Replaying Spiritfarer and Analyzing Unity

After beating the game initially during the holiday season, I wanted to play it over again to appreciate the artwork and sob my eyes out going through the story. Watching the credits roll I saw that the game engine used for Spiritfarer was Unity. I will admit, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was that it was made in Unity. It’s just when you play through this game it almost feels like your interacting with a beautifully animated movie and I couldn’t link the two in my mind. Spiritfarer is a truly beautiful game and I definitely recommend it.

More and more AAA games (at least the ones I’ve had my eyes on) have used Unreal engine because of the graphical capabilities it has, as opposed to Unity. Unity is free for individual use, so it is easy for anyone to dive in to make a game. With that freedom it includes many tutorials on how to use the program, thus allowing for a wide variety of games to be made. “The game engine is also a particular way of organizing the structure of computer game software” and Unity is a perfect example of how to be introduced to this concept. It is the main reason why many indie studios use Unity for their games and those studios tend to go for a more stylistic approach, Like Spiritfarer.

Deger, A. C., Guins, R., & Lowood, H. (2016). Game Engine. In Debugging game history: A critical lexicon (p. 204). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.