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Comment by azhenley | Hacker News Reader

This is a lot of fun and so simple! Congrats on the release.

What was your experience with using Unity? I have been dabbling with Game Maker for the last few months and find it fairly easy to work with, but I haven't attempted anything for mobile.

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Thanks! I personally wouldn't use Unity again. I've run into so much trouble and so many little bugs. An example: just yesterday I updated Unity itself (a minor patch upgrade), and it broke half the links in my project, I had to manually downgrade some official unity packages to get it to compile, etc. I also find the fact that C# is garbage collected to be very annoying - in a real-time application, I just want total control over when stuff is allocated and deallocated. Even in a simple game such as Astro Golf, I spent ages tracking down silly allocations that lead to stutter-inducing GC. Unity physics is also a right PITA - I could go on and on..

Wow, surprised to hear this! I had assumed in a project that large and longstanding, most of the bugs would have been smoothed out.

So had I :(

A lot of these bugs seem to also go unfixed, I think with the intention that you pay for Unity Pro which gives you source code access to the engine and you can work around them / fix them yourself.

Pro doesn't give you source code access, just you need to at least have a Pro license to buy source code access (which is very expensive).

Ah, my misunderstanding. That's good to know. I imagine Unity pays more attention to Pros though? If you're free and you open tickets / post on the forums, they seem to just get totally ignored.

Each level gets better support, right up to getting roving Unity engineers in to help you out.

I don't think they are deliberately leaving bugs unfixed in order to up sell people though. More its just an enormous software project with an awful lot of people using it in lots of different ways. Basically an enormous surface area to try to tackle.

What platform would you consider using in the future, rather than Unity?

I've been looking more and more at Godot, and I really like it. Open source, you can script in C++, and it seems to have most of the features necessary for a simple 2d game like this (perhaps not for some AAA 3D game of course).

Also when developing on Linux I had more luck getting Godot to function than Unity. Had quite a bit of fun making a sidescrolling game in Godot :)

Yep, I've had endless trouble with Unity on linux. Simple stuff like GUI lagging out, it not finding my android sdk, etc.

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