DEV Community: Ethan Toney

My First Chance With A Game Dev Community And Why I Left

Ethan Toney — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 18:17:13 +0000

Back in June/July of 2020, I started working with a game dev community called CGDC (Christian Game Developers Conference). I was part of the Combat-Skills team on the development side. My tasks were to make sure all skills/abilities and combat systems could be programmed into the game as simple and efficiently as possible.

The group size originally started out at close to 100 volunteers, but fizzled out to around 40 in under 3 months.

I worked with the group for about 6 months before leaving. Here's why I left:

!bug - I understand that CSS uses !important, but we are using C# and it confused me several times seeing people put !(not)bug on features not fully implemented. "Bug!" Would've done better for actual bugs while "!bug" could've been left to features not fully implemented or mechanics that looked like bugs but weren't. Minor complaint, but it bugged me a lot.
1. Not using Scriptable Objects - the team asked I redo the ability system for the MVP, so I rewrote the system with the designers in mind a made an easy, convertable script that turned all the abilities into SO. Management hated it and designers complained because "we will have to open up Unity." Apparently the design team wanted .txt files. So someone else wrote over my scripts and made the system into .txt, until the designers found that to be too complicated and wanted CSV. Now, they have issues with too many variables connected, since some abilities vastly differ and loot vastly differ. If they had gone with the SO I wrote for them, they wouldn't be having these issues.
2. I offered my smooth walking system that I scripted alongside the GameDev.tv RPG Course. Management felt that their jittery, floating above ground while moving after the walk anaimation played once system was the way to go.
3. Management decided to throw out my top winning game ideas that the community collectively voted for and went with their "baby", that is, their project they had worked on for several years as hobbyists.
4. The team used to have a game developers from around the world who actually built games and worked for AAA studios. I should've left when they left, but I wanted to have my name on a game on Steam. Now, I'm alright with not having my name there if it means my name won't be on a very negatively reviewed game... though is some publicity good, even if it's bad publicity?..🤔
5. Lastly, I left because there was one dev who would pull all-nighters, plus jump into every team's meetings. When you are being micromanaged by another dev on the team, it gets irritating very quickly.

The whole project wasn't about me, I get that. But I offered several parts that were very useful and was turned down simply because management didn't want to rewrite the terrible systems that someone else dedicated 5 years to build and ran at 15 FPS on gaming rigs. My systems were already built and could've been modified to plug and play, just as other developers had their own systems in other areas that could've done the same. Now I'm curious to see the game come out and see what it is versus what it could've been.

Thoughts on the Epic Games War on Apple

Ethan Toney — Tue, 25 Aug 2020 14:32:05 +0000

With the current war being waged by Epic Games against Apple, I sat down and thought about a few benefits and disadvantages that could improve or harm devs if the outcome is in favor of Epic Games.

According to Epic, Apple's system of taking 30% of revenue hurts devs, while Apple believes it improves their products. I'm with Epic on this point. Apple makes billions over multiple streams of income. They offer various subscriptions and require developers to pay yearly for licenses. Unlike Google, where you pay a one-time fee and 30%, Apple requires $99 per year and 30%.

It's understandable, though not entirely likeable, that Google takes 30% of revenue even though they are also a tech giant. The reason it's more understandable is because there is only a one-time fee for Google. It's easier to get back your one-time payment of $25 with 30% taken from income, than to get $99 per year with 30% taken from income.

Apple holds a proprietary system, so they are eligible to (mostly) do whatever they want with it. Revoking Epic licenses was wrong to do and could've hurt the reputation and devs using Unreal Engine. Apple was willing to hurt an entire industry that uses Unreal to attack Epic. The industry includes people all over the world using Unreal for jobs to feed themselves and their families. It was one thing to remove Fortnite (source of income for Epic Games), another to attack the Unreal Engine itself (a source of income for many devs outside Epic Games).

