Goodbye Unity! ...Godot or Unreal? 

What's the engine of your choice and why?

So I've done professional game dev work in all three and I think this analysis is relatively accurate. That being said, in my experience, Unity was the most frustrating to use. If you are making a small, personal or indie project, especially in 2D, Godot feels perfectly fit to task. Likewise, when I've worked on big 3D games in teams of 30+, Unreal felt the best because it is designed to scale well and has tools specifically made for each discipline to work in separately. Unity seems targeted for the niche in between indie and AA-AAA, but if you get outside that bubble it immediately becomes a nightmare. I worked on a project that used Unity and ballooned into a AA project over development and Unity caused so many problems for us. The game shipped and turned out great, but small tasks could double in length because the time between pressing play and actually seeing what you changed was so long. On top of that, we ran into engine problems, but because of the closed-source nature of the engine, we needed to rely on Unity themselves to get help. Overall, I think each engine has its strengths and weaknesses, but I definitely think Godot is the best option for someone trying to make a small-to-mid sized indie project.

As a dev who cycled through basically every big engine (most & biggest finished projects with Unreal) - Godot is the one that sticks for my personal projects. I will not say which engine is better, because to put it simply, there is no best engine. If an engine tries to do everything, it turns into the bloated, sometimes messy package that is Unity. It would take a very long time to make an engine that nails everything elegantly. My take here is: Unreal is basically great at everything Godot isn't (3D) and vice versa (2D) - Keep in mind that Godot's 3D is still way better than Unreal's 2D, take from it what you want. Unity lies somewhat inbetween, making it a great choice for most people. The only thing that will definitely break Godot is working in a huge setting with a lot of people, nobody can beat Unreal there. If you like "charts": - Broad appeal / ease to get into / availability of assets / pretty much good at everything - Unity (Great for Indie & Good for AA-AAA) - Awesome with 3D / highly flexible and performant games / working in a huge studio / Free extremely high quality assets - Unreal (Good for Indie & Awesome for AA-AAA) - 2D Focused / no extremely sophisticated 3D engine necessary / lightweight & fast iterations - Godot (Awesome for Indie & Decent for AA)

The one thing I'm missing from the Godot documentation is a way to quickly view all inherited properties, methods, and signals, as opposed to checking the documentation of all the classes whatever you're looking at inherits from.

The editing in this video is just the bomb. + Green screen. I haven't seen it before in your videos. + Hair color + And fish-mic at last. Sounds good btw.

I'm a Godot fanboy, but for 3D performance, Unreal is unbeatable. And no, it's not only for hyper realistic games, there are PS1-like games with it, low poly, etc. You can do very bad things with Blueprints, very bad things with your graphics and UE will still perform nicely. But... the workflow in UE is very annoying. Working with C++ with it crashes ALL. THE. TiME. ALL THE TIME. And Blueprint only? Prepare for spaghetti all over. Imagine UE with the Godot's workflow/GDScript? That would be unbeatable.

Great video! Thanks for talking about it - and all the comments here as well. There's so much to learn when we can have open discussions!

For anyone saying Unity’s documentation is better than Godot‘s: We need to have a serious talk. Try to find a well documented all-in-one shader documentation for Unity. You WON‘T! That’s the biggest perk of Godot for me personally. I don’t need hundred of tabs to find out what the built in functions are. There’s one page in the docs. When porting shaders to GLSL Godot from HLSL in Unity I found that deeply disturbing. Also the fact that you need to jump through several hoops to find that one version you need to collaborate with others is mindblowingly bad. Also you need to be careful when collaborating with others via git because you definitely need to have a perfect gitignore file or your repo looks like a mess.

1:28 - it looks like you're using file size as a metric? The average Godot (64-bit, Linux, non-Mono) executable is 75.5MB. Export templates are 687MB. Still, smaller than either Unity or UE.

I mainly use godot for 2D, it is really nice but the lack of exporting to closed platforms is something that is driving a lot of gamedevers into unity.

