I’ve lurked Godot’s socials some and I heartily approve of the idea of an open-source game engine with both the power and backing to compete with Unity and Unreal.
So with that in mind, if Godot’s been around for a while, why does it have little in the way of mainstream successes? The closest thing to a flagship title I’ve seen from the engine is Cruelty Squad, which I LOVE but definitely think isn’t for everyone.
I want to like Godot but the whole scene gives me weird hipster-y “I’m gonna be a rock star, I’m unique and special like all my hipster friends” vibes. Not helping is some people I tried to get to know where I live wanted to get into it but were really flakey in social interactions.
Requesting feedback if I’m seeing the wrong side of all this.
tl;dr: Is Godot actually good? Is it just a hipster engine for people who don’t actually know what options are out there? Is it actually a sentient fish? Inquiring minds request to know.
I’ve seen bits and pieces of Godot Engine tech demos on PC Gamer and other such sites, following Unity’s PR disaster last year–the graphical tech definitely looks impressive, probably closer to Unreal than Unity in the right hands! I’ve dabbled in Godot myself and, especially after Godot 4’s release, I definitely prefer it over Eevee for still renders (helps that it is a game engine and therefore truly renders in real-time, unlike Eevee), though it seems a bit more work than it’s worth to try to render animations in it. Maybe if it ever gets an Unreal-like Timeline Editor I’ll give it another shot.
I imagine there aren’t a ton of showcase games demonstrating Godot Engine’s strengths yet for the same reason it took quite a while for Blender to not be a complete punchline in the eyes of professional CG industries–it’s free, it can basically run on a toaster, and thus all these amateurs are either making low-effort stuff with it or quitting the engine (and possibly any ambitions in game dev as a whole) once they realize that, just because it’s quick and easy to install the engine, it doesn’t mean actually learning and utilizing the engine is even a fraction of a fraction as easy.
Plus, the problem with Godot being almost as feature-rich as Unreal is that it is just as useful for game jam participants and solo hobbyists as Unreal–that is, not at all. If you wanted to quickly produce a small, silly game while still sticking with FOSS software and not having to learn a big, scary new coding language, GDevelop seems better suited for such a need than Godot. If you are open to commercial software that is also useful for game-jam-like small projects, then your options expand to stuff like the various versions of RPG Maker, GameMaker Studio, Core Game Engine, Roblox Editor, etc.
I’m confident, though, that once we get a good Godot Engine-developed 3D game that looks more like a double-A or even triple-A game, people will start to take it more seriously, just like people took Blender more seriously when we started getting some impressive-looking animations from professionals using the software. Perhaps in the meantime, Godot can try to make the UI more industry-standard (similar to what Blender 2.8+ or forks like B4Artists have been doing) to attract more people with actual industry experience making AA or AAA games, instead of just hobbyists and amateurs who only use Godot because Unreal and especially Unity cost money to use.
A guy known as StayAtHomeDev has been maintaining a Youtube that acts as a continuous showcase of the latest Godot projects. StayAtHomeDev - YouTube
Out of all of the major engines, Godot is the one with the best I/O with Blender and is also the one recommended by the Blender Foundation for game development, their new foundation is even headquartered not far from the BF’s location in Amsterdam.
It is also the only larger engine with a proper 2D game creation component (as in, an actual 2D editor as opposed to a ‘paper’ mode in the 3D viewport).
What are you trying to do with it? All engines have their own weaknesses and strengths. You should choose your engine based on what your project needs rather than how others use it.
If you want a good battle tested free and open source game engine then go with DeFold. If you want an open source engine that has more 3d features, then you go with Godot. If you want to play around with some fun engines, Armory and UPBGE are integrated into Blender and fun to play with.
Godot is not up to par with Unity, and it is definitely not even close to Unreal, but people make games and apps with it. The good thing is that there are a lot of resources to learn it.
There is also O3DE, which is going to be an Unreal competitor in coming years.
