Amir Rajan

As an indie myself, I actually want you to ship a game. I invest an immense amount of time - on the DragonRuby Discord Server - educating indies about how to sustainably and ethically monetize. I eat my own dog food and feel all the pains you feel.

Industry standard engines (specifically Unity) profit from aspiring game devs through the Asset store. They sell the *dream* of building a game (through marketing emails for training and plugins), and hope you never actually release anything. It’s like having a gym membership that you paid for, but never go to. Free money for them, no support overhead.

Device aspect ratios, file access across OS’es, display scaling, etc is left to the dev to figure out. Even what should work out of the box (for example rendering particles on the screen), is inconsistent across web builds, mobile, and desktop. You’d think that engines built by billion dollar companies would at least get that right.

As an indie dev, you can’t afford setbacks related to cross platform distribution. The existing engines out there claim cross platform support, but in reality nothing outside of generating an executable is handled for you.

Been doing indie game dev for the past 8 years (six commercial titles across iOS, Android, and the Nintendo Switch). There were a lot of hard lessons learned along the way. I built DragonRuby Game Toolkit in hopes that other indies don’t have to go through the same challenges I faced.