Alexis just released a new game called "9 Cam", and it's inspired by Halfquake, as you can probably tell! It has evil smilies, black and white textures, and even music by me.

It still needs ratings to not get blammed on Newgrounds, so please check it out and rate it.

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Get all my games for just $6.66 in the itch.io Halloween Sale.

My games weren't spooky enough to get into the Steam Halloween sale. Reminds me that I should make a horror game at some point!

Every day I wake up and all I want to do is work on my game. This has been the truth for many years now, in fact, that's pretty much all I can remember. Before Halfquake, I made Counter-Strike maps and experimented with music. I wrote short stories, built maps in a game called Kye, and wrote a text adventure in batchfiles.

There's a video of me as a child, sitting before a Yamaha keyboard (before my parents got divorced). My dad was filming, and my mother was standing next to me. I played a melody that I thought of, I turned to the camera, grinning and checking if dad was "getting this". My mother would then ask me if I wanted to play something from a note sheet book. I declined and just kept jamming my own stuff. Then mother would just put the book in front of me and sort of "suggest" that I play that.

I gracefully wound down my track with an "end" button (which caused the percussion to play a sort of fill-in), and begrudgingly played what mom told me to play. After that was done, I played another melody that I found interesting. Again mom would ask me to play something from the book.

When I accidentally saw that clip recently, I was stunned. I couldn't remember it, but I vaguely recalled the melodies I played from memory, and I sort of still understood why I liked them. And I realized that I'm still that kid.

I absolutely hate being told what to do. That is simply not what I'm here for. My mind is full of ideas, all of which are asking me to be turned into reality. And believe me, they won't shut up, not even in my dreams. Thankfully, I've found a compromise that allows me to live an adult life and still have time for my own projects.

But as time slips away from me, I'm trying to hold it closer. Knowing that my time is running out, I'm longing for even more to call my own. And I know this has been an on-going theme on this website, because I kept mentioning it ten years ago.

I'm using productivity tricks, I use lists, motivation hacks, time audits, but all that does is burn me out, so I have to take it slow and steady. At least one hour per day, that's been my motto for over 15 years now. And that is what I will keep on doing until the day I die.

Will it be enough? Probably not. But realistically, with an infinite amount of ideas, could it ever be? No, but I have to learn to be okay with that.

In 2015, I finally decided it was time to learn a new engine. It had been 5 years since Halfquake Sunrise, and even more years since Flash died. I had a dream that I could start selling games on Steam. My options back then were Unreal and Unity.

I chose Unity because it felt more like home. It felt a bit like working in Flash, since every object could have its own little script. And I didn't want to use C++.

So, for 8 years, I built up knowledge in Unity. I released two commercial games, one even made it to consoles and had a physical release.

Now, Unity has dropped the info that on January 1st 2024 they'll start charging per install if you meet certain thresholds.

Per install.

How do they track that? We don't know, and according to people inside Unity, they don't know either. Spyware, probably. Or, just a guesstimate based on, uh, a roll of the dice.

In any case, if you reach $200k in sales and 200k installs, you pay 20 cents per install. OR - you could upgrade to Unity Pro, then those thresholds increase to 1 million in sales and installs.

Cool, but that doesn't even hurt me as a small developer, right? These thresholds are way out of reach. So what's the big deal?

This is a huge breach of trust. Not only do they change their pricing terms completely out of left field with four months until they are active, they also apply these new terms retroactively for already released games.

This hurts developers who currently have been working on games for several years. This hurts devs who have games already released, and are now expected to pay a completely random amount of money to Unity. Remember, tracking installs is complete horseshit. You don't know which install is from a charity bundle, from a pirated copy, or from a legit copy, unless you throw privacy out the door and spy on all users.

And who's to say that this is the last thing they will try? In two years, they'll say, oh damn, we're sorry, but those fees we added recently? Yeah, we're gonna need to "adjust" them. Whoops, now it's 30 cents per install.

And you know what? If Unity can get away with it, other big companies might even take note. Oh heck, subscriptions are great, but hohoho, we can also charge when the media created with our product is consumed? Ooohohoho!

It is absolutely disgusting.

Unity's CEO is probably to blame, who's famous for suggesting that reloading should cost $1 if you've played 6 hours of Call of Duty. We don't know for sure, but what we do know is that a LOT of people internally warned against ever publishing these new terms.

Apparently, prolific Unity users were in a call or in Slack channels with Unity prior to the announcement, where they also warned Unity not to go ahead. And they did it anyway.

Because ultimately - they don't care.

They planned for people to jump ship. They knew that there would be outrage, they expected it. Small fish would probably jump ship. But you know what? Big fish like Genshin Impact, Microsoft (Gamepass), Nintendo (Pokemon), Disney (Marvel Snap) - surely they'll just pay up, right?

Just imagine Unity knocking on Microsoft's door, saying, hey, uh, all those Gamepass titles with millions of downloads? Yeah, you owe us now, sorry!

Apparently, there already is a class-action lawsuit in the making. In the meantime, Unity is doing absolutely nothing in response. They're silent. People who worked for Unity have quit, and more will follow.

And you know who else will quit Unity? Game developers. En masse.

Developers such as Mega Crit (Slay the Spire), Innersloth (Among Us), David Szymanski (DUSK, Iron Lung) - they're all moving away from Unity. And if your developer community leaves, there is no more engine left.

Existing projects? Will probably be finished. Afterwards? Goodbye Unity.

And that counts for me as well. I will finish Faith in Despair in Unity because it is built on several years of existing code from other projects. But I've already looked at Godot. And it's refreshingly fun to work with. And totally free forever.

If you want even more info about this whole disaster, watch this video which is probably the best summary I've seen so far.

Ten years after the last update, I've decided to rebuild this website again. The backend still looks mostly the same, but the frontend is a lot more reduced, using barely any javascript (which is a fun programming language, but the website felt too noisy). I missed having a place where I can just talk about whatever I want. Social media was an interesting experiment, but it has grown far too toxic and addicting for me.

This is the reason why "news" has now changed to "blog". I'd like to have my own corner again. Not on Patreon, where it always has this weird feeling of trying to turn the reader into a subscriber. Not on any other blog website that will die again in a few years because the company can't turn a profit with increasingly aggressive ads.

No, this time it's just a simple website where I can be whoever I want to be. And you can just... read. No comments. No likes, no reactions. No algorithm suggesting what you'd enjoy next.

You can still contact me, of course. I'm always looking forward to getting a new email or message. But this place is now tranquil.

All news entries and projects have their own pages again, just like they used to before 2013. You can even link to fan art directly. There is a news/blog search again at the bottom. And there's no wait time anymore when switching between categories/pages, because nothing is being loaded in the background while the foreground is animating through parallaxed grass.

What's going to happen next? Well, I'm currently working on Faith in Despair, and I'll still post devlog entries over at Patreon. But more personal insights and updates will be written here.

You can sign up for the newsletter, I won't send you a notification for every piece of news, but certainly for the important ones.

If you notice anything missing in this new version, or have any other feedback, just let me know.