We could use our Unity gameplay mechanics in Godot if we use C#, because Godot is pretty similar to Unity
We could convert our C# code into C++, to boost the performance. No need to complicate matters with Unity DOTS
If we use Godot 3.5 or older, we can create 3D web games for mobile browsers
HDDAGI is being experimented for better 3D graphics
The Mirror for upcoming monetization
The console porting cost is cheaper than Unity Pro subscription fee
No company can lock us out of our projects in the future, because of its license. We have learned about subscription models from Adobe and Autodesk after they became publicly-traded
No need to report our profit and pay any runtime fee. The 2.5% of our gross profit could be allocated to pay Apple for their new EU App Store fee
There is bad news about the layoffs of Unity engineers every month. We rarely hear such thing from Godot
Cons:
If we use C++ to improve the performance, we must know how to handle the garbage collection. Unity DOTS handles this automatically
We can use Unity to publish our game to more platforms and Unreal has better tools for massive open-world AAA game development
The asset store isn’t on a par with Unity Asset Store and Epic Store
Lack of Godot job vacancies, but I expect this to change ten years later
The Animation Player has less features than Unity Timeline and Unreal Sequencer
As far as I know, only two big games have been developed with Godot, i.e. Road to Vostok and Sonic Colors Ultimate. Unreal has been used in many AAA games
To add to what others had written about more famous Godot Games but with Videos;
Sonic Colors Ultimate was made with Godot
(some rewriting was done on the engine which you can easily do with opensource solutions)
Road to Vostok is being ported to Godot
Unity and their disastrous Anti Gamedev/Player decisions is a big deciding factor for Godot.
The Unity CEO at the time, John Riccitiello is due to his shit takes a big catalyst for using opensource.
I would say due to him, fleeing from any publicly traded, stock exchanged and steered company has gotten immensely popular unless you have enough shares to keep other investors at bay.
Similar shitty situation with Foundry and Modo. Whenever I read the publicized stockholder meeting notes, they wrote; Modo is no money maker, we need to find new ways or axe it.
I don´t feel it is wise to bind your income stream to companies and their products which lifecycle can change each quarter.
Unreal will be subscription based for all non gaming users (with so far vaguely promised certain minimum revenue threshold)
Epic Games own Store is not profitable, that needs to be addressed sometime soon…
So freaking many layoffs around Unreal and Unity.
Those closed off engines and stock exchanged companies do not speak stability anymore.
Those are some reasons why Unreal/Tencent as well as Unity are out of the equation for me.
It seems to me, whenever there are mass layoffs, opensource gains a lot in popularity.
Pros for Godot;
no build times, instant run.
Blend files can be directly loaded into Godot.
Filmic support and soon there will be also AgX
WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get)
Integrated editor, you can quickly open scripts attached to Nodes /or in Blender terms parented to Objects.
Godot itself runs on Steam Deck, just an easy install away.
one click deploy when a supported device is connected to the computer.
instantly reloading changes while a game is running
GDScript is great for learning programming.
free Game engine porting for authorized Nintendo Switch developers.
Edit; If you want to see more about which games on Steam are made with Godot, those two links cover your needs;
Interesting. Alright, I’m convinced—I’m not sure I’ll be using it for anything, but I do at least respect Godot now (and I almost forgot about the Unity debacle and Epic’s non-engine-related shadiness).
Thankfully there are quite a few options for solo hobbyist game dev, so it kind of depends on what you actually want to avoid in the game dev process. If programming and scripting is a pain for you, then I would easily recommend GDevelop and RPG Maker MV (also heard good things about Game Boy Studio, but I haven’t tried it myself). GDevelop may be getting proper 3D support, but until then, you could do “fake 3D” visuals by pre-rendering sprites from Blender and using GDevelop’s light system.
If you enjoy coding more and don’t want to spend time creating unique assets, then I’ve heard good things about the Unreal-based Core Engine, the Roblox Editor and even Minetest, all of which let you focus on simple (for coders, at least) Lua scripting and arranging pre-made assets into interesting level designs.
Also, in my experience, while you can probably make a game by yourself, it would help a ton if you at least someone besides yourself test the game for bugs or unfair game design. We tend to get “tunnel vision” when truly working alone and end up ignoring some pretty obvious mistakes, especially when we’re tired and just want to get the thing done and over with.
Here is the link to the game I made in GDevelop:
And here is the link to the game I made in RPG Maker MV:
The way the Newgrounds player works, you will have to click on the game’s screen before getting any sound and music.
