May I be the first to say, welcome to DUNJUNUGUY!

This is the first dev blog I've ever done so I preemptively apologize if it's haphazard or messy at times. I figured, since this is the first one, I better talk about our development stack. What we use is pretty common in the indie game world, but we have a few twists in there as well. Our game is wholly developed using Unity Engine and C#, along with some shader programming here and there. There's nothing much more for me to say about those things that 1000s of YouTubers and content creators haven't said before me. 

Unity is a good engine. It has it's flaws as all mass market game engine's do, but most of those flaws are easy to overcome. The worst thing I've encountered is prefab merging. When we started out, if two of us made a change in a .prefab file and we had to do a merge resolution in our source control, someone was going to be unhappy. It would always overwrite one of our changes or corrupt the prefab. Now it seems like Unity has really nailed down the .prefab storage format and reduced the amount of issues that happen with source control. 

Currently, we are running Unity 2021.1.14 and using the Universal Render Pipeline which we have loved working with so far. We are also bootstrapping some of TopDownEngine which is a really cool project that any and all aspiring game developers should at least check out. The documentation can give you some really good insights on how to build finite state machines for AI, how to do dungeon generation, and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. Of course, we didn't use TopDownEngine's dungeon generation, ours is waaaaaay cooler than that. I'm sure I'll do a dev blog about it on a later date. 

Our codebase, and the engine we're using, has been upgraded so many times that it hurts to think about. When we started we were running on Unity 2018 and not using any fancy render pipelines or anything. Our dungeon generation started out using cellular automaton. The fog was blocky and nasty. We barely clocked over 9fps. I think I have a screenshot or two of super old generation. 

If this post is about anything, I'd say that it should be about never being afraid to upgrade the tools your using. It's a pain in the ass sometimes and can sink a month of your time. But I'll be damned, every time we did upgrades it was well worth it and I know we have at least one more upgrade to the engine coming soon that's going to make the lighting so much cooler. So yea, don't be afraid to upgrade the tools your using. I feel like that doesn't just apply to game development, but also applies to everything else in life too. Better tools just make things better.