Why I Still Use Godot after Switching from Unity 

As an additional bonus that makes a difference to those working with others: the structure of a Godot project is git-trackable. Don't get me wrong, you can put a Unity project onto git. But other than source code, the structural elements are un-diffable binary blobs. But with Godot, change a setting, such as target windows size or a scene element or styling? You see it in line-oriented text config files in your commit history. It answers the: "what just changed?" question very easily.

I agree with you 100%. About GDScript, it's the same case with me, I'm a web developer, and learning a new language only to use the engine seemed uncomfortable, but it didn't take more than a day to get used to it (it seems like a mix of Python and TypeScript, after all). The engine flow is also super simple, all I deal with most of the time is nodes and their properties, resources and their properties, signals and their callbacks, and specific asset import details (since I work more with 3D) . There hasn't been a single day in these two years using Godot that I've thought "this day wasn't productive", and that's great, it's a tool that doesn't stand in the way to give life to your ideas, they simply flow, you just need to know technically how to put them into practice.

2:55 that's something I've been saying to people saying that "Most people don't make 200k anyway" no... but everybody dreams. Game making is passion craft, we are dreamers, everybody as this little "what if" in the back of their mind and that's enough to make you switch. Cause if you can't even dream to be successful anymore, what's even left ?

I dodged the Unity bullet way back in 2016 back when there was Godot 2.0 because Unity was doing weird stuff back then too.

Tooling. You spend years learning, improving, building good tooling, preparing. Meanwhile, Unity is messing around.

6:24 totally right. i've been a dev for 20+ years and a game dev for 11+ years. and you hit the nail here. if you work for a company they'll really appreciate your willingness to learn. and the most important experience is deeper than the tool or lang you use. i had to change langs so many times and engines, and the tech itself changes. (e.g. desktop > android > vr. cascade > niagara, nanite lumen pcg metahuman they're all new. and maybe its a good time to switch to ue since noone is an expert on those new things so the ground is pretty leveled.). i believe it's very critical to use what you love (and not something from an abusive company), but if you dont know which, just try it out. someone once told me that trying it out is how you find out. btw awesome vid, nice vibes, down to earth, good audio, no distractive animations/noises. thumbsup-ed.

Now THAT is a smug thumbnail face. You too can own this look of satisfaction.

Your game looks so good, the title screen art looks profesional.

Dodged a bullet is putting it lightly. I saw the writing on the wall and dipped

I’m also a Java developer, so I was planning on using C# in my Godot project but you’ve convinced me to use GDScript instead. Excellent point about the availability of good support for each language. Thank you!

Been using Godot since probably a year before Godot 3 came out. I'm currently developing a procedurally generated dungeon crawler, inspired by the first Legend of Zelda. This project is really making me appreciate the lightweight aspect of the engine so much because it allowed me to optimize the heck out of the dungeon generation code to the point where I can generate up to 300 rooms in half a second! I'm usually generating 20 rooms which takes an average of 35 milliseconds! (based on a sample size of 1000 generations) I've messed with other engines before but Godot is the only engine that I kept coming back to because of its ease of use, reliability, and flexibility. Also, I just made my first VR project in Godot 4 and it only took 20 minutes to get the headset and controllers tracking properly so that's a major bonus!

If you haven't been getting any crashes, try Godot 4. That's when I started getting a bunch, and it really gives me the feel that Godot can provide the experience I'm used to with bigger engines.

i just started a project around 2 weeks ago and man glad i chose to use Godot over unity. The clean interface and light weight were the main reasons I chose Godot.

Godot is basically the LINUX of game development. Free, community driven project. That's good!

I just have to sit down and get used to the quirks of Godot. I have tried a few times over the years, but always got put off by some quirks of the engines. Tabs being open with different contexts, Ambiguity around what should be the base node for an game object, very very vauge errors with no further explanation... I simply tried to recreate Asteroids... and kept getting an erros and bugs from spawning smaller asteroids on hit. Either the game throws an error saying it can't spawn the object... or it would spawn a million copies of the object and crash the game. I know it's just a matter of learning and improving... just really depressing to feel so stupid when you mastered an engine over years of learning..

Love your giant cat tree. Nice video, very friendly.

All very good points 👍

Thank you for the video

0:35 51mb in a few seconds, that’s still weird to my brain. I’ll never not be mentally on a 56k voice modem

Oh, Chess Survivors is pretty nifty game. I have enjoyed it. Didn't even think what engine it was written in, but seems like it works well enough. Which is great for open source software.

Aarimous, question? From your personal experience what platforms can you port your game over too? Is it only on Steam? So I am guessing you'll be making Desktop games only?

The fun thing about open source is: There actually can't be a missing feature, because you can put any feature in by yourself. For me this is the reason i really love Godot and tend to use only open source software. You basically never have to wish for a feature, because all it takes is learning programming and implement it yourself. If you put your work out open source too, everybody benefits from it.

It's like a bicycle, simple and agile, just pedal and go. Big engines out there are sluggish. For someone looks for a new engine to move away from Unity but wanting to keep sticking with C#, Flax engine is an interesting one too.

I played around with unreal engine for fortnite … literally 5 minutes each time you start the game to test something. Except for just code changes which you can crossload, but even those use about a minute.

5:13 Did you know that you can right click on a Node in the editor and select "Documentation" to open the doc for that node from within the engine?

A few months ago in unity I had an infinite while loop and I had to manually hold down the power button and reboot my computer because I couldn't close unity

3:58 also compared to Unity, Godot projects are tiny and git friendly.

Before I used Unity, I don't have a girlfriend, no social life, no money, and no time. But after Unity announce new Runtime Fee, I'm still don't have those things. Well, back to work.

Unity has unity remote 5, Is there something similar for Godot to live playtest game on Android mobile devices ?

I used to make games on the Amiga using stuff like Amos or Blitz, so modern engines and the node based approach just aren't how my monkey brain works so I ended up rolling my own thing in Python which sort of approximates the capabilities (and importantly the constraints) of something like the Saturn or NeoGeo and rely on other free / cheap tools to support my workflow (tiled, aseprite, krita etc). For a more modern approach with nodes and such I did find Godot to be pretty well designed and solid at most projects a solo dev or small team would want to create and being OS is a huge benefit. At the other end of the scale you have Unreal Engine which has all of the cutting edge tech in it and a lot of focus on much larger teams.

I totally agree. Lightweight, no need to install (just unzip and good to go), runs 100 times better & faster (no more constant reloading, recompiling, freezing, crashing, pop up loading who knows what, opening with errors, again, again and again, etc.) Also no more creating prefabs to send as parameters to the code, to declare in the code, to instantiate them, etc. Godot's interaction between editor and code is great, the full model is really good. Yes there are things that are controversial, or lacking, like physics, soft bodies, some UI decisions, and more. But all in all, I find it closer to my way of thinking.

Godot is an option im considering when i start my own project but im still unsure how itll handle a small scale semi open world.

Been thinking about giving Godot a shot a while now. That speed you demonstrated with the startup is a big "why". U might just have given me the push to finally (go) do it. (Sorry).

"5 is a nice round number"

I want to get Max vertical scroll of a vscroll container.... how?

What about performance in android betwen unity vz godot?, im using unity just to make mobile game 3D/2D, UE for pc game

In case someone replies to my comment: Hobby games are ok, but what about ones of the same scale as the BrawlStars for example, or Hearthstone? If I want to make a cool multiplayer game with some SDKs like Facebook login and others, how reliable is Godot it this case?

I literally just started with GODOT this week. I was able to build a start menu, options menu with config file that saves the volume on my music, sfx and voice over and loads it on startup, I have a sound system that is scene independent ... I only work on this maybe 2 hours a day. I toyed aorund with Unreal but Unreal is HEAVY and it's not that great for 2d. You can do 2D but it's not it's focus and I'm wanting to make some 2D games. The other engine I toyed with was GDevelop and that was kind of fun but GODOT just clicked so much better for me.

since you use godot for so long, how powerful is this? can it handle heavily detailed environments? is creating 2D games user friendly? how is the documentation for scripts and features for someone just starting out?

Oooooo what if people make a brand new Open-Source PC Games Distribution Store that could be interesting

Both Unreal and Unity are becoming more like multi media production suits, and the number of hoops you have to jump through in order to configure the engine is just silly. Godot, while not as powerful, is such a breath of fresh air that I actually feel excited to work on my little experiments and learn. It's also just a lot easier to use and has a tone of QoL features that many other engines lack. That is mostly because the devs' frequency using the engine are usually the ones adding features as well.

Honestly I wanted to start with Unity but it felt too overwhelming and the online discussions were of no help either. Now I saw the Godot interface and it looks so welcoming. Also since it is open source, I might help it with testing if not with actual bug fixes and enhancements.

I heard that godot has many unfixed bugs and wondered whether the engine is usable. What do you think about bugs in godot?

Best of all, the money you save form using Godot enables you to invest in a pop filter to keep down the plosives, Do it!

Am a C# dev by day and love GDScript.

I wish someone could explain the deep reasons why gdscript is so different from c#, but in more simple terms. I've used both as a unity dev and a godot dev and it's like, there's functions, for loops, vector3s etc. So the transition was really simple. Of course I'm a artist and not a real programmer. I don't really feel I dodged a bullet by learning unity though because I can make use of a lot of unity tutorials when making stuff in godot.

Godot is *really attractive* in light of recent events. But so is Unreal. One is free, the other has every feature. What to pick

Apparently Godot supports C# as well now? Which makes the transition much easier for a lot of Unity devs. GDScript's similarities to Python scare me a bit, since Python would be a terrible language for game dev. Dynamic typing and loads of "syntactic sugar" seem useful at first but they just end up making scaling, optimization and debugging more difficult the moment your project gets a little bigger.

the fund page in your video showed 25591/month. after one week, it is 50300/month...

In the worst possibility, if they screw things very big, a well know popular project like Godoy will be forked in no time.

I am deep into my Scorphius multiplayer game. Cannot make the swtich right now.

smartest guy on earth, switched from unity early. 3 years early

is crashing an issue? I think this has probably been fixed in newer versions because I have a laptop that only have 8GB of ram and Unity has crashed on me like 1 time in the last year

i think if other game engines prioritize expansion and new features to attract more money coming in. thus they will not be storage efficient, solid, or prioritize linux support. i use godot as an investment. the better the engine gets, the more valuable my past experiences with the engine becomes. while this is the opposite for unreal and unity. the more time passes, the less valuable your experience with them becomes. also godot isn't just a game engine. you can use it to make utility softwares quickly if you know what you're doing. if you need to prototype an app for robotics purposes or smth else, godot is the one to go with.

4:21 after 2 days of trying godot, I actually find godot crash more often than Unity. It's not a big deal for me, I have a habit of pressing ctrl+s regularly. XD

I use unity for mac and it crashes alot

Alternate Title: "Why I still did not go in front of a bullet, after I dodged it."

I want to use Godot, but still have issues with it's lack of fully supporting C#. No, I don't want to learn GDScript, because I already know C# really well, it's syntax is better and I already have libraries written in it to help with development.

I just noticed, that you were using Godot 3 for most of the video.

Cult? I prefer the term "Niche Artisanal Religion"! :D

Godot has won!!

Just a heads up that paid open source projects do exist, so you can't say 'it is open source so by definition it is free'

Godot On Consoles - How Much Does It Cost

crashes taking a couple hours of progress out? Doesn't saving every 15 to 20 minutes take care of that?

Great. Now its time to switch to babylon

The fact alone that Unity crashed all the time was enough for me to switch. Let alone all the other issues.

Is five a nice round number? I guess it is subjective, but if you ask me, I would say that not only is it odd, it is also a prime.

The 2.5% pays off when you upload the project to consoles, I think it’s minimum 20k to port on Godot, on unity it’s basically free if you don’t earn 200k year

Godot is severely lacking when it comes to 3D inverse kinematics to the point I gave up on my project.

I personally would write my own engine to make games but I do no have the required skills and knowledge to do it. Open source things good for kickstarting because an enthuisiast community works on it but the major engines also worked on by people the major exception is sometimes they ask a price for it. I am not really into the unity Drama I just read somewhere this thing and the direction they are going on is now not clear because they had owner changes and the owner decided to be idiot. Other than that the Unity not looks that bad but every engine needs to solve their problems and provide viable options for newcomers too.

