Hey friends,
Nathan Hurde here. Today I will like to announce how things are going and where Chase and I will be taking PawByte in the future. It has been 10 long years of working on the open source project Game Pencil Engine. At the beginning of the project we created wonders, even purchased a Wii U dev kit. We were hitting the ground hard, but each year it felt like every feature added, another one was required.
Fast forward to a decade later, we have been busy with life and personal obligations that cannot allow us to keep creating open source software in hopes of achieving funding to focus on full time.
To be clear, we always wanted to make games using our own in house engine that the public had the source code to for free. With the recent Unity debacle it looked like that was the right choice; however, there was more to think about. Everything in an engine is important from its design, architecture, speed, language, tools and systems supported. At the time engines other than Unity and Unreal and Cocos2d were not seen in mass production as we see now.
Im happy to see the progress of Godot, Game Maker Studio, Construct, Rust and others. Watching YouTubers like gamesfromscratch gives me great hope that we will not be living in a duopoly of Game Engines.
With that being said, as of today Chase and myself will be ceasing the production of Game Pencil Engine. I am saddened beyond words that I must take away this project that has become such a large part of me. I will salvage some bits of code for smaller scale projects, but I won’t even begin those until I ship a game using another game engine. The time to create a game will be much shorter than the time to make Game Pencil Engine a worthwhile competitor to the top 10 popular game engines.
The source code to the current iteration of Game Pencil will still remain available and be MIT licensed.
We began PawByte to make games and now we must choose to make engines using a popular, modern and well supported engine.
Secondly, when I do have more free time I plan on starting a non-profit unrelated to PawByte that will focus on civic projects, education as well as smaller scale open source projects.
Now back to PawByte….
Currently there are many engines for us to choose from to begin rapidly prototyping our franchises and worlds.
I will like to thank everyone who has supported us along the way. This maybe farewell to Game Pencil, but the memories and discoveries we have made are timeless.
I love you all, I love gaming and I will do my best to create wonderful vibrant games for you.
Sincerely,
Nathan Hurde
Co-founder of PawByte