Remaking in Godot. Beta Versions Available.

Melody Duel Godot Version

I've decided to migrate from Unity to Godot due several reasons, particularly my interest in Godot's netcode framework. As an introduction to Godot for myself, I've taken up the task to recreate Melody Duel in Godot, moving away from using the third party service Photon Unity Network (https://www.photonengine.com/pun), and replacing it with my own server-client code created all with Godot. It is for the most part complete, but before I release it fully and update the Web itch.io version and the Google Play Store Android version, I would like to share the beta versions of the game to you all to try out and leave feedback.

The last thing I want to do is mainly for the Web and Windows versions: add options for rebinding keys for player 1 (local/online) and player 2 (local), and maybe do some small touches to how the gameboard looks like adding lines for the lanes.

Web Version: https://zigtrinity.com/Games/MelodyDuel

Windows, Mac, Linux and Android versions available for download attached to the post.

For those curious, my main reasons for leaving Unity are:

• Android API/SDK versions and Gradle (tool to build Android executables) are tied to the Unity Editor version itself. Therefore, every year, I have to upgrade the Unity version of every Unity Android game I have, lest they be removed from the Google Play Store (happens often, still happening right now).
• Being forced to update the game to use a newer version of Unity means new breaking changes and bugs that I have to fix before I can simply just reupload it to the store with no actual gameplay or content changes. It's time consuming and I have very limited time.
• Unity has been getting slower and more unstable for me with every new version. It crashes more and more. The load times are slow. The build times are like 15 minutes for HTML and Android executables.
• Each new version of Unity comes with preinstalled bloat. For example, the last time I updated the Unity version of an Android game, it came with the bloat of Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality packages that I don't need.
• No battle tested netcode (they just got a netcode solution in 2023, after several years of sitting on their deprecated implementation).
• A lot of experimental systems only half-way replacing older systems, which no longer get updates as they are planned to be sunset. It creates this weird area where you want to use the new systems, but they are missing features the older system has and are not production ready/stable.
• I've run into limitations with a variety of their systems that I could not simply extend since they do not make documentation beyond simple examples, or simply just have limitations in the core design of it. Example: fully inheritable Animator controllers, with base and child controllers and the child controllers can have additions, overrides or modifications, while keeping default behaviors from the base. I had to hack a solution together through a lot of trial and error, figuring out how data is stored and put back together...
• And, of course, the last straw was them trying to push the install fee policy, which would have made them the only game engine in the industry that could potentially charge developers more fees than they make in revenue by factors of $100,000's. While they have back-peddled the policy at this time, the fact that they even tried cracked my faith in them as a company, as they deliberated this foolish policy for 8 months, pulling in external experts for thoughts on the matter (most, if not all, said 'do not do it'), and still went ahead with the policy.

For all these reasons, I've decided to move to Godot, since the community matches my ideals more, i.e., they are solely interested in making a solid, practical, efficient game engine. And even if I hit a roadblock, it is open source, so I can actually fix the issue myself.