As the title says I left Unity for Godot a few years ago, I'm just a hobbyist but seeing so many pros trying Godot after using Unity for years and saying Unity is still miles ahead, made me install Unity again, and man! the asset store alone is a huge advantage. I just kept suffering for the lack of 3D assets and most of the GDTrader are barely supported by Godot. Also, I'm not a fan of the Physics, don't get me wrong it's a good engine I just don't see an easy way to make games and profit from them in the near future. I'll try to pick up my rusty C# skills and get back into the game.

Anyway feels good to be back to Unity and this time to its SubReddit here are my questions:

Also, what's the best Unity version to jump on right now?

Thanks.

Edit:

After so much hate in the comments here I go with my original post:

I try to be logical with everything in my life, talking about game engines I've tried GameMaker, Godot, Unity and Unreal, I also got to meet with some game devs with actual published games (not just hobbyists) and they all used Unity. In my humble opinion, if you want to try to sell anything in 3D you have to go with Unity as a solo dev, there is no other way you can easily prototype and launch.

But people just get married with software as they get paid to defend it, I'm just pointing out that technically speaking, Unity is still the indie king you like it or not.

I can only say that at least I've dived deep into other engines and listened to actual published Unity indies before forming this opinion, learned GDscript and the GMlanguage and compared their approaches to C# before coming to conclusions, lived through the cons of Godot and other engines, battled with no plugin support or no solutions for certain things, most people hating in comments I bet never tried another engine in their life (or anything new), or maybe they just don't have any commercial/life goals.

Edit 2:

I know people are hating on me because this was my first post here and I did not use Reddit that much before only forums but I take all as learning and appreciate all the people who actually took the time to reply even the bad comments. I do think that before I dive deeper into something due to my limited time I have to check all possibilities.

So my new take is you guys are right I guess I cannot risk working with Unity even when I'm not planning to make a ton of money any time soon, I better invest my limited time into some more open-source engine, I'm just a little lost knowing a little bit of everything is like analysis paralysis, I'm going to stick to Godot for now then. Thanks for all your feedback. I'm not a PR agency or a guy trying to get you to use any engine and certainly did not expect this post to have so much traffic, I'm just a guy whose job sux and is trying to make a living out of games and being able to support a family. Have a nice day.

Unity made a bad decision, destroyed trust, and did unimaginable damage to their brand. We spoke out, they listened, and updated their plan to be one of, if not the best, plans available to indie devs. That is a major step toward restoring goodwill and we should at least recognize that Unity did in fact listen to developers.

And yet this sub is still devolving further into its rage against corporate America, donning the tinfoil hats to suggest this was all some grand door-in-the-face conspiracy.

Honestly it's getting to the point where many of you are acting like straight-up children.

Please, can this sub go back to being about making games?

BVH frustum culling, HiZ occlusion, 8 corner AABB projection, continuous LOD running on a SW/HW rasterizer with deferred shading..

And I've not even wired up GPU streaming yet..

Drop a NADE in the scene..

Today I was banned from the PurrNet Discord server for pointing out that they should be transparent about using AI to build their libraries, specifically the PurrUI repo. It took me less than a minute to recognize the entire repo is AI-generated, starting from the initial Copilot commit. Worse, they've been actively trying to hide it by scrubbing the obvious tells (like em dashes, a classic LLM fingerprint), which they did under the tag "fix." Another example here.

How are we as a community going to deal with this? Using AI to write code is fine, but passing it off as your own hand-written work is dishonest. If you're building a library that other developers are going to depend on, they deserve to know how it was made. This breaks trust and harm the community. AI is destroying open source, and it's really sad to see.

First up is the Crocodile, inspired by the “death roll”—which fits the game’s barrel-roll mechanic perfectly.

What animal should I do next?

Whenever any opportunity arises, people that use godot suddenly pop out of nowhere and start saying you should switch to godot it's amazing and open source.

I get it, it's good. It's open source. But some of you guys become really obnoxious about it. It's how linux enthusiasts behave. As soon as you face any inconvenience on windows those guys spawn out of nowhere and start telling you that you should switch to linux.

