Mattrified Games Blog

It's been about two months since I wrote and posted this on my Patreon.  I was going to publish publicly a few weeks later, but there was some discourse over the future of offline events, so I decided to reread and wait a bit.  Unfortunately, that wait turned into forgetting; so with a few revisions from that Patreon post, here are my thoughts on how showcasing a game at EVO went back in early August of 2023. Besides Battle High and MerFight, I've worked on a several other indie fighting games.  Probably the biggest and most ambitious is Drag Her, a 2D game focused primarily on real-life drag queens and kings.  It's camp, it's stupid, and it's aiming to just be silly and fun.  It's still a fighting game though, and this year, the team was invited to showcase the game at EVO, the biggest fighting game tournament in the US -- possibly the world.  Overall, I think it went well, but I have some thoughts on EVO, its indie showcase, and more.   The Trip ...

As many game developers, especially, smaller, independent ones such as myself, are aware, Unity, has announced a new runtime fee for games.  From what I gather it implies that games made with the free Unity license (Personal) with over $200K in revenue in a calendar year AND over 200K lifetime installs will start paying a fee per install over that limit, something that sounds small on paper, like two cents, but can add up very quickly if you're game is somehow getting millions of downloads.  Suffice it to say, many are not happy about this announcement.  I do believe some fear is a bit reactionary, a bit knee jerk and exaggerated, dreaming up scenarios that 98% of devs will never have to deal with.  For example, at those values, I will never have to pay this fee for either MerFight and Battle High, but this is rather myopic -- though not as myopic as Unity's thought process behind this idea.  A LOT of questions have come up since this announcement: Does this in...