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Updating Gun Rocket through 10 years of Unity Engine

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Why This Matters

This article highlights the challenges and importance of maintaining and updating legacy games built on evolving platforms like Unity. It underscores how technological shifts can impact game accessibility and the need for developers to adapt their projects for future compatibility, ensuring continued enjoyment for players and preservation of their work.

Key Takeaways

About 10 years ago I made Gun Rocket.

It was early in my game development journey. I had released 5 prototype games on Game Jolt, and it was time to sit down and make something worth paying for. I started with the idea "What if n++...but with the Asteroids ship?"

Development took about a month. The result was a game with 100 levels, multiple ships with different stats to pilot, and even a LAN multiplayer combat mode. Gun Rocket also stands out as my most lucrative personal project. After a successful Steam Greenlight process I was approached and licensed the Steam distribution rights for the game for a few years.

Recently I was reflecting on my game development journey. I tried to boot up Gun Rocket to play it. But it refused. No matter how hard I clicked the game would not open. The log is empty. I guess some driver or Windows API just doesn't work anymore.

So it is time to roll up my sleeves and bring Gun Rocket into 2026. Come along won't you? I could use the company.

Gun Rocket won't launch. What to do?

Let's start by opening the game in Unity Editor. We'll test the game in its current editor version and re-acquaint ourselves here before moving on. The version of a Unity project is stored in /ProjectSettings/ProjectVersion.txt. It's a simple file with a simple purpose. Here's what I see:

m_EditorVersion: 5.5.0f3

Looking back at the git history of this file, I can see that I actually developed the game in 4.6.0p1 in 2015. The ProjectVersion file was created when migrating from 4.6 to 5.5 in 2018 hoping it would fix a bug (it didn’t). So there's our first interesting factoid about how Unity has changed. Crazy how time flies.

Anyway! Looks like Gun Rocket was most recently developed in Unity 5.5.0f3. The current Unity tech stream is 6.5 beta. That doesn't seem so bad! Just one major version bump, right?

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