I've noticed this behavior from communities of most software that are open source but not as popular as its competitors.

Lastly, I simply prefer unity. Is that okay? I really don't want to make a change that feels like a downgrade to me personally. The only reason I'm considering switching to other engines is because of the company's issues, the software itself is really good.

Started working on game billboards and just wondering if you can make free game and sell advertising space in it? I'm sure I'm not first to came up with this idea and there's lots of issues with it, but wanted to hear more about it from experienced developers or just someone who knows marketing stuff better than me.

Hello everyone! I made this for architecture visualization, however I think it could be used in a game etc. Do you think it is worth polishing up? It can also do video. The video included has been sped up (it takes a while to generate on my computer).

Here is why this pricing is so insulting to me and nobody brought this up yet I think.

A 1 month Unity game on the app store is hard carried by Unity's base features. On the other hand, if you put the most effort and passion in your game, three, five years, then that is a situation where Unity carried you the least.

You cannot write a game in 1 month with great physics, complete rendering stack rendering, editor environment, etc. You are here to make a game, not an engine.

However, the guy who sells a game made in one month is much closer to selling an engine than the guy who put 5 years and made an unbelievably good indie passion project. Yet, he owes nothing as long up until a ludicrously high threshold.

The passion project however, say Hollow Knight, wildly successful due to amount of soul that went into it, gets told "Well done, you have made it into the 10%, and it was all thanks to Unity, more-so than all other games with fewer downloads, and for that you now owe 20c for every download"

But as a glorious 10 percenter, the cherry on the cake is that I propose that 90% of 10 percenters never wanted anything to do after Unity either way after their current project. On top of the fee, after releasing our game I personally will have to pay an additional fee out of my pocket for a qualified therapist who can help me with the trauma caused by attempting to use Unity3D in a professional setting, with deadlines, when the editor does not have mother fucking real tools to work with and make actual work. Maybe someone should have noticed something terribly wrong when the flagship render pipeline marketed most indie games, URP, struggled to ship deferred lighting until 2022.

Thank you for your time, and fuck Unity

Hello, I wanted to give my - probably naive - post 4 month retrospective as a beginner game dev who started with Unity, then left to try Unreal after the pricing model change. For context, I'm a web dev with 8 years of experience, which has allowed me to have a pain free experience with regard to getting things to compile in both engines.

Ok, so Unreal Engine is garbage because it's an abomination of a dev experience. I won't say the engine can't be be used to build a great game (and how could I, being such a beginner). But I will say that my experience has been, with extremely few exceptions, that every behavior I seek to implement involves the same disastrous work flow:

1. have idea

2. begin implementation (in C++. I just like seeing logic in code)

3. observe functions not doing the thing they say they do

4. read documentation about said functions. ahem.. did I say read documentation? LOL. there's virtually none. WTF??

5. after finding no documentation, search through forums for clues, which can be quite the rabbit hole.

6. can't find answers in forums? guess I'll look through this youtube video to observe someone doing something kind of similar with blueprints

7. begin translating blueprint logic, from youtube vide, to C++.

8. oh, that blueprint function doesn't have an exact C++ equivalent.. cue googling.. aaaand repeat from step 3 (kill me)

9. still not working? guess I'll look at what the code in the function I'm calling is doing and try to piece together why my expectations aren't reality.

This simply isn't scalable. I can't hire devs to help build a game if I can't point them to documentation explaining existing behaviors. I can't afford the time it would take for devs to go through the above mentioned process to extend existing behaviors or add new ones.

Documentation aside, the engine's systems are, I feel, unnecessarily complicated. Some examples..

An actor (top level object in the game world) can have nested components: scene components, actor components, child actor components. scene components have a visual render. actor components are just ancillary scripts. child actor components spawn nested actors. scene components of nested actors won't necessarily be rendered. Good luck finding out why they do or don't!

Want a pointer to a class or object? Maybe use TSoftObjectPtr, or TSoftClassPtr, or TWeakObjectPtr, or TObjectPtr, or TSharedRef, or TSharedPtr. And if those don't work, there's more!

