Final build, and what comes next

In September of 2023, Unity made a now infamous announcement that they would be changing their licensing agreement in a way that had the potential to due genuine harm to the indie dev community. Despite much of this being rolled back due to the massive backlash, it opened my eyes to the possibility that continuing to put my trust in Unity could be a mistake, and more importantly, that maybe a fresh start would be the best thing for Return in the long run. Something I've talked about a couple times in various social media posts through the years is how Return is my first "real" project as a game dev. When I started working on Return, I had less than a year experience working in Unity, and it was only ever meant to be a one room arena shooter that I expected to finish in a couple months. Four years later, and it's ballooned into a zelda inspired metroidvania with a parkour system, multiple dungeons, and a full story mode in the works; the fact that I started so directionless and with such little experience has hurt the project every single step of the way. In fact, the biggest reason why it's taken me so long to get it where it is today is because I keep having to remake large sections of the game to fix architectural issues, bugs, optimization problems, and make big design changes to steer the project into the vision I currently have for it. 

When Unity made their initial announcement and devs began leaving en masse, one of the engines that popped up as a viable alternative to Unity was Godot. I had always heard that Godot was primarily a 2D engine and that its 3D was super underwhelming; however, because of the massive boost in visibility, it became pretty clear almost immediately that while this may have been true at one point it certainly wasn't anymore. From seeing examples of people's work, to messing with it myself over these last few months, Godot genuinely seems to be a fantastic choice for 3D games, and it's only getting better as time goes on. It's still not quite the powerhouse that Unity (and certainly not Unreal) is, but I have zero interest in making games that reach AAA levels of graphical fidelity anyway so I don't personally see that as a hinderance at this point in time.

As such, my immediate plans are to step away from Return for a while to evaluate Godot as a possible candidate for Return. During this time, I'll be working on small/prototype projects that will help me learn how Godot works, as well as what it's limitations are - as eager as I am to keep working on Return, my biggest fear is that using it as a platform to learn Godot will just result in me making the same mistakes of my past, with Return being a game I had previously used as a platform to learn Unity. I currently have no timeline in mind, as I plan on giving this phase as much time as it needs. It may well be that my exploration into Godot will find that Unity is still the best option for Return; however, the simple fact is that over these 4 years, I've grown into a much more capable dev than I was when I started, and I'm confident that a fresh start will be the best option either way. Ultimately this comes down to Return being an incredibly important project to me, and me wanting to give it the respect it deserves. 

All that said, let's talk about what I've been doing all this time. Over the last 5 months I've been spending my time building a new area to showcase everything I've done in private for the last year or so, as well as implementing rough versions of features I've been wanting to add for a while, such as loading zones and more dynamic audio. I spent a particularly long amount of time on the level - one of the aspects of Return I had always neglected was the graphics (being that I never really got out of the greybox phase) so I wanted an opportunity to see a glimpse of Return as I had always wanted to see it. It might go without saying, but nothing in this build is representative of a final product - there are tons of glitches, jank, inconsistencies, optimization issues, and missing features - and it exists solely as a means to show off what was done during what I'm considering to be phase 1 of development. I might pop in every once in a while to add a feature here and there, but by and large, Return is going to be pretty quiet until I figure out what I'll be doing with it. Until that day comes, all I can do is promise that it will be worth the wait - thank you for your interest in Return!

- Carlo