Dear friends, we don't want to bore you with gamedev industry news, but they will affect the development of Angelstruck, so we want to talk about them.
You may have heard the news about Unity's new taxation rules, and the incredibly bad implications that has for Unity developers. TLDR, after a certain revenue and application installation threshold, developers are planned to be charged *per install*. Not sales, but installs, which includes reinstalls by a player who would've already supported us with a purchase, or the substantial amount of players who install the game through other means. This affects ALL Unity games, even the ones that have been published 10 years ago.
Unity, in a scramble to explain their poorly thought-out plan, stated they'd be using proprietary tracking methods to detect single-user installs. In other words, a method with zero transparency and dubious effectiveness. What this potentially means for data collection on players' end, we have no idea. Nothing's clearly explained. Concerning us, this punishes developers who: 1) plan to make a living out of game development. 2) refuses to sell at a high price to offset the risk of being charged more than we gain.
Here's an article that goes into details, though there are many more out there.
So what does this mean for Angelstruck? Well, we can't go on with Unity, despite our years of experience with it. The company has shown that they're willing to make dangerous changes with no notice. Even if they backtracked on this legally dubious plan, there's no guarantee that our work is safe from future corporate shenanigans.
Currently, we're working like crazy to transfer our game to the Godot Engine. It is an open source, now battle tested game engine that powers mega-hits like Brotato, Cruelty Squad, Halls of Torment and many more. This engine is completely new for us, with different rules that we have to figure out. It will most likely be impossible to make a 1:1 recreation, especially visually. But we'll work diligently to make the best possible version of the game we can. We'll definitely publish a demo update to receive your feedback.
We want to thank everyone who follows our news, and especially the crazy persons who enjoy our demo enough to play 4+ hours. See you in a while.