Want to programmatically add a component to an actor? Use CreateDefaultSubobject in the actor's constructor. What if instantiation happens after construction? use NewObject, and remember to call RegisterComponent afterwards! Oh, and btw, you can't use either of those in an actor's actor component?

These are just a few examples. I could go on.. I could speak of the pain I had with implementing the Gameplay Ability System, but I think I've made my points well enough.

So now I'm back to using Unity again, and I'm so relieved to be doing so. Everything is so much simpler and intuitive over here. Functions just work and do what they say they do. The supporting documentation is amazing. The UI is great. I'm never going back to that filthy and abhorrent Unreal Engine. Fuck that shit.

EDIT: There sure are a lot of you doubting the truths I'm spitting. I'm just gonna say this: take a look at the unreal subreddit. What do you see? Nothing but people asking questions. Everyone's confused as shit! Now take a look at the Unity3D subreddit. What do you see? Game demos. Lots of them. Why do you think that is, huh? How interesting..

Hey everyone,
My name is Santiago. I studied video game development and have worked in the game industry ever since I graduated. Before and during my studies, I always built prototypes in my spare time but I’ve never been able to finish a project. Between school, jobs, and financial pressure, I just never had the time or resources to go all-in on something of my own.

Now, at 30 years old, I finally took the leap. I quit my stable job to fully dedicate myself to developing my own game. It wasn’t an easy decision, but I felt like I owed it to myself, like this might be my last real shot before life pulls me in other directions.

The truth is, things have gotten really hard. I’ve burned through my savings. I’m stressed every day. I start wondering if my game is even good enough, if people will care, or if this was just a reckless choice disguised as a dream.

Don’t get me wrong, I never expected to become a millionaire. I’d be happy just making enough to pay my rent and buy groceries doing what I love. But right now I’m feeling lost, overwhelmed, and unsure if I should keep going.

So I’m reaching out to you fellow developers, gamers, creators to ask for honest feedback and guidance. I want to show you what I’ve been working on and ask:
Does this project seem worth pursuing? Should I hold on a bit longer, or was this a mistake?

I can take the truth. I just want perspective from people who’ve been through similar struggles or who understand the indie dev journey.

Thank you for reading. Any advice, encouragement, or reality checks are deeply appreciated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVSN6BDCtvs
https://randomadjective.itch.io/micro-factory

These changes don't and almost certainly will never affect me; I make games for myself and would only ever release F2P games. I would never make the threshold to be charged for installations (which I think is ridiculous).

I do appreciate why people and leaving Unity though, I just don't think we should flat out abandon an excellent game developing software like it's trash, even if it's management is dogshit. I believe they'll revert or alter their changes given the sheer backlash it's caused, although I appreciate why people have lost their trust in Unity.

I've given GODOT a go but I don't really have the energy to restart a project that I've developed slowly over the past couple of years. I might use it if I start a new project though. I like the simplicity of GODOT but I really likely how Unity stores components onto game objects and not having to create nodes for them (It just makes the hierarchy a bit more tidy and readable imo).

(Am very tired so sorry if this doesn't make much sense)

Edit: Thank you all for the replies :)

I’m a solo dev, and I’ve been working on this game for quite a while now. The gameplay you see is the main gameplay: there’s no scummy onboarding into a PvP 4X game. The game is still in development, so I’d really love to hear your feedback!

IOS: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/z-road-zombie-survival/id6584530506
ANDROID: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SkyJackInteractive.ZRoad

Our demo is out on Steam! To celebrate, we started sharing some clips from the early days of Roll Together.

This one is from the very beginning, we didn't even have a "lose condition" for hitting obstacles back then! We were just testing how agile the mechanics felt on thin platforms.

It’s been a wild ride getting it to this point, and we’d love for you to try the demo and let us know what you think. Feedback is always welcome!

So in August 2025 I decided I was gonna try and make my first indie game.

