Devlog 5 - Android Exporting HELL

A Frustrating Experience

Welcome back!
Thanks again for sticking with me on this game design adventure. This time, I ran into something... frustrating.

Godot I Choose You!...?

I started making the game in Godot, which is one of the two engines I'm familiar with (the other being Unity). I chose Godot because Unity tends to open really slowly on my machine, and I don’t always have a lot of time. Godot, on the other hand, is lightweight and runs well even on older hardware - so Godot it was!

But that decision came back to bite me.

The CSV Problem

I use CSV files as my static data containers because they’re easy to manage in LibreOffice Calc (which, after a lot of trial and error, I found works best for me).

The problem? Godot treats CSV files as translation files by default. That wouldn’t be a big deal - until I decided to export the game to mobile.

I wanted to test the game with my family. Since not everyone has a PC, I planned to release a mobile version so they could play too.

But when I tried exporting the build… disaster struck.
While the CSV files were technically included in the build, the app couldn’t read them. The way I wrote the code to load the files wasn’t compatible with how Godot handles external CSVs on mobile.

I spent days trying to fix it. Eventually, I had to face it:

Godot just isn’t great with mobile exports using static CSV data files.

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure how long it took me to finally give up… but I did.
And I moved back to Unity.

That’s it for this devlog - thanks for reading, and see you in the next one!