In my own opinion, besides the fantastic sides of Godot, the mature level of Godot should be "minus minus". Don't misunderstand, I really like Godot, but meanwhile, I DO NOT recommend it to any small team cause you gonna need to re-invent tons of components to complete your game. But it's perfectly suitable for the medium size studios who are seeking a solid game engine foundation to customize and also capable to maintain it. For any team that has less than 5 programmers (engine-wise, TA, toolchain, etc), Unity/Unreal Engine should be a much more realistic option, just remember that, in the end, the only matter thing is your game, not which engine you used, or how many advanced techniques you used in your game.

3:03 - was watching Jotson work on a project the other day, and he found the documentation for some of the features he was using was lacking in detail. It depends on how far off the beaten track you want to go. That said, it's still light-years beyond what 1.x or 2.x had for documentation.

The lack of a big Asset Store is one of thing that will keep Godot away from the spotlights.

I've always found the Godot documentation really good and easy to use, but I was already pretty experienced when I started using it. I've heard folks say it's really hard to understand without already knowing the basics about game dev and programming architecture.

I think none is better that the other. It's all about what you need, as each engine has different strengths.

There are quite a few times I've not found info on something in the docs.

What did you fella's use for the video overlay effect? Great video BTW, providing valuable information (like this) is a good way to grow your channel.

Regarding flexibility - Unity features pretty powerful Editor scripting which can be used to easily build on top of the user interface so I think that should add some points to that :)

Yes! Dorothea's hair is back, better than ever!

Great video!! I love the fish mic content

Sound quality on that fish is terrific.

It's been a little while since I've used unity, but I am VERY surprised it ranked highest in documentation. Lots of times I would need to look up what exactly functions did and they simply were not in the documentation. I don't think I've run into this with godot yet.

Unreal Blueprints are amazing. BP has access to 99% of everything you need to release a game commercially with decent performance. It gets a bad rap due to the misuse of it by developers in successful indie games (ARK, Dead by Daylight). Even Fortnite has over 50 thousand Blueprints in the live game and why not, the difference in performance vs CPP is negligible for a lot of tasks and its even faster in UE5. In the world of game engines, I'd argue Blueprints alone being a big win for Unreal whether you want to program in C++ or not. That said, I spend more time in Godot because its fun to use, fast to load, and has a great community!

I just got into gamedev journey 2 weeks ago, started with godot but decided to move to unity mostly because it is easier to find a tutorial. My plans is, I learn about gamedev as much as I can as fast as I can in unity and go back to godot when I know more about thing. And also since my project is a 2D game I feel godot is a more proper engine to use, I already did a 2D small platforming on both engine, and Godot is more snappy

Not sure if this belongs into a documentation, but I wish the gamepad documentation warned you about some of the strange behaviours. Examples: 1) R2/L2 can be added into Input Map as Buttons, but some gamepads handle them as Motions, which can cause issues when you allow people to rebind gamepad inputs. I had to write a custom code that would check for rebinding conflicts and I had to treat R2/L2 both as inputs and motions. 2) When a game starts and both the gamepad and keyboard are plugged in, even if the gamepad is not being currently used, Godot will think gamepad is the active input device - no idea why. This is probably a silly complaint, but in one of my games I have hotkeys in the main menu and the game tells you what the buttons for it are and it changes based on if you are using gamepad or keyboard. So you can start the game with your mouse, have your hands on keyboard but the menu hotkeys will be shown for gamepad.

My boy really gave Unity a "Not Optimal" score in programming languages

To be honest, I'm very happy with Godot, I don't mind that there aren't any closed platform exporting options because I'm mainly concerned with PC, Mac, Linux and Web so for me it's no biggie. In fact, I find it good practice to focus on simply making a game first and then decide about a target platform or audience and Godot is simply perfect for that: you can start it up, start throwing something together and when you think you have something, you can easily build on that. I've tried all three platforms and for me personally, Godot was the most hassle-free to work with, easy to install (actually that's a lie, there is no installation, just the engine. ;3), some people said that the node system was "confusing" but for my brain (I have Autism and a light form of Adhd) it made way more sense than whatever Unity was doing. With coding in Unity it always felt like I was struggling against what I wanted to code and how Unity wanted me to code it, so it always felt like I had to write hacky code to get the engine to do what I actually wanted it to do. Godot on the other hand? I immediatly understood the Node system which is basically one big "Parent/Child" system, I can just say: "Hey node, do you have this name?" and the node under me would say: "Yes, that's me, what's up?" and I'd say: "Please set your variable x to this number" and it's like: BAM! Instant change without any hassle, no strange "are you missing a reference?" errors or some weird stuff like deprecated / missing functions or whatever; you think it, you do it and it just works. I actually wish more engines were like Godot: to the point and without any nonsense that I didn't ask for. That's why I love the engine. It's quite literally (to me at least) a "it just works" engine and you wanna know what's even better? It's completely free and open-source to boot. ;-)

