Why I Switched To The Godot Engine

i switched cz im bored of Unity and Gamemaker ive used em for over 10 years or more and this is fresh and new

Unreal is still frustrating but very beautiful 😩. Taking days to see how to use material instances with material collections...and no answer to be found anywhere.

you rock bro ^_^

I hope Godot never stops being snappy

"gatto"

Godot overwhelmed me but it’s my first game engine and I’m a beginner lol 😂

Any one say how to make water in godot , i know mesh and watershader but is you go under the mesh nothing is there . How to make real water not mesh with water shader

I switched from Unreal too. I had a lot of problems like you fighting with the engine to try getting something to work. I dont have enough fingers and toes to count the number of times I had to restart or having to create a new project and copy code over to get past issues nobody seems to know why.

Being a web dev for my day job I did everything with canvas and Typescript for a while just to get more of a challenge than the job offers. And fiddling around with Unity and Unreal I realized it would take ages just to learn the engine. But after the video Brackeys released on Godot I'm now able to learn on my own with the docs and channels like this for specific features. GDScript feels amazing and things are so reasonably named i Godot that everything feels like pseudocode.

I’m your 1K like 😊. Loved your take on your switch to Godot. I use unreal to this day, I have tried godot in college however maybe is because of the years I’ve put into unreal. It all comes natural and I prefer it.

unreal did not wow me it disgusted me it was to cluttered and had no easy access to see what blueprints do and how they set variables it urked me I tried unity it was dog shit cause of it needing to call every thing before you can use just one simple variable and I used game maker it was just fine it is the most work I done in except godot done a metroidvania but how to save and load was really confusing and did not have a set way of doing saving and loading that made me get burned out after trying 7 different ways that weren't working cause gms2 was not documented then I tried godot that were little overwhelming cause of it letting you add any node with right clicking its ben 5 months since I started the game I made a version that I felt like it wasn't in my standards so I remade it now I'am making models and the world to my semi-open world game.

4 months ago when loading an premade scene with extra assets like the building set took me 20 minutes on 3050 6gb i5 13420h

I love Unreal Engine. I want to make more tutorials with Unreal Engine 5. I am indie game developer from Ukraine and I released in this year my first game on Steam maded with UE5. My friends use Godot Engine.I recommend your channel for my friends.

What ever happened to that football game you were making?

basically the title should have been: "Why I'm wrong"

I loved blueprints from Unreal but I switched to Godot for the freeness.

Godot should have a voice sample expressing the name at startup. So people know how to pronounce it :)

As someone who was a dedicated Unity dev, when they messed people around with the whole TOS BS, I made the decision to swap over into Godot, I swear I am never going back, Godot is so quick to get into, I was able to rebuild my one project that I had about 2 years of work in into Godot within 2 months. I am very happy with it, but the best thing about it is how quick I can go from my desktop straight into the engine and work on my projects.

i aint gonna lie, godot is fuxking amazing for me. Python like syntax, extremely small size & opensource makes it best engine for me of all time. Yeah, it doesnt have amazing physics or graphics, but godot jolt and multiple different addons can help u with that!

i completly agree with you @StayAtHomeDev

"It doesn't just WOW you, like Unreal"
Bro, the first time I installed Unreal 5, I asked my professor at the time if it was the legitimate copy, because I genuinely believed I downloaded the wrong application. It is a NIGHTMARE

You don't need a high-end engine unless you're creating graphically intensive games, like some of those super-realistic horror games. For normal, everyday games, the Godot engine is an excellent choice. It's affordable and user-friendly, making it a no-brainer to switch.

Unlike commercial products like Unity, where you have to deal with trust issues, licensing, constant updates, and annoying terms That keep changing because they cannot make up their minds about what's what, Or how else they can change the term so they can squeeze as much money out of you! Godot offers a hassle-free experience. If you want to form a team, everyone needs to have the funds to use Unity, but with Godot, you can have a large or small team without financial barriers.

When you start making money from the games you create with Godot, consider donating a portion of your profits back to the engine. This support helps keep the open-source project thriving, ensuring continuous updates and improvements. Open source is the way to go. As you become successful using these tools, remember to give back. A small donation, like 10% of your earnings, can make a significant impact and help the community that supported your journey to success. And when you do this everybody wins this is a no brainer I don't know why people are throwing their money away for these commercial products and the way they treat you and you're still paying for that! I understand that maybe some of you are stuck and can't get out but on your free time that's the only time you're going to have for it so figure it out!

Unreal Engine is a good engine, but it's overkill for most use cases, especially for indie developers, and it's very resource intensive on the engine side and even on the complied game.

