this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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I have plans for making video game, and so far Godot looks most promising out of free game engines (completely free and open source, native script language - GDscript - similar to Python which I know and from yt tutorials it seems very intuitive). Any couterarguments?

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[–] TeaHands 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I recently made the move to Godot 4 from Unity, due to the latter slowing down and becoming just too frustrating to use. Overall I like it a lot, you’ll probably get on well with GDScript and the engine is very snappy and fast which is a huge advantage over some competitors. Some negatives though in no particular order:

  • The UI isn’t great when it comes to scripting. I believe the new version is allowing an undockable scripting tab which solves one problem, but I’m reserving judgement since there are plenty of other annoyances. That said you can always hook up an external IDE I’ve just not looked into that yet.
  • No visibility into your scene when it’s actually running. This is the big thing for me coming from Unity, it’s incredibly awkward sometimes to just try and see what your game is actually doing when you hit play.
  • A lot of stuff changed from Godot 3 to 4, rendering a lot of information you’ll find outdated. But also even within 4 itself it seems like things have changed a lot from early tutorials, so I’ve had to do a fair bit of good old trial and error problem solving (occasionally of the “just press all the buttons and see what happens” variety)
  • The UI creation tools manage to somehow be even more frustrating to use than the ones in Unity, which is really saying something. Although these are the only two engines I’ve used and I hear it’s a fairly widespread problem, so can’t entirely blame Godot there.

Edit: I just finished writing this post and went on Mastodon, immediately saw a discussion about how Godot's support for browser-based games is apparently not good. So idk what you're planning but that could potentially be an issue.

I’m not saying don’t use it, of course. Every engine has its pros and cons. Overall it was quick enough to get up and running that tbh you might as well just give it a whirl and see what you think! Good luck with your game :)

[–] smokedsalmon 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Actually, if you select "Remote" in the hierarchy, you can view the scene while its running. Kinda clunky workflow though

[–] TeaHands 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah you can see the hierarchy change, but you can't actually watch the scene play out like you can in Unity. It's not a dealbreaker but it's by a wide wide margin the thing I miss most.

[–] smokedsalmon 2 points 1 year ago

Ohhhhhh, I see what you mean now, my b. Yeah it would be a real nice add.