Highly anticipated (at least around here) survival shooter Road to Vostok has a brand new demo out. It's a lot like the old public demo, indeed the developer calls it Public Demo 1 Version 3, with one huge caveat: Road to Vostok now runs on the Godot game engine rather than Unity.
The in-development post-apocalyptic shooter is set in an abandoned border zone between Finland and Russia, with you as the protagonist trying to cross from one side to another. The game vision requires advanced, fast 3D rendering and a strong physics engine—concerns that mean the underlying game engine is very important.
"About three months ago I ... decided to switch to another game engine," said solo developer Antti in a video update. Now the Road to Vostok "project is now 100% ported which took a total of 615 hours of development time. You might ask if these 615 hours were worth it, I believe they were. With this amount of work I got myself a platform that minimizes the risks that I was worried about, which has a lot of potential for the future, and above all is fun to work with."
Antti, the solo developer of Road to Vostok, is just one of many devs switching away from Unity toward the open-source Godot game engine. He posted a long piece about how complex the decision was, and how he chose Godot, a few months back. An exodus from Unity triggered earlier this year, when Unity attempted changes to its fee structures resulted in just about every single game developer I've ever met or spoken to getting real angry. One indie dev called it an "astonishing scumbag move."
Road to Vostok got a lot of attention after a big debut earlier this year, with over 400,000 players jumping into its first public test. It's a game about run-down post-apocalyptic environments, and about the kinds of concerns doomsday preppers have. It's not just about whether you've got a nice, customized gun, but about whether you can actually carry and use the ammo and supplies you and it require.
"The survival genre has been missing innovation, and there have been so many vaporware projects and false promises over the years, so it's time to bring passion and innovation back to the genre," Antti told PC Gamer earlier this year. You can read more about Antti's vision for the game—and why he doesn't intend to abandon the project—in that article.
You can find Road to Vostok on its website, and the now-in-Godot public demo on Steam.
