Acclaimed roguelike studio behind Slay the Spire releases new deckbuilder after publicly abandoning Unity over fee debacle

Amid Unity’s pricing policy disaster, the studio behind Slay the Spire held steady and announced a move to a new game development engine in protest. Developer Mega Crit has now shadow-dropped a new game - built on another engine in only three weeks - due to “recent events.”

Mega Crit reiterated their plans to switch from Unity on Twitter. “We're moving to Godot and made a free little jam game over the last three weeks,” the studio wrote. Mega Crit describes the new game, Dancing Duelists, as an auto-battling deckbuilder that was developed to “explore the Godot engine.”

Aside from battling with cards and growing a deck, Dancing Duelists doesn’t have too much in common with the team’s prior deckbuilder. Dancing Duelists has you choose one of several wacky characters with names like Carnival Carry and Groovy Oracle. After entering a tournament, your funky fighter automatically dishes out their unique cards until one side runs out of health points. That might seem quite passive, but the strategy comes in between the fights when you pick new cards and upgrades that will best slot into your deck. 

Dancing Duelists actually coincides with a recent game jam called Jump Ship, which challenged developers to make a game “using an entirely new-to-you engine or tool based on our announced theme.” The initiative is a fun way to help developers transition to a new engine following the Unity debacle. You can find all the game jam projects on Itch.io. Dancing Duelists is also free to download on Itch.io.

Dancing Duelists is a fun experiment and is certainly entertaining for the 10-ish minutes that the tournament lasts, but Slay the Spire fans are probably more eager for news on the team’s proper sophomore effort. Mega Crit recently announced that their new (unannounced) game would be “migrating to a new engine,” potentially pushing the mysterious project back. 

Vampire Survivors’ developers joined the protest by announcing that they’d never use Unity again. Terraria’s developers instead donated $200,000 to other engines, including Godot. And the team behind Hollow Knight: Silksong remained quiet, worrying fans of the upcoming sequel. All that noise eventually led to Unity’s CEO leaving the company.

Check out our upcoming indies of 2023 and beyond list for more cool stuff to play.