Last week, I did not write a blog. There was just not really something to tell. I was still working on the version that should contain every function that was already added in the Godot version of the game. This was required because I switched from Godot to Unity. The beautiful thing is that me recreating the game was vastly faster than starting from scratch. Today a comparison ...

Three weeks ago, I decided to switch from the Godot engine to the Unity engine. Godot is a great engine, but Unity just has some functionality build in that are just so easy to set up. For example, I set up the basic analytics system in Unity. It is not yet everything I want, but it is ready to use. It took me 30 minutes to set up, while I just could not figure it out in Godot. As you will see in my comparison, that is quite a time-saver. 

In this blogpost, I would like to show you a comparison between the two versions in time spent developing the game. Since I started Genesis, an unfinished game that I might pick up again later, I started logging the time spent on gamedesign. Therefore, it is easy to make a comparison between my Godot development and the unity development. 

Of course, models, music, sound has been reused, and therefore, are (almost) not present in the unity version. Also, some small features are not yet added, like the sheep animation (who were jumping around on their tile) and the little counter that would show the amount of stars you had. But besides that, it is almost the same version. 

So this is the result: 

Ok, how should you interpret this information? To be honest, the data is not perfect. The "basegame" information is difficult to compare. In the Godot engine, this was mostly to create the jam version. This included the "freeform" version of the game, which took a while. I am also not counting some prereading I did while I did log it. Do not take the timings top serious, since the logging on the unity version is more accurate. For example, the mobile setup for Godot to way longer, since I forgot to log several hours. 

Firstly, yes, it took me 1 hour to create the one particle effect in the game. There are just so many options, and to be honest, I am still not really happy with how it looks in the game. But it passes for now. In addition, saving took a little longer. It did not took too long, because it uses the same mechanics as the levelsystem in both versions. It just stores the information on another place. But as you can see, the levelsystem had no win in time, because I had to figure out how to save the data in both engines. 

This is mainly due to the different systems. To save those levels, I changed the file layout to XML. The JSON parser was not able to properly interpret all the levels. In other words, I also had to recreate the levels. I had to change all level information from JSON to XML and that was no easy task. I thought I could not just use a little function to change the JSON to an XML structure, because the structure changed. Also, I was working with integers and those cannot be null in Unity. So I started creating the levels manually. Luckily I quickly realized that I could use a little program that changes JSON to XML. I just had to manually change some information in each XML. It still was faster :)

A last remark on the timings is the analytics. Previously, I said I set up unity Analytics in 30 minutes, but here it states it took more than 2h. That is because I first tried to use firebase. It did not work as quickly as I was expecting so I quit a little later and decided to go with Unity. 

As you can see, the game is not really big at the moment. There are only some basic tiles and 28 levels or so. Currently I am hoping to have 200 levels at release. It may not be enough to keep players truly engaged for a lifetime, but instantly creating 1000 levels may be a bit of a high investment for a game that might be not very succesful.