In my opinion: Unreal is perfect for virtual production and AAA games. But I'm a bit scared about all of those "AAA" games coming now. AAA doesn't mean hq graphics. For me it also means having a really impressive story with great acting and new concepts and this isn't as easy as many people think. Unity works more like a blank canvas: It's about finding creative ways to make something awesome for low-end devices and also high-end. C# is also more user-friendly than C++ and there are also visual scripting tools available in Unity. I never used Godot, but I like that it is the Blender of Game Engines.

Godots visual script is lacking badly is the biggest reason I avoid it sometimes I just don't wanna code personally.

2:30 I believe alot of people sleep on blueprint cuss its not "programing" however I really feel like blueprint is high tier, I think it dose a better job of onbording people new to programing then ez scripting langs like gd script. And it still very powerful and performances can be decent, however I think I would hesitate to put it above godot in lang support, having gd c# and cpp in 1 build really is hard to beat, and at the end of the day there are few areas where I would want to do visual scripting over just scripting. But yes blueprints really are pretty dam cool

Yes, I have found some parts where the Godot documentation needs improvements. The good news is that anybody can contribute to improve it. Or at least report the issues. I have reported some of the ones I have found, and some have been fixed. I would even contribute, but since it is not functional, it is not a priority for me. You want to look at it? Sure, this remain unfixed: - area_set_area_monitor_callback is undocumented. - PROPERTY_HINT_TYPE_STRING is undocumented, along with how to make complex array export var. It does not appear in the docs at all. The value of the constant is 24, by the way. - property_can_revert and property_get_revert. They allow to specify the revert behavior of exported properties. You can define them in any Node. And, yes, they are undocumented. - _edit_set_position is an undocumented method that is used by the editor to place Nodes in the editor. You guested, undocumented. Although, I don't think this one is intended for developers to use, it can useful for addons. - get_magnitude_for_frequency_range returns a Vector2, it is not documented what it is. I'll tell you: left and right stereo components, in linear energy scale (use linear2db). Edit: please notice that if you are not doing addons or some very niche project, you probably won't even encounter any of these. And yes, this is all stuff I have used. I'm not looking at random pages to find out, but I'm looking at my notes instead. The most recent issue with the docs I have found is a translation error. In Spanish "Vector3.project" says "Devuelve el producto exterior con b", no it does not. That is outer, not project. Project should say "Devuelve este el vector proyectado en el vector b".

I'd honestly just recommend to go with whatever floats your goat. Most of us are (solo) indie game devs. Especially in the beginning and for the smaller scope games we tend to work on, there is no need to min/max which engine to use. Instead use whatever feels best/makes the most sense to you. Sidenote: Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of "elitism" (not sure if that's the right word) when it comes to game engines and game development, in general. I often see statements such as >Make your own assets./Stupid asset flips.< or >"Proper" Scripting over Visual Scripting

Thanks for vídeo

As an enthusiast, editor fun is the only thing that matters.

Nice job! Sticking with Godot forever!

you are right, i used both unity and unreal and can confirm your point

Tbh Godot's documentation is kinda hard for a beginner user, idk why, but it is, even blender has a better documentation

Yeah I love Godot, but its documentation is not the best. Its there and it is helpful enough most times, but it can be vague and unclear what something actually is doing. I felt I had to debug things myself a lot to figure out precisely what is happening and when and in what way. I think its one of the weakest points of the engine. Not a problem I had with Unity or Game Maker.

