First Shader from Zero in Godot 4

This one is why I never stuck with unity. You were always either learning something that was going to be replaced, but the replacement never really came. Add on top a lack of CI friendliness (it might be different now but years ago it was clearly not designed to let you build projects from a CLI or script), install sizes, slow starts, still using a mono fork with patches instead of .NET core, etc I just couldn't stick with it

It feels like this really awkward place now where Godot is much nicer and faster for when you don't need all of the features that unity provides, while Unreal arguable offers more depth and features. The one thing Unity had going for it there was that .NET and reloading code was better than (in my limited experience with unreal) C++/blueprints

Godot hit this really nice sweet spot of consistent UX, complete enough features to get you by as an indie, and a clean enough codebase + design that I felt like if something was missing from the engine that adding it myself was reasonable (ie: at one point I was writing a raymarching based renderer for fun and adding it as a new render seemed like a reasonable project even solo)

I do think the ECS direction Unity started to go was a good call, and I actually did enjoy it, but after waiting for long enough I sort of just forgot about it at this point

I'll admit that a large chunk of why I have such good memories is because it was one of the first programming platforms I learned, so there was a lot of novelty to it, but I still think it was a very fun platform.

It was so fun that it was "animation-first"; I would be dicking around drawing a shitty cartoon, and then decide I might want to add some code, so I convert to a movie clip and start scripting. I have played with a few game dev toolkits (and I'm even a maintainer for GDevelop on NixOS [1]), and they certainly can be fun, but I'm still chasing the high that I got from coding in Flash.

I actually think that, ironically, writing Flash games might be a valid path forward again. Ruffle has gotten quite good, and importantly the features are locked, so you could treat writing games in the same way that people do homebrew for the SNES or something.

Maybe if I can figure out how to get Flash CS6 working in Wine I'll give it a spin again.

[1] https://search.nixos.org/packages?channel=26.05&query=gdevel...

Developers who write raw shader code by hand are the glue that holds AAA gaming together. The rest of us ride on their coattails.