Thanks again for the responses!
Pharan लिखाOh, so you're about to scale up your studio and will need to invest time in like... R&D stuff for everything? So you have to decide if Spine is the right tool to use. Sounds fair.
Yup, that's exactly right 🙂
Nate लिखाSorry you didn't get a response. I don't see any messages from your email address?
Ah, I probably sent the request via my work email address and created the forum account on my personal. I'll send another request after posting this in case there's anything to take offline to continue the conversation.
Appreciate the links to the update history - that definitely helps me understand a little bit better the plan on record and history of releases. I totally understand cranking on something for years, especially a small team. Burnout is totally real, especially when you have a live userbase of developers using your toolset. I genuinely hope it's not causing you guys too much stress. Even labors of love take a toll.
Nate लिखाThere is Trello, though I'm not super happy with it. It tends to be a jumbled mess, especially with so many "ideas" and features that we want to implement, but not in the near future. We plan to change to something else, or at the very least to reorganize the Trello board.
Yeah, we've used Trello in the past, although in general I've found Pivotal Tracker (https://www.pivotaltracker.com/) and Asana (http://asana.com/) to be better, more comfortable fits. Trello has some clean visual simplicity, but I tend to like Pivotal Tracker for teams that are on active sprint development (when you near burn down charts to reaching milestones) and Asana to be excellent when you want to break work into projects and just maintain a priority list (a bit more minimal, but functional). Just some suggestions to look into if you're interested.
Nate लिखाI do all of the editor coding, with Shiu doing art. I also do the runtimes along with Mitch and others. Keeping a small team ensures Spine's quality is high and I I hope this shows.
Totally get it, and I would do the same thing in your shoes. 🙂 I definitely believe in small, focused teams. My main question was making sure to have confidence in the long term of Spine and updates for external changes (like a new engine update and requiring runtime updates, etc) and improved workflow.
Nate लिखाThis isn't something we have done or have plans for. The source is our entire business and distributing it, even under license, puts us at huge risk. We do offer a source code escrow option, which would provide the source in the event that we go bankrupt or no longer exist. In that case you would be limited to using the source only for your own use.
I totally get it, I really do. I understand the reluctance, and similarly, I need to make sure to keep my business safe as well and clearly understand what my engineers can do to augment our artist's pipeline, especially with some features that we know we need and that we could write effectively (it's possible lots of these are supported in 3.0). Any external dependency where we don't have the ability to fix the issues / needs that come up for our team introduces a large risk for us too. :/
There are lots of very successful companies, big and small, that license their source code to other companies safely, especially game engines (Valve's Source, Unreal, Unity, Crytek, Cocos2D, etc). It's definitely something we value very highly and is often a deciding factor for using external tech. I won't push you to do something you don't want to do, but would urge you to consider it. 🙂
That all in mind - is there any expected timeline for the 3.0 release? In the case that we need to wait for that to really evaluate whether a closed source version of Spine is a good fit, it would be helpful to get an idea of when that's coming. 🙂
Again, appreciate the responses all! 🙂
