Blitloop Devlog #1: Introduction
The first devlog episode documenting the making of Blitloop, a next-gen retro game built with Unity.
Welcome to the first episode of my new devlog for Blitloop. This is the first game I've built with Unity. Come along to see my process, reasoning, problems I encounter, and the solutions I come up with during the journey from the initial prototype to a completed game.
SpriteKit
I've been working on Blitloop on and off for quite some time. I originally developed the game in Swift, SpriteKit, and GameplayKit. Unfortunately, Apple's lack of love for SpriteKit led me to dead ends, with bugs in the SpriteKit framework that Apple is never going to fix, especially concerning shaders in SpriteKit, to a point where I felt I couldn't achieve my vision with SpriteKit.
For a while, I considered starting to get into programming Metal directly, but I really don't want to write my own game engine; I just want to make the actual games. This led me to start exploring Unity.
Unity
At this point, I had come quite far with the Swift version of the game, and after a lot of thinking back and forth, I decided to start over and rebuild it in Unity instead. Of course, this came with the side effect that I had to learn Unity and C# too.
That's where the game is now. I'd say it's way more than halfway there, but there are still plenty of things left to do. I'd be thrilled to have some of you come along for the remaining ride to bring this game to the finishing line.
I hope you enjoy this episode and the upcoming series.