Mastodawn

cancel Jul 13, 2022

Unity (former game engine company) has merged with an actual adware and malware distribution company. That's not an exaggeration. Fake Flash installers, was blacklisted by Microsoft's anti-malware tool, VirusTotal entires, that kind of thing.

https://blog.infostruction.com/2018/10/26/adware-empire-ironsource-and-installcore/

https://www.benedelman.org/news-021815/

Don't build your games on engines you don't have the source code to.

Adware Empire - IronSource and InstallCore

A recent Adware campaign using malicious Bing ads led me to a Chrome download that eventually deployed Adware to the user’s computer. The IPs and types of Adware connected back to IronSource Ltd., Babylon Software Ltd., and InstallCore – all Israeli companies that have connections to Adware. See her

INFOSTRUCTION

cancel Jul 13, 2022

... if you can avoid it. Pico-8, GameMaker (though they're on some crappy subscription thing now), etc. are all OK for making smaller games. If you're going to invest many months or years of your life into some long-running project, maybe consider Unreal or Godot, instead.

@cancel Fucking hell, I was considering trying to learn Unity cause it felt like the only engine both powerful enough and easy enough to learn to let me maybe actually manage to make something with it...

Although I can't code so that was probably never gonna happen anyway I guess 🤷‍♀️

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot I think Unity would be a bit rough if you can't code. GameMaker is the go-to for 2D games without writing lots of code. (Though they recently switched to a subscription model... ugh)

@cancel Well I intended to learn to code before I got to that, although I have untreated ADHD and I don't even know if I can do that at all

Game Maker seems a bit too basic, it seems to not even support aspect ratios that aren't 4:3, and the SDK only runs on Windows (and maybe also macOS?) which I don't use either...

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot I'm not aware of aspect ratio limitations with GameMaker. I've seen portrait games made with it, 16:9, etc. Are you sure you're looking at the right product?

Yeah, it's a Windows-centric thing. Most game stuff is. Especially the non-programming parts. Trying to make a game w/o coding on Linux sounds like a nightmare. (I can't even imagine trying to *use* Linux without some programming skill.)

@cancel lmao why? 😅

There's absolutely no programming involved in *running* Linux, I'm a designer and I only know how to make like some really basic stuff in JavaScript and I use Linux cause it feels like the only OS I can use that doesn't make me feel like a capitalist shill (plus it won't spy on me and it gives you much more freedom than any proprietary stuff)

But yeah basically I use it for political reasons and I'm... not having any trouble with it lol. I do most things from a GUI and when I do use the terminal it's really simple stuff, definitely no programming involved lol

Also idk the only Game Maker games I've ever encountered were Ijji, Undertale and Deltarune, and they're all locked to 4:3

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot It breaks all the time, for me, and I have to repair it :P And it will break in ways like, "oh the compilation flags for this library are wrong now, and it's producing something with a mismatched ABI that this other thing wants to link against, ..."

@cancel I have no idea what any of that means

I just use it like I used to use Windows and stuff just works lmao

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot Not saying you're wrong, but the last person who said to me they have no problems with Linux, 2 or 3 months ago, after I questioned them a bit, ended up revealing that they had just reinstalled their OS a couple of weeks prior because the package manager made it unbootable.

@cancel That *kinda* happened to me one time, cause I canceled an update (ctrl-C'd Pacman) while it was updating the kernel so I ended up with just... no kernel at all lol

But I mean that was 100% my fault lmao

cancel Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot no victim blaming allowed :)

@cancel The only thing I was a victim of was my own pressing of ctrl-c lmao

Like if I didn't want stuff like that to happen I'd be using Ubuntu or Fedora or something, not Arch

@cancel It's all moot anyway, considering I can't even afford the subscription fees and I'm too stupid to even learn the minimum amount required for even that stuff though 🤷‍♀️

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel (my games are all in game maker and they are all in 16:9 https://electric-prune-juice.itch.io/

you can make games in absolutely any resolution or aspect ratio you want)

Electric Prune Juice Games - itch.io

itch.io

@fluttergirly @cancel Huh, interesting! I thought they were locked down to the same sort of resolution old RPG Maker games or Undertale are locked at

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel nope! game maker is super robust, you can make really anything you want in it, though the easiest type of game to make tends to be platformers or top down adventure games, but its capable of anything

a bug Jul 13, 2022

@hazelnot @cancel Undertale has that resolution either out of choice, or because toby fox didn't know how to change it, hehe,,

@fluttergirly @cancel The two games I have *some* design docs for are an RTS and a Metroidvania, so it technically should suit me for at least one of them, although unfortunately it doesn't have very good Linux support (pretty much none at all) and I don't have Windows on anything 😅

Csepp 🌢Jul 14, 2022

@cancel @hazelnot I remembered some news about a gambling company (Playtech) buying them up a few years ago and it looks like that did happen but they have since been sold again to Opera. 🤔
Similar problem as in the OP.

Btw aren't there some web based low-code game dev tools? I'm not a huge fan of games that only run in browsers, so I haven't looked too deep, but I think I've seen tools like that.