The way I see it: choose a game engine that can bring out your game idea to the fullest potential. And for those starting game development, I suggest trying all of the engines by making a tiny simple game, and pick one that you liked the most.

I played with Unity a little, and when I start using godot was like upgrade from hard disk to ssd :3

Worth noting on programming langs that Godot, being open source, also supports a load of bindings. In terms of performance, Rust is generally considered to be faster than cpp, and of course rust bindings exist for Godot. You also have C#, Lua, Python, Nim and even JS, and loads more (like D) that are currently WIP.

Apparently blueprint is really really good, so that might be why it's ranked highly

You may have forgotten to mention godot's visualscript. Who doesn't hooking nodes up with ports and noodles?

I encounter missing documentation quite a lot in Godot. Usually it is just obscure methods not being described at all. But the worst thing with documentation is automatic redirect to locally translated version when browsing outside of editor. Polish one is absuletely terrible bilingual hybrid, and I just have to always manually switch to english docs.

Happy Godot user here. I really enjoyed this video but I have a serious quest for you. Where can I get that red fish you have on this video? :D

Another category could be releases: We've been waiting for Godot vNext for so many years 😢 While many features have been backported, it does not look good to have a large breaking release looming over for years. *Great* analogy: It's like parking in a parking garage that's about to be demolished While all engines have their breaking releases, it's a bit easier to gauge when they'll happen (also, Godot and Unity need stronger C# support)

I like Unity the most. Some people are keep complaining about Unity. I don't know what kind of super big project they do. In my case, Unity is fine and I can do exactly what I wanted. And C# is super easy. I like Unreal Engine also and it looks super amazing. But I have no plan to create the commercial game with it. Because I don't like royalty license fee and document process. Who knows my game can also reach 1 million mark. Unity license is simple at least. Godot? Easy, powerful enough and love it. Actually the game engine is not important that much and it has a lot of options in the market but the game idea is.

Anecdotally, I was trying to figure out how certain aspects of Gridmaps work, specifically figure out how to rotate modules for a randomized dungeon algorithm. At one point where it should have told me the information I needed to know, it told me to refer to the source code without telling me where in the source code to look. I hope documentation will improve for Godot 4, but in the world of tech writing, documentation should never tell people to refer to the source code as that defeats the purpose of documentation in the first place.

well.. it is not a easy task compare engines. But let's put this way. The first time when Blender was released, the industry laughed, they compare whith others pays solutions like Maya and said "it will never be used in a big project". Look what is blender now, it is what godot will be in a near future.

so I made a test and do a tutorial of game for godot I use a c# where tutorial use gdscript. I have to say I like c# more, even with bugs. it is easier to find and manage some elements. documentation was mostly fine with minor hic ups. The only thing that i couldn't find for longest time was multiline, search fail for this one(it was in documentation but it just didn't what to show it)

honestly, the best vids are the ones with fish

I have tried several time to get into Godot and It always was too hard to get to use it after Unity. It was always hard for me to find documentation about how to do things in Godot. And I want to see more tutorial form you guys, shader tutorial was great series !

I'm not dev however I do develop my own commercial product using godot. Extremely easy in usage. Maybe not so powerful like unreal, however if you're one man army is all you need On top of that I'm feeling like godot community is getting stronger every week.. New tutorials, new demos This is the way!

Unreal is ranked high for programming because. the "visual code" (blueprint) generates C++

Oh come on... This is a brilliant video. I pretty much disagree with most of what you're saying. But who cares? You're hilarious! As someone that's put hours into videos much less impressive as this, I salute you. I'm a Unity dev for many years now. It's a beast, but ultimately, it can do everything you can think of with a bit of research. I've given Unreal a go, and it's very clear it's even more of a monster than Unity. I can't actually imagine being able to develop a game on my own (in my spare time) with Unreal, whereas I think this is possible with Unity. Godot then. I confess, I'm new. But boy am I having a hard time wrapping my head round it. GD Script seems pretty clumsy in its naming style, and implementation. Seems like there's a lot of child/parent traversal as well to get what you need. I'm not giving up though. For one thing, I love the idea of Godot. It's the David versus the Goliath (and Goliath's best mate who's harder than he is). I'm getting the feeling it shines at 2d games... And I have a 2d game in mind (Gonna make my millions with it you know ;). I would love a proper in-depth tutorial on how the scripting works. Some of the key functions and the general "right way" to approach code. In fact, I wouldn't mind that for various Godot concepts. I've followed a few tutorials now. They're not bad, but I left wondering what on earth it was I'd just done! Anyhow, I'm rambling... BRILLIANT STUFF. Keep it up :)

