The road to Slay the Spire II started over when Unity Technologies shot themselves in the face

In 2004, I was a small child using GameMaker. I read many early posts and sites from gamedevs as I dunked around. I even read the blogs of one "Radiation" talking about the Turing-complete Earthbound dialog system. I was amazed. In 2015, GameMaker hit it big with the release of Undertale.

But GameMaker was Windows-only, and had a pretty abysmal UI update. In 2016, I started using Godot 2, after evaluating many FOSS options. I even successfully shipped a virtual trainer at an evil institution. Luckily for the forces of good, they scrapped the project, because how could a small open source tool compete with Amazon Lumberyard? Lumberyard was the only proprietary game engine that could be used in the war industry, and is now defunct.

In 2023, Unity had a small series of scandals. After several layoffs, they announced in September a change to their pricing model that was not just extractive, but nonsensical (such as charging for each install). This on top of legal fuckery was a clear signal to Unity devs that it was time to jump ship.

Unity walked the pricing model back a tad, but the damage was done. Developers were jumping ship from unity. Famous Unity tutorial dev Brackeys switched entirely to a Godot tutorial dev, the GMTK jam saw the Godot-Unity share jump from 13-61 in 2021 to 39-41 in 2025, and many Unity indie devs left the platform for Godot.

Among these were Mega Crit, who made this statement:

The Mega Crit team has been hard at work these past 2+ years on a new game. But unlike with Slay the Spire, the engine we have been developing it in is Unity.

The retroactive pricing structure of Runtime Fees is not only harmful in a myriad of ways to developers--especially indies--it is also a violation of trust. We believe Unity is fully aware of this, seeing as they have gone so far as to remove their TOS from GitHub.

Despite the immense amount of time and effort our team has already poured into development on our new title, we will be migrating to a new engine unless the changes are completely reverted and TOS protections are put in place.

We have never made a public statement before. That is how badly you fucked up.

Mega Crit would publish a Medium article in October 2023, evaluating Godot after a 3-week internal game jam. It covers the debacle well, why they chose Godot for the jam, and their evaluation of Godot.

It was confirmed in 2024 that Slay the Spire II would be developed with Godot, and it now prominently features on the GodotEngine showcase. I think Casette Beasts was the largest Godot game prior to this.

As I'm nearing a decade(!) of using Godot off and on, I feel nothing but vindication for thinking "Godot's da best". The best thing with Godot is how fast it launches, how fast games run, and how you can edit your game while you play. It's very funny that the game was named to discourage people from "waiting for Godot" (to add new features) when you often find yourself not waiting for Godot (to launch).

tldr : yay godot yayyy slay the spire yayyyyyy video games yayyyy i need a job yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy