Randy & Manilla - Two sibs in a Quantum Travel (Early Access available)

[ofihombre7]

I have bad news for all you, the Randy & Manilla project is going down a path that put at risk of a future cancellation, and this has an explanation:
Much of its development was done at the Covid-19 pandemic time, and despite having resisted, this has brought me development problems and delays in obtaining new programming techniques and assets, and for each year that passed, more situations came up that prevented me from developing the game properly.

Already in 2022, things got a little more difficult due to several factors. One of them was the devaluation of the Euro against the Dollar and its price inflation (mainly caused by a war), which can make it difficult for me for new collaborations with increasingly higher prices. But the last straw for me, was the merge of Unity with IronSource, company that was accused of distributing harmful malware on many devices, and its purchase brought developers a very bad reputation and fears that in future versions it will bring more invasive malware and ads in games (or worse yet, malware in the asset store or even the Unity engine itself).

But as always happens in purchases of this magnitude, the intermediaries begin to calm the panic of the community saying that nothing bad is going to happen and will be all advantages. And they're partly right, at the beginning of a purchase it start with a few initial advantages, only to later unleash their hidden intentions when everything is calm until their absorption.

Some developers are planning to migrate the engine for their projects, and I'm going to do the same for Randy & Manilla.
If several fears of the community are fulfilled for the next years, I will do the following:



As you can see, Since its development with prototypes began in September 2019, it was used the Unity 5.4.2 version.
At the following month, the project was migrated to Unity 2019.2.9, And to the date of this article, it is still in use, with its iconic classic UI from the 2010s.

For the 2023, I will relocate the whole project to a new engine, and later reveal which one I chose.
This is not easy. This involves recreating all the code from scratch, creating new materials, redesigning levels, characters, mechanics, etc. A reboot in other words.

Perhaps before I make the decision to leave Unity for good, I will release the last free demo of the game made on the same engine by the end of 2022 (with 3 or 4 additional levels and its new features), and then a second crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise enough for a proper migration.

However, that would only happen in the worst possible scenario. A set of bad decisions by Unity after the IronSource purchase could be one of the reasons for the project cancellation.