Yep, I started my own game dev journey a year ago after a decade in the tech industry.
My gamer friends: Use Unity Bro its so easy to learn!
Hrm but uh what about cost structure, licensing, all that kind of stuff?
Doesnt matter bro, you can just port it all if it doesnt work!
Well uh, porting is actually a lot of work and burnout is a serious concern so wouldnt it make more sense to-
Youre making this too complicated, what you need to do first is-
…
And that conversation was obviously useless.
Anyway yeah, I picked Godot after doing, you know actual research on all the benefits and limitations of various engines.
See, Godot, being open source, and myself, not having a huge amount of money to throw at this, and also not just knowing any reasonable or reliable people that could contribute… I can afford to work with Godot at a comfortable pace and not be driven insane by budgetary concerns and a timetable, and Godot is likely to only improve, and I can improve with it, expand the scope or add new features as they become better supported by engine updates or freely usable nifty tools and techniques proliferate.
Also at this point I am planning on really only supporting linux users, as I am again looking to do this as a hobbyist that isnt really concerned about making a ton of money, and also at this point I just literally despise every technically incompetent person non FOSS user I have ever known, so Godot suits that well.
Oh and linux gaming marketshare is growing rather rapidly.
This is the key thing IMO. If they ever do anything like try to make it a paid framework with huge fees, or just move in a direction the community disagrees with, the existing open source code remains open source and someone can just fork it.
Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.
If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.
Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.
That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.
Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.
I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.
I’ve told this story countless times, but I think it’s the perfect example of why I’ll always choose Godot given the chance.
Do you know when you’re playing a single-player game and you have to switch controllers and now your new controller doesn’t work? Or when the menu can only be navigated by Player 1? Well that happens because the game is only looking at input for the first controller. Story time, a few years back I was playing around with making a single-player game, I tried Unity and Godot, both suffered from this, you had to duplicate the input for any controller you wanted to make sure worked for all of them. So I took a look at Godot’s code, and in a couple of hours I had an “all controllers” option in the combo box to select which control to get input. I opened a PR, maintainers thought it was a neat feature, and now everyone can use this, and afaik Unity still suffers from this and there are dozens of assets on the store that try to fix it in different ways.
Best I’ve got doesn’t have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.
The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.
I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.
What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.
We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:
The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.
But… sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.
We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.
We go to different parts of the map.
We die then respawn via suiciding.
We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.
We join and leave amd create and disband squads.
We die on the water, we die on the land.
We die on islands, we die on beaches.
We shall never surrender!
Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.
Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.
After what must have been about 3 hours… we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.
Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons…
Something clicks.
I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.
I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.
Everyone goes sure man why not.
After doing this with myself and 5 other people… I have a theory.
Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.
The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.
About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.
About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.
The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.
Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!
Yep, I started my own game dev journey a year ago after a decade in the tech industry.
My gamer friends: Use Unity Bro its so easy to learn!
Hrm but uh what about cost structure, licensing, all that kind of stuff?
Doesnt matter bro, you can just port it all if it doesnt work!
Well uh, porting is actually a lot of work and burnout is a serious concern so wouldnt it make more sense to-
Youre making this too complicated, what you need to do first is-
…
And that conversation was obviously useless.
Anyway yeah, I picked Godot after doing, you know actual research on all the benefits and limitations of various engines.
See, Godot, being open source, and myself, not having a huge amount of money to throw at this, and also not just knowing any reasonable or reliable people that could contribute… I can afford to work with Godot at a comfortable pace and not be driven insane by budgetary concerns and a timetable, and Godot is likely to only improve, and I can improve with it, expand the scope or add new features as they become better supported by engine updates or freely usable nifty tools and techniques proliferate.
Also at this point I am planning on really only supporting linux users, as I am again looking to do this as a hobbyist that isnt really concerned about making a ton of money, and also at this point I just literally despise every technically incompetent person non FOSS user I have ever known, so Godot suits that well.
Oh and linux gaming marketshare is growing rather rapidly.
