Developers of Slay The Spire, Megacrit, have a new game out now, though it’s not quite as ambitious as their previous titles. In fact, Dancing Duelists is a small, free game available via their official itch.io. While it’s a little title, it might be the start of a whole new era.

Jumping The Unity Ship

Megacrit is one of the entrants into Jump Ship Jam, a game jam where developers attempt to make a game in a month using an engine they’ve never tried before.

Now, if you’ve been following any developments in gaming recently you’ll know that jumping ship from an established engagine has been a hot topic since Unity Technologies’ controversy.

The introduction of a charge per installation of games made on the Unity engine has driven a number of developers, including Megacrit, to write its former go-to engine out of its plans.

So, Dancing Duelists is a test run of their new engine of choice. The new candidate is the open source, cross-platform engine Godot, which is quickly becoming a favorite of disillusioned 2D game creators in the wake of the unity apocalypse.

Have You Got The Moves? Maybe, Depends What Cards You’ve Got

So what’s it like? Dancing Duelists is a deck builder dance battle, where you try and out move your opponent and impress the audience with your moves. It comes with a whole range of colorful characters as dancers, and it brings plenty of visual flair to the party. We wouldn’t expect anything less.

If you want to try out Megacrit’s Dancing Duelists for yourself, you can play it now via itch.io. Don’t restrict yourself to that though, The Jump Ship Jam submission page has a whole host of entries to try out for free, and there’s sure to be some small-time developers who’d appreciate your kind words, too.

There are weird strategy games, a lovely-looking cartoon Metroidvania, and a diplomacy sci-fi rock opera game, to name a few. Even better, they’re all free to try out.

Want to check out some more interesting game projects? Take a look at our news on Zipp’s Cafe.