Here's my take:

I believe 20% should be the new standard for major companies, especially Apple. I don't believe Apple should be forced to allow other app stores into their app market (something Epic wants to do). I think it was wrong that Apple decided to attack Epic Games and the people using their services (Unreal Engine), not just Epic Games with Fortnite only. I also think that both stores should implement a system where 3.0 (and below) rated apps are sent notices saying to update the app to a newer version to get a higher rating or risk the app being taken down.

My Experience with Native Script and why I've Switched to React Native

Ethan Toney — Mon, 15 Jun 2020 17:44:04 +0000

Note: I'm a web dev that started in on mobile dev due to a few ideas I had. I am not an experienced mobile dev.

When I first started mobile development, I narrowed my choices to two: React Native and NativeScript.

NativeScript has a few features I like about it. First, you can choose Angular, Vue.js (supports Typescript), or vanilla JS.

NativeScript runs natively (mostly). And the team there suggest that NS may have certain features that would fare better over RN. That being said, NS wasn't a fun experience. NS requires two apps, one to connect to your project, the other to open your project. The live reloading didn't always work, and compiling became an issue for small things. While my experience was certainly a factor, the documentation didn't always cover my needs. Portions of the docs were old and outdated. Other portions vaguely covered topics.

So I tried out React Native. There's a great course at http://www.handlebarlabs.com/ that was recently updated. While I didn't start with that course, I ended up using the course to expand my knowledge on professionalism (standard folder structure, etc.) in RN.

RN isn't always easy to use, but the hot reload feature works better for me than the NS apps. Since RN uses Javascript (also supports Typescript), RN is much more familiar to me than NS.

The only downside I've had so far with RN is the debugger. The debugger is not always clear with errors.

Possibly my favorite part of React Native is navigation. It's fairly simple to setup and create a basic app with navigation. I only use React Navigation, but there are a few other choices out there. (That being said, I couldn't figure out navigating in NS. It would continually break on me, even with the templates.)

That being said, whatever framework or library you use, I'm hoping you enjoy it!

Want to correct me? Want to add something else? Feel free to drop a comment.

Unity in an Unreal 5 World

Ethan Toney — Thu, 14 May 2020 14:16:24 +0000

We recently saw the Unreal 5 demo and for those of us that use Unity as our primary dev environment, it was pretty cool. Now, as a Unity user who does have Unreal installed to test it out, I wasn't too surprised or hyped by Unreal 5's offerings. While I haven't researched much into Unreal 5's features, I'm guessing that we'll still see more issues pop up dealing with storage sizes and optimization for lower-end hardware. As a dev who focuses on building games for lower to medium PC specs, Unreal 5 isn't (imo) geared towards me. AAA companies will love it, Indie MMO creators will love it, and I'll still be using Unity.

That being said, Unity is becoming outdated. The CEO loves throwing out the statistics of Unity's use, but what's after stats? Broken, deprecated features. Almost all the useful features are in "preview" and do not work well with older versions of Unity. The visual scripting solution changed to DOTS, while they bought BOLT to satisfy users preparing to jump ship. I prefer non-visual scripting. I can write C# well enough to build games, but cannot write C++, which keeps me tethered to Unity. I think Unity Technologies knows that C# devs are mostly stuck with them.

I like Unity quite a lot, but their practices of placing paid assets on the store, their learning center locked behind a subscription, and of pointing to assets on the store instead of implementing common assets into the engine has started to tear down the initial market. They claim to democratize game dev, but Epic is pushing ahead of Unity with Unreal 5.

While I'm not going to jump ship just yet, I think I may start to learn C++ after I get a better understanding of C# in a desktop environment (as my C# knowledge is limited to Unity). Hopefully, Unity Technologies fixes their engine and improves it to have common core features alongside Unreal. Until then, I think I'll start preparing my lifeboat.

And really, have you tried making multiplayer games in Unity? It's not simple, and Unity doesn't help by deprecating their net code.