Waiting for a Godot thread

[Elfi]

...I guess I have to do it myself!

What is Godot? It's a well-recognized, multiplatform game development engine by the Godot Foundation, and unlike most of its competitors in the space, it's free and open-source as well! It handles both 2D and 3D spaces independently and natively, and has a variety of tools for quick and easy or extensive development cycles, XR hardware, and the like. The latest version is Godot 4, which has a variety of new and overhauled features over 3. You can check it out here! https://godotengine.org/

I still primarily use Godot 3 myself (I am very much the LTS tools kind of gal), but I've been watching Godot 4 closely as it continues to grow, and I'd love to have some of the nicer things backported. How about the rest of you? Any other Godot devs here? Anyone who tried Godot but bounced off of it? I wanna hear you all talk about it!

[Jess]

my friends and colleagues have been trying to get me to switch to godot, but I'll probably just do it whenever I want to try out the 3D thing I wanna do. I can do little gimmick 3D stages in gamemaker but like, for a full game? nah I got better things to do than make a full 3D engine

[kkzero]

I've known about Godot ever since it wasn't particularly viable (i.e. the 2.x days), and even now I haven't totally gotten into it. Not that I think it's bad, as it's incredible for a FOSS game engine, I've just never really been able to wrap myself around any of the Whole Enchilada-type gamedev tools, and thus anything I've developed that isn't a romhack is some small test of a framework.

[MetalPetal]

I had to compile my own version of this engine to enable Doubles, and then I'm now having to compile custom export templates so I can make .exes with Doubles. This engine is cool, but it is also a pain in the ass.

[Efi]

I've been using it for a few years and it is wonderful, specially liking the 4.2 update, which is already not the newest thing.
It is in all regards a superior tool to Unity, for sure. It may not be as easy for newcomers, but that is because of its excellent design for customization: the Godot code editor/IDE is a Godot app itself and you can load scenes as pieces of the editor with some work.

It can be a bit confusing at first because development happens in two axes. There's the traditional classes, broadly the same as in C, then, orthogonally, the Node-derived classes can also form a node hierarchy. This combined with the signals system is a very powerful way of acheive a sort of composable system without limiting it to the ECS model. You can, in fact, write your entire game as a monolithic class if you're so inclined. This flexibility I feel is superior to mere ECS and I find myself resorting to tighter-bound classes and nodes that an ECS system wouldn't allow. It is also very capable of being performant and I have found very few cases where common sense yields performance issues.

That said, there are a lot of systems that need some upgrades, like the animation systems, and some other I haven't even dared touch. But it is sometimes so simple to use that I forget you can just do the simple silly thing and it is fine. It is a joy to use and learn. The documentation is also very well maintained.

While I have made my own engine, the ease of use of Godot has kept me away from it for a long time (specially the GUI stuff) and if anyone wants to try it, I recommend it a lot. And you can always ask me directly if you have questions. I'd be glad to help! (I have a Discord account too)

[PencilVoid]

I've been looking into Godot Engine for my game development projects. The 3D tools seem alright but I feel that the 2D engine is generally lacking. It doesn't have some QoL features that the 3D engine has equivalents of, and some features like the tilemap system and animation in general are unnecessarily difficult to use, despite the improvements that version 4 brought. I get the impression that the developers are more focused on competing with Unity and Unreal with flashy new features rather than leaning into the engine's strengths and improving existing features where needed. Definitely not a bad engine by any means, but if you're used to GameMaker I would recommend sticking to it for 2D projects.

[Jess]

if you're used to GameMaker I would recommend sticking to it for 2D projects.

this is what I keep saying lmao

[Efi]

I get the impression that the developers are more focused on competing with Unity and Unreal with flashy new features rather than leaning into the engine's strengths and improving existing features where needed.

It's open source. The developers can be anyone who knows C++ and their focus is whatever they feel they can do. I know the tilemap system is being developed to be better and I believe so is the animation sytem. It's not easy work and most of the people who submit patches do it for love, not money.

[Sharb]

I moved to Godot after quitting from how frustrating Game maker studio 2 was to work with, the sprite editor sucked, the interface was annoying to navigate, the compilation times sucked but the worst of it was that it would crash randomly to the point I was too nervous to do anything and was saving every 2 seconds.

This was probably around 2017 or 2018 because I remember one of the first things I did was try to recreate Deltarune in Godot 3, but I started porting over Bun n' gun after learning the ropes and it's sorta been my go to for development going forward, it's fast, it's easy to comprehend and it's way easier to collaborate with (I had friends who absolutely refused to work with me because they could not handle working with game maker)

I feel like this could have happened with Unity too at the time but Godot's interface actually made me wanna experiment with the 3D aspect of it and I actually learnt a lot more just playing around and looking at all the templates.

Something I keep thinking about, if I stuck with game maker I don't think I would have been able to make Sonic Worlds Next, at least with the tools available at the time I don't think I would have been able to learn and pick up how to do it effectively and simply.

Godot's not perfect, the 3D grid map's broken in the latest version so it's useless, tilemap's are way better then they were in the old versions but the collision editor's still extremely laggy, prone to crashing (I had to make a work around so i didn't have to set up collisions for everything) but I'm really happy with where it is right now and I'm genuinely looking forward to how they improve future versions.

I personally believe you should stick to whatever game engine you're comfortable with and I think it's really unproductive to start fights with people over what engines they use, I don't think I'd be where I am without Godot but I don't think my experience should be used as a reason to ditch game maker.

[MetalPetal]

I moved to Godot after quitting from how frustrating Game maker studio 2 was to work with, the sprite editor sucked, the interface was annoying to navigate, the compilation times sucked but the worst of it was that it would crash randomly to the point I was too nervous to do anything and was saving every 2 seconds.

This was probably around 2017 or 2018 because I remember one of the first things I did was try to recreate Deltarune in Godot 3, but I started porting over Bun n' gun after learning the ropes and it's sorta been my go to for development going forward, it's fast, it's easy to comprehend and it's way easier to collaborate with (I had friends who absolutely refused to work with me because they could not handle working with game maker)

I feel like this could have happened with Unity too at the time but Godot's interface actually made me wanna experiment with the 3D aspect of it and I actually learnt a lot more just playing around and looking at all the templates.

Something I keep thinking about, if I stuck with game maker I don't think I would have been able to make Sonic Worlds Next, at least with the tools available at the time I don't think I would have been able to learn and pick up how to do it effectively and simply.

Godot's not perfect, the 3D grid map's broken in the latest version so it's useless, tilemap's are way better then they were in the old versions but the collision editor's still extremely laggy, prone to crashing (I had to make a work around so i didn't have to set up collisions for everything) but I'm really happy with where it is right now and I'm genuinely looking forward to how they improve future versions.

I personally believe you should stick to whatever game engine you're comfortable with and I think it's really unproductive to start fights with people over what engines they use, I don't think I'd be where I am without Godot but I don't think my experience should be used as a reason to ditch game maker.

I feel you on the limiting factor. I spent a decade with Gamemaker and never really felt like I could get a game beyond a tech demo. It's a weird case where the engine is easy to understand without a lot of time, but trying to actually wrangle a real game out of it feels near impossible. Switching to Godot was the single best thing I ever did as a game developer, and I acknowledge that Godot has some annoying problems of its own to deal with.