Unity Version Updates - 2018 to 2022!

Hello, Guapo's team!

As you should know, I will now start adding animations made with Spine Pro.

This upcoming version will have the first animation, the second part of the Cloy vs Orc encounter, where you will watch it.

Because of that, I needed to make some unplanned and extra updates for Unity. I updated my Unity 2018 to Unity 2022, and doing these kinds of changes requires some additional testing and configurations:
  1. One is due to incompatibilities or changes in current functions; in our case, I haven't found any problem until now.
  2. Secondly, the Android Build. Oh, the Android build is one of the most annoying things to configure. Unity is supposed to install all the needed features, but the stuff Unity installs doesn't work at all, so I had to do it manually, spending around 12 hours trying until it worked fine.

Maybe you are wondering, why update? Well, because of some good reasons:
  1. Unity 2018 doesn't handle Spine GameObjects well. Suppose you have a big animation and change the visibility of some parts of that animation, for example, a leg or some clothes (smegma and scat in our case). In that case, Unity 2018 will get crazy, increasing the number of verts by thousands. Note, the verts are the number of visible vertices on the screen, and having too many of them will make the game lag or definitely freeze or about close itself.
    1. In the beginning, my Spine object had 4.5k verts (4,500), but by hiding one of the Orc'arms, the verts increased to 16k, and by showing it again, the verts increased to 26k. It doesn't make any sense, but it was due to Unity 2018 incompatibilities, and Unity 2022 doesn't have that problem.
  2. The Android build was starting to present incompatible problems for new devices, so it will now be fully compatible with Android devices from Android 5.1 (API level 22) to Android 14 (API level 34).
  3. The shadows/light effects. Since Unity 2018 only has 3D lighting, and I was using a 2D project, the lights never were 100% compatible with our game. But now, adding spine animations has made things worse because these objects don't work well with my current lights, so I needed to update Unity to use 2D lights and make spine game objects look as they should.
    1. This made my sprites material incompatible, so I needed to update them. Luckily, this was something I could do quickly.
    2. This last point made my old lights incompatible, so I'm updating all the lights in the game.

Because of those changes, the next release of the game has been delayed. Originally, I had planned to release it last week, but it looks like it may be ready next week instead.

I'm really sorry for the delay, but looking at the positive things, this change was inevitable (happening sooner or later), and it will allow us to add Spine animations without any problem from now on.

I send you a huge hug and heartfelt thanks for all your help! This project wouldn't be possible without you!