This is a trial run of a new engine, and they simply decided to publish the result for others to see.
This is more like publishing research findings than trying to market and sell something for a profit. Whether the result is good or bad, it’s informative either way.
Did you by any change miss that it is a free game?
Yes, I did.
But also free things can still have marketing. I assume they want people to actually play their game.
Not to mention, they literally only had a month to make it, being that it was for a contest.
What a weird take
I know Louis CK is kinda on the out for references, but this was kinda spot on his bit about entitlement.
“Something (given out for free) that I didn’t even know about until today, and is just a fun experiment to share and learn from? Not good enough!”
I didn’t say it wasn’t good enough. I said they way they pitched it is a strange way to entice people to play it.
It was probably meant more for the community than the consumers, two overlapping but distinct groups.
You’re probably right.
It was a jam game made in 3 weeks to see how the team likes Godot.
Sheesh
To your edit, you doubled down hard in later posts, so I wouldn’t say the hostility isn’t completely undeserved.
I think you just really expected something different from what this was supposed to be, even when people explained to you exactly what it was supposed to be.
I wasn’t disparaging them in the follow up comments either.
I’m not seeing any hostility really, just disagreeing with you and explanations.
How would I run this on Steam Deck?
I believe you can download the linux version from the game’s page, extract and run it in desktop mode.
If you add it as a non steam game you can play it in the regular interface, too.
Godot has the best Linux support out of all popular game engines. Really depends on the controls really. But they could easily release a native Linux version, or proton is so good that I’d just assume a windows version would be flawless as well.