Open Source isn't always mean is free, Unreal Engine is open Source too and is not free

it doesn't take an hour to open one scene *looks at unity and unreal*

It's still mind blowing to me that Godot is so effecient. Even if Unity would pay me I wouldn't swap back. Unity 2D is just a mess, needs to compile 5-20secs for every script save and list goes on and on... Not even talking about their 2D camera. I still have PTSD of the jiddering in my scene when my player/camera moves.

Godot has A* BUILT IN?

Godot C# is faster than GD Script 🙂

Why are all the ppl. always using the raw binary size of Godot as a huge plus point? It doesn't matter how huge the initial download is, as you will likely only download it once or twice. When you develop a game, you pin down the current version and only update when it is really essential for your game. Yeah, a ~50MB game engine is nice, but I wouldn't even list it as a plus point. lol Also, all the people always mention: "It is open source, you can add that feature". Sure thing. We use an Engine to focus on the game, but we are obliged to contribute to the Engine first? That is such a stupid argument; only a few people contribute to the engine because they don't have to focus on a full-time game they are creating right now. "When you need a feature you can request it". Again - lol. First, you don't know when that feature will be released; maybe never. So you develop your game with a missing feature you never know when it arrives. Regarding the performance. You did open an almost empty project. Try to boot up GoDot with hundrets of nodes with hundrets of megabytes in size. Your showcase is pretty damn useless. sorry Don't get me wrong, I am not bashing GoDot. I am just sick of hobby programmer who praise an engine (doesn't matter which) with advantages which aren't really that important to 99% of the game-devs. That is just missleading for all new ppl. joining the indie-dev scene.

Now Unity looks like a tax authorities who will charge you whatever tax they like. Just the possibility of a future dispute with them is a sufficient condition not to use their engine.

What? No solution, just problem? 😭

Someday... I would have the ability to study coding with this engine for my dream game. But for now, I have to go grinding for followers. (Good thing I have zero plan to use Unity nor Unreal. Because background checks matter!)

My first few minutes on godot: I open the sample projects, all of them have issues; I start a new project, install the fbx importer, my model imports all messed up, no materials, no skeleton, just a white shape...I want to like it, but it's tough...

for me the difference between a cult and a tribe is the toxicity. If Godot is not toxic its a tribe. Just look up the BITE model to see if there is any toxicity.

Despite all the problems, the only reason why a lot of people still use unity is because of the asset store, they don't have to implement things, they can just build an asset flip game by just putting some money there.

Unity bad godot good

Sure godot is useful if you are making tiny , super simple 2D games

I definitely don't like snake case, so C# it is.

If Godot had a small (1-2)% "licensing fee" and just used that money to pay the people who fix bugs and add features we could have the best community driven game engine out there

Big community maintained open source project? == cult

Too make it short Unity is supiror in any kind of thing

Not that i agree with Unitys new pricing but I bet most people who "switch" arent game devs in the first place anyway, just like to complain, most of us who are serious have many many years invested into Unity and its not just as simple as switching. Godot is a much smaller engine with like 1% of the features. Enough if you make simple 2d games perhaps.

You use Godot because you haven't figured out that Unreal Engine is out there. lol

Godot sucks. Bad 3d c++.Use stride full c# opensource free and great 3d

you didn't dodge anything because it wont affect you or 99.99% of people who use it. go read what it actually entails, stop farming clicks, be better. it's 200k in a 12 month period, which is actually pretty hard to do unless you actually make it big. even if you DO make it big, the actual fee is so tiny (compared to what you just made) that it pretty much doesn't matter. you gary's mod? that game has been out for 17 years, has made 277m dollars. do you want to know how much they would be charged in fees for a single year? well they would of lose 0.12% of their yearly revenue due to runtime fees. yes that's not even 1%. before you step on a train, you should really see where it's going and if it's even logical to ride on said train.

look at godot source, the spaghetti code is insane. good engine otherwise.

Because all you have made is just moving bunch of sprites around on the screen and it can be easily done with any kind of frameworks and you are better than making these wave riding videos than any games that have decent content so it doesn't really matter?

if other_game_engine.get_news_tree().is_giving_trouble(): self.emit_signal("world_game_dev_listeners", self, "switch_to_godot"); other_game_engine.queue_free(); 😅