Godot is a good engine. Unity is a good engine. Unreal is a good engine. That's my personal opinion. But still I use Godot.

none of them should lose or gain any points based on programming language , all of them can import low level libraries from C or C++ externs , so they all have the option . I would say C# is probably the easiest to learn in full OO , C++ is probably the most performant and gives more low level options and godot has the widest variety of languages with gd script being the quickest to learn kind of like python and go and custom engine is the most limited because it likely doesnt have all the primitive types you need and graphic library built into the engine .

Well unreal engine was technically released in 1998 but it wasn't available for literally everyone to use like unity or godot until later on, I think the quake engine was made available before unreal engine was because UE1 was never open sourced though we did apparently just get a copy of the ue1 source with the duke nukem forever 2001 leak so uh there's that I guess

Tbh I do think your original video was pretty harsh, or more like you were really trying to find reasons to dislike godot. There were some really good reasons but some were just downright silly, like you were grasping at straws so you could have a total of 5 reasons, which I definitely think was a major part of the backlash in that video. I do think it's really important to mention that godot is a *lot* better at 2d than unity. Unreal is absolutely immaculate for 3d, but in 2d it's severely lacking. Unity has decent 3d and somewhat lacking 2d. Godot is absolutely immaculate at 2d but is pretty lacking at 3d. Each engine has its specific area of expertise, and I definitely think ignoring this is a bad idea. It's probably one of the most important things to mention when comparing engines, as it's a major part of the decision of which to choose. Personally I only make 2d games, so I chose godot. But someone who wants to make both 2d and 3d would probably want to choose unity, or at least wait until godot 4.0 (which is supposedly going to help "fix" godot's lacking 3d). And if someone wanting to make 2d games chose unreal, I would question their sanity. I'll be totally honest and say yeah the lack of an asset store is really disappointing, but I will also say that you don't really *need* a built-in asset store, when there's plenty of already-existing asset stores, like itch.io. A built-in asset store is more like a commodity than a necessity imo, though the convenience that comes with having one built in can't be denied.

So many various opinions so far

To be honest the Godot 3D performance is more of a double minus. But the really shocking thing is that the performance doesn't look much better on the 4.0 version either. The UI looks very tidy in general. But there are also completely nonsensical UI concepts. Like the Texture Import Tab. What is also annoying are some missing drag and drop functionalities. For example, you can't drop an element over a tree node. It will be automatically dropped over the selected node. There is no hover functionality implemented. I hope and wish the developers that they get their problems solved. But I think they need help, especially when it comes to performance.

You are so sane, try to stay that way despite those wierdos

I like you with your fish 🐠

yeah I still run into undocumented things from time to time. like polygon2D.polygons. 'Usable' is a fair description of the godot docs I think

Here is the thing, Godot is like blender. It will give a high competition to unity (not unreal) like blender gave to maya. Like I never used Maya, I never felt a need.

I just use godot bc it's free and easier to work with for me. Am I saying the other's are worse? Ofc not.

The avatar💀

Cryengine for 3d and Godot for 2d, there is no need for the other

ok who put unity as ++ ease of entry, I need to have a word with you

107.65 Million Nintendo Switch Has Now Sold Over 107 Million Units Imagine if that dev at the start spent more time learning how to google simple things - they would probably not make so stupid comments

Custom Engine with the least performance? Are you kidding me? The reason to write your own engine is in most cases: PERFORMANCE. When you adapt the engine to your needs it will in most cases outperform any OTC-Game-Engine easily. It's a big performance difference if I use UNITY for a 3D Ego Shooter or an ID-Tech Engine which was explicitly created for First Person Shooters. Are you doing this just for sh*tstorms in the comments-section? P.S: Who is this Meta-Phaze and how many games has he already made? To say that consoles don't matter is so incredibly wrong. He should grow up. Most older people (like me) are now 90% console players and don't like to play PC cause console deliver more compfort. You can play from your sofa and don't have to deal with OS-stuff. Besides that cheating will always be more complicated on a console.