This is the key thing IMO. If they ever do anything like try to make it a paid framework with huge fees, or just move in a direction the community disagrees with, the existing open source code remains open source and someone can just fork it.
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner.
Sure if you are a bigger entity and have more money to throw around, there are other engines that’ll probably be a much better fit.
If youre a broke ass indie dev, I am not really seeing a better choice than Godot right now, as youre not gonna be able to afford a more expensive engine without /usually/ pulling some kind of asset flip scam type thing.
Sure there are some very good more niche 2D only development engines, but even with a lot of them youve still got some kind of liscensing to deal with.
That basically leaves Unity and … OGRE, as far as I am aware for possibly good choices for a 3D game.
Unity is currently self destructing, and OGRE, at least as far as I have tried, is pretty hard to get a native dev environment working on linux. Maybe I missed something or got confused, but I kept running into error after error trying to set up its more advanced features, which seem to require windows specific dependencies.
I guess you could run it in a VM but that seems basically insane, and even if I was to set up a dedicated Windows machine just to develop on OGRE, it is far more clumsy to work with than Godot.
I’ve told this story countless times, but I think it’s the perfect example of why I’ll always choose Godot given the chance.
Do you know when you’re playing a single-player game and you have to switch controllers and now your new controller doesn’t work? Or when the menu can only be navigated by Player 1? Well that happens because the game is only looking at input for the first controller. Story time, a few years back I was playing around with making a single-player game, I tried Unity and Godot, both suffered from this, you had to duplicate the input for any controller you wanted to make sure worked for all of them. So I took a look at Godot’s code, and in a couple of hours I had an “all controllers” option in the combo box to select which control to get input. I opened a PR, maintainers thought it was a neat feature, and now everyone can use this, and afaik Unity still suffers from this and there are dozens of assets on the store that try to fix it in different ways.
That is a neat story, thanks for sharing!
Best I’ve got doesn’t have to do with Godot, but I think its neat.
The year is 2003 or 4, and I am beta testing the 0.5 release of Project Reality, which later more or less evolved into Squad.
I know nothing about coding at this point being still in middle school.
What I do possess is apparently pattern recognition.
We are in a last minute waaay overextended beta testing session trying to iron out a mystifying bug:
The whole new feature of implementing squad specific kit bags that are only obtainable at certain in game locations is working.
But… sometimes it is not. At all. Sometimes you can grab an unlimited number of kits without restriction, sometimes you cant and have to follow the newly coded rules that limit kits by being in a squad, and having a total pool of requestable kits per squad and per your whole team.
We get in vehicles, we get out of vehicles.
We go to different parts of the map.
We die then respawn via suiciding.
We die then respawn via being shot, killed as infantry with different weapons, killed inside different vehicles.
We join and leave amd create and disband squads.
We die on the water, we die on the land.
We die on islands, we die on beaches.
We shall never surrender!
Er, well the goof off testers wont, the devs are getting frustrated.
Absolutely none of this has any discernable effect on the problem.
After what must have been about 3 hours… we are basically just fucking about as testers as the actual devs including the one who actually coded the new system is in despair, we are gonna have to push back the massively advertised release date of about 8 hours from now.
Fucking about a bit and watching random zany attempts at most impressive suicides with those who we are at this point joking are just the chosen ones able to spawn unlimited specialist kits with c4 and anti tank weapons…
Something clicks.
I hold down the tab button to bring up the scoreboard with player names.
I start telling a few of the testers who have not already left to try spawning kits at various locations.
Everyone goes sure man why not.
After doing this with myself and 5 other people… I have a theory.
Everyone who has non alphanumeric characters in their name is able to break the kit limitation rules, everyone else is bound by them.
The lead dev is skeptical, but checks the code again anyway.
About a minute later he screams over the mic on teamspeak.
About 10 minutes later, he has fixed what was probably a really simple but easily overlooked bug in how early python parses string values and passes them to other functions or data types.
The server is back up, everything works correctly now, and Project Reality 0.5 is released only a few hours behind schedule, instead of the next week or two when the team would be able to organize another large scale testing bout.
Lol and thats the story of how i saved a mod release date wooo!