trauma dumping & video game engines ⚙️

November 30th, 2024

To be honest, we never expected the level of success Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion would receive.

It quickly threw my life into turmoil, as a ton of expectations started to rain down onto me from seeming nowhere. Players became obsessed with the idea of a sequel, which equated directly into the business with it being the best course of action, much to my dismay. I have never been a fan of sequels. Ever since I was a kid making dumb flash games, I’ve always felt it was better to move on and do something newer than rehash what was already said in a slightly different way. That being said, not wanting to be a stick in the mud, I pushed myself to go along with it to ultimately create Turnip Boy Robs a Bank.

This post isn’t about the quality of the game we shipped, as I am incredibly proud of what the team managed to create without me being 100% there. Nor is this post really about sequels at all, but rather the strain of taking a next step when your head is screaming for rest, and you can’t think clearly.

For context, last year I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. To combat it, I have weekly therapy, and I’m currently taking Lexapro (my knight in golden armor). While my life has drastically improved because of those, I wasn’t always benefiting from it, which includes the time shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched.

I remember when the physical of the first game came out, and I got the once in a lifetime chance to see my own game on a GameStop’s shelf. I walked in, saw it, almost broke out into a deep sob, and instead muffled it entirely because of the anxiety of “what if I look weak in a random GameStop I don’t care about.” Ever since then I have barely processed it, and it feels like a sharp edge in my career and life to not be able to really enjoy that feeling.

This is not to say “woe is me,” but rather set the scene. I was not mentally healthy shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched, and it leads to many issues.

To be honest, my heart wasn’t in Turnip Boy Robs a Bank at the start, and it only really got a small amount of it total by the end. Around the start of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, I had pushed the team to start three separate projects, with the idea that if we did one, we can do more and appeal to our audience while allowing us to do something new. We drastically increased the studio size, but that didn’t clog the holes I had created. The core team, the people who created Turnip Boy’s wacky world, were more diluted. We spent our time tinkering on new games and worlds, only to let the Turnip Boy IP be continued by people who were strangers to our heads in that way. They’re amazing friends, but they weren’t us, which made it hard for them to write as if they were. This not only slowed development, but hurt team moral as the leads were off doing whatever they thought important.

I remember a few months into the project, Jake hit me with “If the sequel sucks, no one is going to buy the next games” which absolutely floored me. It was the perfect way to sucker punch me at that moment, which both hurt but helped me regain control. At that point, Jen and I set up a plan to inject the “Turnip Boy charm” into the sequel, jumping on and majorly editing the structure of the game, writing a boatload of the game’s dialogue, and just being infinitely more present. While I believe this was a turning point for the game, it definitely took a toll on me. The stress of having to basically “do it again” was weighing down hard, and we ended up crunching to bring that vision to life.

This all being said, I feel like this whole experience still affects me today, almost a year out from the launch of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank. Thankfully, we put our foot down and completely stopped development of the game post-launch, as we didn’t want to over-promise after the most stressful development cycle I have personally ever gone through. That being said, the decisions we made are still affecting us today, which has ultimately shaken up my life more than I wish to admit.

This finally boils down to the point of this post, to talk about game engines. I know, it’s a shift, but hear me out.

Shortly after Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion launched, Unity announced their gross policy on cost-per-installs. This policy disgusted almost Unity’s entire userbase, including me. The trust that was lost, even to this day after they completely discarded the policy, has been loud to say the least. It’s the biggest reason why Godot has had such a massive surge forwards, but I digress. After reading about this policy change, I decided to completely disregard Unity as an engine, which threw me back about four years of engine experience as Unity was the engine Becker College decided to shove down my throat. It was easy to decide what engine Turnip Boy Robs a Bank should be built in, as my great friend Carson was taking the programming reigns, and he’s an amazing GameMaker developer. Plus, on top of that, before I learned Unity, Carson and I both mainly used GameMaker for personal projects anyway, so it felt like a good choice.

Throughout Turnip Boy Robs a Bank’s development, we learned the engine HATES larger games. Even to this day on my M3 Pro Macbook, it takes GameMaker several seconds to open an Object in the game’s project files, due to the sheer number of things the engine has to keep track of. Speaking of this, later in development, GameMaker would just lose our data. I remember one late night in particular where Carson and I had to go through all our NPC Objects to fix the dialogue that had just been lost. It felt like a blindsiding from the engine we both had grown to love so dearly.

Believe it or not, this isn’t a GameMaker hate post, but these reasons speak as to why I have chosen to walk away from the engine at a professional level, despite it still being my personal engine of choice. This being said, we had just eliminated two engines from the fray, and I was becoming more desperate to find an engine to call home so I could develop in somewhat peace.

To be honest, after the Unity fiasco, I have lost a lot of faith in using an engine owned by a massive company. Now, if you are a fan of my work, you might be thinking “bruh, you just announced Hobnobbers, a multiplayer co-op mall raiding game made in UNREAL ENGINE!!!”, and to that I say fair. Hobnobbers is another example of Snoozy Kazoo using an engine because the lead programmer being most knowledgeable in it, and in this case, it’s Alexis’ engine of choice. Also, funny Fortnite engine but that’s beside the point, LOL.

I have definitely taken a more relaxed approach at Snoozy Kazoo, where I’m more of a director/overseer rather than in the code myself. While I’m now known to jump into the fray whenever I’m needed, this has definitely given me more room to eventually want to start some smaller games by myself for fun. Starting an indie studio was always my dream, but what’s the point if you can’t enjoy it? I’m now at a point where I feel like the pressure is starting to disappear slightly. While I play a much bigger role in Hobnobbers from the start compared to Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, I’m getting to the point where I can see myself working on something else as well. It’s why I have been able to take time and flesh out the studio’s website, this website, and our new Discord bot, the Mascot, which has mini-games I’m fleshing out. This all being said, I want to start a new game for myself, but it brings us straight back to the engine question…

Ok, so I ruled out Unity and GameMaker, as well as Unreal Engine since its corporate owner. Next is some type of open-source engine, and look at that! Godot is trending! Let’s check that out!

YIKES!!!

The Godot foundation has a lot of cult-like behaviors? That sucks, but that’s just one Google search, and I don’t have time to really research it. But I mean; it’s open-source, so that doesn’t matter too much right? Wow! The porting situation is fucking awful! Never mind!

And I mean, to each their own. Godot seems to have a great IDE, and a large community that cares deeply. It just doesn’t make sense for Snoozy Kazoo since people expect us to port our games, and I want to do it ourselves if possible with support from the engine’s foundation itself, rather than a third-party company. Even if that third-party company is owned by the founder of the foundation, which is a little weird but whatever.

Thankfully, there is a large community of developers developing open-source engines. At this point though, I have been considering cutting out the IDE entirely and just trying MonoGame, since it’s a powerful framework, used within Celeste and Stardew Valley. Even better, it has porting tools created by the MonoGame foundation itself for Nintendo Switch and Xbox.

At this point, I’m pretty settled on MonoGame. I think I just need to jump over the hurdle of actually learning it, which was the point of this post. By writing this, I want to encourage myself to actually learn it now that I spoke my case out to the world, and that’s hopefully what’s next for me.

I think a large reason why I wanted to write this post was to simply show that behind the scenes, something as simple as choosing what game engine you will use in the future can be still extremely difficult to decide. When development turns your life upside down, and your mental health isn’t the greatest, it can make a seemingly easy decision impossible. I’m very thankful for all the people in my life who have helped make it better, whether that be my partner, my therapist, or my family, they’ve all been a wonderful support system.

Peace out dorks,

😈 Yukon