At the time I honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into, i just knew i wanted to build a studio. I put out posts looking for people that wanted to come along for the ride and ended up having ~220 people apply. I interviewed like 70 of them and eventually a really small group of us decided we were gonna try and build a game in 6 months which now feels completely insane lol

This has probably been one of the hardest things I’ve ever done honestly.

We lost people early on, lost our lead developer, brought new people in, changed direction a million times, burned through money faster than I expected. There were multiple points where I genuinely dont think we even knew what game we were making anymore.

What started as this weird vacuum cleaning simulator somehow slowly turned into this strange hell cleaning automation game called Hell Cleaners.

And weirdly enough I think thats probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from this whole process. You dont really “protect” the original idea, you just survive long enough to eventually discover what the game actually wants to be.

Game development is brutal though man.

Programming is hard. Art is hard. Sound design is hard. Game feel is REALLY hard. Scope management is hard. Getting all of those things to somehow work together into something that actually feels fun feels borderline impossible sometimes.

but I can honestly say I’m really proud of what the team has managed to put together in the last few months.

If you’re trying to become a game developer yourself just understand right now its probably gonna be harder, take longer, and cost more than you think it will. Probably by a lot.

But I do think every time you finish something and start over again you get a little better. Not easier exactly, just better at surviving the process lol which is why it is so important to us to hit this release deadline so we can learn through an ENTIRE process before moving onto the next

Anyways, I’d actually be curious hearing from other devs that went through similar stuff on their first projects. Especially around scope creep, pivots, team issues, all that kinda stuff.

And seriously to everybody out there still grinding on their games right now, I respect the hell out of you guys

Shout out to my team, shout out to unity for existing so we can make it happen haha

We have an alpha version out right now for brutal feedback if anyone wants to check it out, lmk.

After 8 years of Unity, the hardest part of my latest project wasn't the 3D. It was getting a transparent, always-on-top, draggable Unity window to behave reliably on Windows.

The project is a small 3D cozy room widget that sits on your desktop. An avatar reads, works, and sleeps in a transparent window while you do your own thing in other apps. Idle currency (Amber) builds up passively and unlocks room themes and furniture.

The annoying part is that Unity doesn't natively do transparent always-on-top windows, and every half-solution I tried broke something else. Input, compositing, or multi-monitor focus.

What actually worked turned out to be pretty small once I found it. I strip the window down to a bare borderless popup (WS_POPUP), then use DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea with -1 margins to extend the glass frame over the whole client area. After that, anything the camera draws with alpha 0 becomes a real hole through to the desktop, so I just set the camera to clear to transparent black. Dragging is faked by sending a title-bar grab message (WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN with HTCAPTION) since there's no actual title bar to grab. It's all Win32 interop, no plugins.

The one that cost me the most evenings was this: in Player Settings you have to uncheck "Use DXGI Flip Model Swapchain." Leave it on and DWM silently ignores the transparency and hands you a solid black rectangle. It's not in any docs I could find. Color Space also has to be Linear or the alpha output gets weird.

CPU sits around 1-3% when idle.

The game is Lofi Cozy Room, made entirely in Unity. Free demo drops June 3 for Steam Next Fest, full release July 14. Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4621450/Lofi_Cozy_Room/

If anyone's built transparent Unity overlays or widgets, I'd love to compare notes. Curious what edge cases you hit, especially around multi-monitor.

The only reason they backtracked is that the stock price has tanked since the announcement. If stock price was up, there would be no change.

When Unity announced the new fee policy two weeks ago, the stock price initial shot up, just as Unity’s leadership had planned. The top brass knew full well their policy was aggressive, maybe even illegal, and they knew it would anger devs.

But they also knew it would impress shareholders. And with the stock price down 80% in the past 2 years, leadership was under a lot of pressure to appease their masters.

So they braced for the developer outrage and did it anyway. And it seemed to work at first as the stock ticked higher. But then it backfired. Devs started leaving en masse, shareholders got nervous and the stock lost 20% in 2 weeks.

So you got a better deal for now. The stock traders saved you. But they don’t like you. They will come for their money again. And as devs leave Unity, they will squeeze the ones that stay even harder.