Godot is a passable engine. It doesn’t have a massive pile of money behind it, but it’ll generally do most things adequately.

Honestly - and I may be biased as I’m a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it’s bloated as hell and there’s a learning curve… but if you’re an indie, it’s just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.

Here’s a video from an all-hands meeting the day after she quit. (Reddit, sorry.)

The following is a transcript if you’d rather avoid Reddit:

(speaker 1, Linus) So we called this meeting because it’s come to our attention that we need to have a quick chat about the best way to handle HR related feedback and rumors. We won’t be giving any names for what I hope are extraordinarily obvious reasons, but what we can do is give you the following guidelines for problem solving and conflict resolution.

Sorry that this is all boring and corporate, but here we are. Number one, always stand up for what’s right. We’re only a team as long as we’re all working together and working for each other. That’s the most important one. Number two, always reflect on your own personal experiences and use your common sense. Few things in life are truly black and white. Number three, always wait to hear both sides of a story before passing your own judgment. Be cautious when you know that one side is bound by legal and ethical disclosure guidelines, when the other is not. Carefully consider what it says about the character of someone who would engage in that type of gossip against someone who has no power to defend themselves.

Number four, always encourage openness and transparency. If you have a problem, you need to speak up. We want to fix it. If you receive feedback about somebody else at this company, the first response is, have you spoken with this person? Followed closely by, you need to speak with this person. We don’t solve interpersonal issues here, or really anywhere in your life, if you wish to live in a drama free zone, by engaging in water cooler politicking. So, if for any reason that individual is not comfortable approaching the person they’re having a conflict with, we have a chain that they’re supposed to follow.

So first, you advise them to take the problem to their manager. Followed by me or Yvonne, followed by our third party HR firm. I hope that you all trust that we’re here to make this a safe, fun, and productive workplace, and we won’t tolerate mistreatment of any of our team members.

If you have any reason to believe otherwise, then I refer you again to point number four, which is to address the issue with the individual directly, or bring it to me or Yvonne, or bring it to our third party HR firm. Since I’m not at liberty to share any details about what occurred, uh, all I can do is ask that you trust me and Yvonne.

Um, some of you know us very well, I’ve been here a very long time, um, some of you have not been here for as long, but I like to think that whether you’ve been here for nine years or nine days, you’re here for a reason and you believe that we are utmost to run this company with integrity and compassion.

Um, We can’t solve problems we don’t know about though, so on that note, I’d like to invite anyone who has concerns about a fellow team member or about a manager to submit their feedback either by speaking with their manager, me or Yvonne directly, or if you would prefer to provide your feedback anonymously, we have an option for that as well.

It’s the manager and co-worker feedback form. Uh, Yvonne, if you’re not aware of it - show of hands who is not aware of it? Hey, a lot of people aren’t aware of it. Good, so now we all know. There’s an anonymous form, if for whatever reason you’re not comfortable either talking to me me or Yvonne directly about it - and that’s okay, that’s fine, we understand, that’s why we have these options - Yvonne’s gonna post it in the general chat.

It’s a safe space to provide us ideas for improvement, or if you’re consumed by the holiday spirit and you want to say nice things, you can do that too. Does anybody else have any questions?

Not a single question? Wow, that must have been a really good speech.

(speaker 2, James) You gonna dance on that table, or just stand on it?

(speaker 1, Linus) That’s it! So, um, Yvonne, did you have anything you wanted to add?

(speaker 3, Yvonne) (inaudible) Somebody said (inaudible) if you guys want to sanitize your hands, help yourself with free (inaudible)?

(speaker 1, Linus) Yeah, that was actually just totally random timing. It came up the stairs a moment ago. Dennis is on it. Alright. Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful and, uh, productive rest of your day. And weekend.

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power’s sake. “Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others” sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn’t agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don’t let them trick you into thinking they’re the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they’re told. The lower class are the people they don’t like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy’s founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don’t mind communists - I’m pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

Agreed. Fuck tankies.

I’d love to see more races and classes. Artificers, Tortles, Warforged, Tabaxi, etc. There’s a bunch of missing subclasses too, like Storm Barbarian or Swashbuckler Rogue.

Maybe mod tools would allow that, but at the same time I’m not convinced. It just seems like easy territory for an expansion, sort of like Tasha’s or Eberron… but for the video game.

There’s a great video about this sort of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agzNANfNlTs

Essentially, it looks at why conservatives vs. liberals approach the world differently. Democracy vs. capitalism is inherently a logical contradiction; in a true democracy, everyone is treated equally and all voices have equal weights. In capitalism, some people are more equal than others - it’s a pyramid. Fascism is when these “some people are better” is because of something like genetics, or culture. (The video doesn’t touch on this, but modern Communism falls into the same trap as well, where “some people are better” because they know the party leaders or they’re technocrats. It’s a mindset that humans have and not something exclusive to capitalism.)

Where you wind up on the American political spectrum is based on where you fall when the ideals of equality vs. hierarchy clash. There is no middle ground because the two are fundamentally incompatible - if everyone was truly treated equally, you couldn’t have people with more power/status than others. If you accept that not everyone should wield power and that at the end of the day there must be some rich and some poor - some that have power and others that do not - then you are therefore arguing that people shouldn’t be treated equally. From there, the pyramid structure is the natural order of things (“always a bigger fish”).

Because the structure is fundamentally at odds with itself you can’t have both at once. You have to compromise on one side more than the other. Hence there is no such thing as “apolitical”, even with technology - it will hold a bias one way or the other.