Is this for indie dev ? coz why did you not include " PROFESSIONAL USAGE" when you compare these engines? You can make games either as passion or profession but in the end you need to sell it(or not). Even with all the things you mentioned here( which as i viewed is really biased and siding with godot) there is none yet a professional game Company who used the present godot for games. You say UE is hard with all c++ mess but have you wondered why most titles transfer to UE 5 now ?

Honestly, I don't understand the "Custom" comparison. A "Custom" engine will always come much more bloated, and overall crap, unless you are targeting something very specific. I.e.: your development machine. Documentation in Godot is very good, aside when there is none. E.g.: the "show" function will call the _draw function automatically?

You guys still seeing my messages?

Why not try to have a light blue hair so you could be Godette? :D

Here are other nominations in which Godot would take first place: 1. Best native version for Linux 2. Technical requirements 3. Web editor 4. Collection of personal data 5. The cutest ^_^

Hmm, used to hear unity has better performance than unreal

I really don't get this part about docs, Unity's docs are very raw, ugly and just bad

I get bored of game development until unreal and unity's loadings are done.

You used Unreal for an hour? Does that mean you waited an hour for it to open then just closed it?

Godot has the biggest legion of loud stans.

1:04 "gameplay" that game has neither game play or graphics, it's a literal gambling machine simulator disguised as a game.

If people can talk into a Blue Yeti why can't you talk into a fish?

why at exactly 1:47 she looks like Elon Musk?

where is GDevelop i think the best game engines are GDevelop Godot Unity Unreal Engine

yet no love for cry engine so underrated

She sounds like the female version of brackeys

Deutsch?

Unreal > Godot > Unity

Unreal is hands down the best. They offer so much more than just the insanely optimized and powerful engine it comes with free access to normally paid/subsceiption based AAA software. For example Houdini FX and much more at some point I imagine maya and others will be added to the list if you use your unreal account to log in. The free content released every month normally $500+ worth of assets. You asked if blueprint is easy? Yeah it was designed for vfx and artist to quickly build functionality to their assets but it is powerful enough to make a game with only blueprints without knowing any programming. You can use c++ which is what I do but I think python as well if I remember correctly. P.S. I am not paid by them to say any of this it just I can't imagine anything ever coming close to the availability/ease of use and free at that.

Hahahahahahahahahahahaa

@MetaPhaze You are just wrong :)

@SFox You are just so wrong :)

I agree with MetaPhaze in everything BUT one thing: I find your videos useful, informative and entertaining.

Yes, i once had problem with a documentation. I wanted to clear PoolVector2Array completely. I used PoolVector2Array.remove(index) in a for loop for all vector2 in that array. But it didnt work. Ive tried remove(0) after that and got same result. The point was, remove(0) didnt clear last element in array. And that tiny Vector2 remained for the next iteration. That thing was completely destroying my calculated trajectory of ricochets. If you ever get into this, the only method that can help you will be PoolVector2Array.resize(0). Ive spent like 9 hours in a sum to fix this little thing. Also, methods in the documentation could be described much more detailed. And finally, the situation with translation in the other languages is not very good actually. Despite documentation has some weak points, it still contains lots of info, so its quite useful.

I do not really use Unreal but everyone should look at blueprints, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-bY6Nl-OEhSo.html it's worth your time to think about the future even if you never use it. think about how easy that is for a beginner, do you even think of that as coding. maybe it's just the first visual programming language I have seen done well.

I just got into gamedev journey 2 weeks ago, started with godot but decided to move to unity mostly because it is easier to find a tutorial. My plans is, I learn about gamedev as much as I can as fast as I can in unity and go back to godot when I know more about thing. And also since my project is a 2D game I feel godot is a more proper engine to use, I already did a 2D small platforming on both engine, and Godot is more snappy