What is Godot?
Godot 4, which is more commonly referred to as Goodt, is a lightweight and open source game engine. While not as popular and maybe even slightly less powerful compared to the big two, Unreal Engine and Unity, can still be used to make both 2D and 3D games.
What Can You Do With It?
Godot makes it possible to create video games without knowing the ins and outs of the underlying technologies within game development. The potential game developer only needs to focus on the game mechanics in order to employ a high-level approach to creating games using scripting languages such as C# and Python. High-level in this regards, refers to the fact that when you create a game with a game engine, whether it be Godot, Unity or Unreal Engine; you don’t need to worry about the how the software will render the game or how communication to the graphics card will happpen.
Advantages of Using Godot
As mentioned earlier in this article, there are other game engines available. Godot, on the other hand is relatively knew but more importantly is an extremely lightweight and very easy to install engine. It takes roughly 5 minutes to install and setup depending on your internet connection. You can even download it from Steam if you are familiar with Steam. I would be willing to bet most people interested in game development have Steam installed or have at least heard of it.
With Godot you are able to create some of your favorite game genres including First-Person Shooter (FPS), Role Playing Games (RPG), casual games, adventure games and much more. Godot supports an easy to use interface on top of being able to create and export games to a wide range of platforms, including mobile platforms, Windows, macOS and Linux.
Godot includes all the neessary tools that you will need to create great games and it also simplifies the application of useful techniques to improve the quality of your game.
If you are coming from other game engines like Unity, PyGame, or even Phaser, you will be familiar with the scripting language, GDScript. GDScript is very similar to Python in that it uses indentation to handle block scope. For those of you coming from Unity there is a secondary version of the engine that makes use of C# as the scripting language.
Features of the Engine
Currently, Godot is in version 4.0. The Godot team is constantly working on the engine to improve and add functionality of the engine. Some of the things that have already been introduced are as follows: - Godot 1: Released in 2014, it included many of the features found in modern game engines like light mapping, shaders or navigation.
Godot 2: Released in 2016 brought some additions suh as scene instancing, inheritance and a better debugger.
Godot 3: Released in 2018 built on the strenghts of Godot 2 and included even more features that made the development process even more seamless. This is very true for C# support, visual scripting, VR support and support for WebAssembly.
Godot 4: Released in 2023. It is the current version of the engine and the one that is recommended to use going forward.
Why Did I Choose Godot?
I chose to start using Godot as my game engine of choice after trying to build several games in Unreal Engine and Unity and finding those two engines to be confusing for someone new to game development. While the Blueprint system in Unreal Engine makes creating a prototype game pretty easliy if you need custom functionality that doesn’t exist in the premade nodes then you will need to learn C++ so you can create that logic and use it within the blueprint ecosystem. Unity, while a bit easier to get started with than Unreal Engine with C++, I did find using C# a bit easier to use but not by much. As I have a background in JavaScript/TypeScript and Python having to learn C# and its type system was a bit of a pain point for me.
I have developed a few games, nothing published just personal projects to get the ball rolling with both Unreal and Unity, I felt something was missing. Coming across Godot and seeing how familiar GDScript felt in comparison to Python I felt more at home with writing my game functionality. Godot seems like the right choice for me. It might not be for everyone but I am enjoying my time with it and have already completed several projects and I just started using the engine this week.
Conclusion
As I said before, Godot might not be for everyone. I can’t say that it has the power to create a Call of Duty like clone. However, the engine is constantly being worked on by a dedicated team as well as open source contributors. I have seen some pretty impressive games that have been converted from Unity to Godot after Unity made that announcement last year and those games changed my perspective on the engine.