Double Fine chooses Moai

Re:Double Fine chooses Moai by mbenjaminsmith on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @12:30AM (#3917638)

I started a games company at the beginning of the year and am constantly researching game engines. If I wasn't working in 3D I would have went with (or switched to) Moai. It looks like a great mix of productivity boosting features and a no-BS, close to the metal way to create cross platform code. I also like their focus on the networking, advertising, analytics, etc features in their SDK.

I'm currently using Unity. Their core product is decent but their team (at least the CEO and the sales guys, I haven't interacted with any tech guys) are obnoxious. I met with their sales rep in Asia (where I'm based) and he told me in no uncertain terms that they don't care about small teams. And that they were horrible at communicating because they don't see themselves as having any real competition. I think it's the fist time I've been heavily invested in a technology and at the same time wanted to see it become obsolete.

One of the best parts of Moai is Lua. I had started with Unity working in C# (seemed like it would be less performance bound) but didn't really like the toolkit until I switched over to the relatively obscure Boo (it has a Python-like syntax). Even with the almost total lack of documentation it's just way more productive than the other language choices. Switching to really terse scripting language has had a big impact on productivity for me.

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Re:Double Fine chooses Moai by dhelgason on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @03:36AM (#3917968)

I'm really sorry about your negative interactions with our team in Asia – they don't reflect the fact that we very much feel we're competing with every other option there is out there, and generally never being as good as we can be at serving developers. And not just competing the 3-5 significant other 3D engine companies, but also internal technologies, open source engines, and even very different approaches like picking 2D instead of 3D in cases where both might work.

Our entire business model is built around supporting individual developers and small teams, and while we've more recently started to learn to support bigger customers, it not how we think about our product and company and we've kept building and licensing great tech that we then release to everyone using Unity – the same for all, from the littlest indie shop to EA.

PS. I'm glad that you liked Boo, it's a cool language whose designer works for us doing many Mono and compiler-related projects.

PPS. Apart from being kind of enthusiastic about Unity and the business we're in I'm usually not told that I'm obnoxious, but I can live with it if I have to. In any case feel free to get in touch on twitter (davidhelgason) or by email at david at unity3d.com. Also would love to hear more about your bad experiences in Asia, these are new teams and maybe someone didn't get the memo about democratization yet.

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Re:Double Fine chooses Moai by mbenjaminsmith on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @04:02AM (#3918015)

Thanks David, it's good to get a more positive response from you guys. I'll send you an email to continue our conversation.

[Edit: I received an email from Nicholas. I'll follow up with him]

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Re:Double Fine chooses Moai by toddz on Wednesday May 02, 2012 @11:47AM (#3919664)

Thanks for your kind words about Moai. Considering we only shipped 1.0 last month, it's exciting to see how quickly game devs have connected with the idea of a minimalist open source framework + cloud services for games.

Unity is a fine product as well. We have a number of Unity developers building their game back-ends on Moai Cloud, and we are working to build more features for them.

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