Finally got around to it and been playing Godot for an hour. I’ve been following Brackey’s How to make a Video Game - Godot Beginner Tutorial and I’m about ~40 minutes in.
First impressions:
- Jesus christ that downloaded fast
- Holy crap that opened fast
- I love right out the gate it let me pick what renderer I want to use (alongside the pros and cons)
UI:
- The UI is a little bit confusing. Having the Script and 2D window be something at the top, but to the right of your traditional window dropdowns - is very jarring
- Mousewheel is a weird default: Control-scroll moves up and down, while regular scroll zooms in and out. I believe this is the opposite of most programs
- Modifying the collision points on TileSets was weird - I would modify one, then any new tile I click would get the new collision points, so I kept accidentally overwriting the collision points on tiles when I just wanted to select. But then I also couldn’t copy a previous collision point… so I had to like carefully plan out which tiles would have the same collision points because I couldn’t copy them… I didn’t want to get too specific on something minor, but that was frustrating.
- Overall, the UI is still less cluttered than Unity, so despite being a bit unintuitive and having some frustrations, it’s worse but not a showstopper
“Let me make a game!” vibe:
- For reference, my base point here is Flash, with ActionScript. The dead simplicity of that framework let developers pump out awesome games in under a week
- Godot seems to have better support for 2D games than Unity. 2D feels “first class”, and I’m not getting weird collider issues on corners like Unity does
- When following a tutorial (that is only 4 months old), I already ran into cases of UI changes and deprecated features. That’s a big issue with Unity, and not something I look forwards to in Godot
- As far as vibe check goes, this one is also on par or slightly better than Unity
Overall Rating: Good enough
My world has not been shaken - but I’ll use Godot for my next game. First impressions have Godot’s editor on-par with Unity, but the real win is it comes without the clown show that is Unity Technologies itself. For the first time in a while I’m excited to get back into making games, I just need to make the time 🙃
I’m in the same position, used Unity since Unity 3, tried Unreal but felt it took too long to just make a prototype, finally spent a day going through the 2D and then 3D tutorials for Godot, and now I am trying it out for 3D development with GDScript.
The only thing I’ve really missed so far from Unity is a scene view while the game is running, you get the remote inspector, but it is so valuable to be able to have a secondary visual perspective while the game is running. Other than that, I’ve just had minor things with UI, like the 2D/3D/Script options at the top, the script editor should be its own tab and not tied to a scene, it gets really confusing when you’re in a tab named something like “Monster” but you’re editing the “Player” script. It seems somewhat common to use VSCode or other editors instead of the built in one, so I might take a look at that approach.
I’m definitely liking it more than Unreal, it has been a lot easier to just get started and I can’t wait to really get into the weeds with a project.
Edit: Just noticed there’s a button to make the script editor a separate window, then pressing the script button always takes you to that window, that basically solves that issue