Finally, if you actually enjoy both asset creation and programming, there is software like Pico-8 that forces you to create simplistic pixel graphics and basic Commodore 64-era game design so that you don’t spend an excessive amount of time on either or need to hire one other person to help.
@jeffrey.thrash Very detailed reply, much obliged, will give all those a look. Had indeed already heard of Pico-8 on that note. Also ButtChrono GOTY every year.
@Galnart Ah yes, had subbed to Vostok’s channel but forgot they were porting. Good to know.
At last someone understands muh VISION! If only ButtChrono hadn’t been overshadowed by Pizza Tower and/or Hi-Fi Rush that same month. But at least it seems people hated it less than Forespoken–I’ll take what I can get.
You can peruse Juan Linietsky’s Twitter account for answers. He regularly asks the community about their experience, stuff they think should be in Godot, and so on. He also regularly talks about the state & history of the medium and the place of Godot in it. https://twitter.com/reduzio
My only experience in Godot is watching my then-flatmate develop a space shooter with it (he’s a web developer during the day…, but this guy can do anything). He had little experience with other engines so it’s hard to compare, but he told me it was generally a very pleasant experience (the way the engine is structured made a lot of sense to his logician brain from what I reckon).
Hearing the recent stories of Epic now playing corporate buzzword bingo with their intent to become a competitor to Roblox (along with the Disney investment and their continued pursuit of film and the metaverse). It appears to me that the Godot Foundation is now the only notable entity that actually intends to keep the game engine itself front and center and also in keeping the engine focused as a solution to make games (so another reason to give it a shot).
To note, I did mention many years ago how Unity began de-emphasizing their engine as a game maker in favor of the ‘realtime platform’ terminology as they began to promote its use for film and for showcasing products (even to the point of allocating developer resources to implement features exclusively for Volkswagen).
Check the user data compiled by Akien and you notice that Unreal so far did not actually get a boost from Unity’s stunt with the per-install, in fact Unreal as a game making solution is beginning to decline as well. Godot is among the few solutions that are now in a notable growth phase.
@Ace_Dragon I think branching game engines out into movies isn’t a bad idea (isn’t that basically what machinma is?) but yeah, the way Unity and Epic are doing it clearly isn’t done with content creators in mind, and at any rate both of them can suck eggs if they want to pull this nonsense after everything else they’ve done. Surprised Unreal is declining, but not terribly so.
True, that is why Godot got in 4.0 (roughly a year ago) the Movie Maker Mode.
it can record non-real-time videos. (usual stuff like higher resolution, more graphical fidelity etc can be used without caring too much about FPS)
I don’t know what Godot videos you’ve seen, but I’m pretty sure that you don’t have much experience with Unity or you just haven’t tried HDRP. Unity can look virtually indistinguishable from Unreal. The Unity look meme just won’t die apparently
I think that there are two approaches one is that you bet on the stability of the ecosystem. And here Godot is a clear win, because no matter what, your skills would last for a lifetime. You might build skills for 5 years, then apply them successfully at 10 years, then become a master at 20 years. You would always have the skills and the software available right in front of you, and each year you will be able to double up on your investment.
This a real lesson that Blender taught me, as I have seen software and software come and go (SoftImage). Companies get smacked (Pixologic). Studios disappear (Weta). In terms of OS, Win7 got toasted, Win8 went away, Win10 now is about to hit end-of-life… With all of these crazy things going on and there is no stability at all, and everything collapses, at least you would always have open source software for the rest of your life.
But I will be fair here, and mention that Unity is very strong in mobile-gatcha games. And Unreal5 is the leader in high-end PC games.
However Godot users instead of crying about it, go all in on indie-pixel-art games, or other NPR based looks. And they are OK, provided that they know the strengths and weaknesses of Godot, they won’t try to push it really far.
Perhaps say in about 5 years or so, I estimate that raytracing will become much more mainstream and cheaper, thus Godot shall have access to high end graphics. Then other parts shall be improved, as asset streaming (very important for 2K textures), virtualized geometry (important as well for high poly models). Everything depends on community donations and developers getting hired to implement the features after all.