Godot is less capable, but it's more than good enough for a lot of use cases, especially when it comes to indie developers which usually target much smaller scale games, and Godot is getting better all the time.

The big reason I would use Godot is because it's open source, considering what was going on with Unity around a year ago with the licence terms, being open source is a breath of fresh air, after all, there's nothing stopping Epic with Unreal Engine or any other closed engine changing there terms whenever they want, personally, I wouldn't want to deal with any of that when you can spend years invested in one engine or another learning the in's and out's of it, especially if you are working on a game that's taking years to do, but also, I like how light weight the Godot engine is, that and being open source is a big advantage in favour of Godot for me.

Unreals documentation was why i switched to godot a few days ago and couldn’t be happier

So, you have problems with UE documentation?

* Laughs in CryEngine *

There's no documentation for CE anymore. They yeeted it half a year ago and it's still offline.

I am honestly in same page. I am sick of UE5 and its complexity and lack of documentation. Also with GD you have full controll over thing you create.

Godot is for small-sized games. Unity is for medium. Unreal is for large.

Godot's editor UI is slow and clunky to navigate if your project imported 1000+ assets/textures, because of its limitation of only one file system window, inconvenient search windows, and inferior/unstable editor scripting comparing to Unity/Unreal.
Unity is the middle ground, good editor UI, but less performant for graphic intensive game.
Unreal is slow, requires a team of devs to set up the project in a special way to speed up the loading.

Can you explain how to use Git with Godot? Trying to learn Godot, being able to just go some steps back would be great. Haven't used Git before and would like to use it locally. Couldn't get the plugin to work on my own.

To be fair, a Determinant of a matrix is something that very common in linear algebra and no additional documentation is required (if you want to know what it is you will look it up somewhere else).
Though I do get what your saying about the documentation, I totally agree.

For 3D and/or complex games from small-to-mid scale team, Godot is best choice. Unity sucks at 3D and UI, Unreal is overkill.

The real Unreal Engine documentation is reading the engine source itself. Also it's a gigantic engine made for large teams. They market themselves as available for small and indoor devs but it is huge.
I've worked in ue4 full time, primarily as a c++ programmer, for 9 years and there is still so much i don't know about it. For example I know almost nothing about the animation system, animation, skeletons, montages, notifies, etc etc etc

Godot is one of the few game engines that I feel just advertises itself. Most of the time when you see things for Unity and Unreal, they're advertising what somebody made in those engines which is great for showing of it's power but doesn't do much to show how accessible it is. Godot itself focuses on what it is and what it does and doesn't distract you with what somebody else did.

My question for you is have you made a game? You teach very well how to make games, but have you had time yourself to make one? Would love to wishlist or check it out if you have!

Documentation, development speed and debugging iteration speed had me switch.
My situation is almost identical to yours. Also went with godot.

I can't say about Godot yet, but at least for unreal documentations. It's just like you said, the documentations kinda not enough. There are so many tools that if you know how to utilize them properly, they could be super powerful. But unfortunately there is no explanation anywhere on such a vast internet. Since I have artist background despite having some programming knowledges, I'm proning toward stuffs which can be see easily. Blueprint visual scripting is far better than having to write stuffs in IDE. If we're talking this point, visual scripting is always won for me.

I'd say if you have to choose your tools, choose something you feels comfortable with. If I have to work on my potato laptop, I'd choose Godot any day and try my best to work around with my limited knowledges while trying to learn more about GDscript to expand it further.

But if I have powerful computer. Well unreal would always win unless they reverted their policy back to having to pay 90% of our revenue to them like UDK3. But having to pay only 5% after $1m should be fair enough.

Unreal is just too powerful dude. I feels like I could continued to study and improve myself my entire life. Also since I have ambitious dream game, other engines won't be able to make my game comes true. While unreal is just make me see the possibility of it become true in reachable future.

None of unreal improved you did the right thing

What if I wanted to get into the mobile market, would Godot be a good choice?
Can Godot develop games like Farmville, Hill Climb, Subway Surfers, and so on.
I don't see much games for the mobile market, correct me if I'm wrong.

I appreciate hearing these stories. I'm still waiting for the engine itself to become more stable and for the community to stop being so toxic until I make a bigger project, but I love it for small games, 2d and 3d. It's my favorite engine to use for game jams.

On the topic of the engine being unstable, last time I used it (4.2) I moved a custom resource and it corrupted my whole Player scene, so I really can't use it for my main project, as it requires a lot of reusable custom resources. Even after reverting to an old version didn't help (the .gitignore recommended doesn't track the .godot folder where all the UID refs live). I submitted a bug report, and there was a workaround introduced for 4.3, so I'm going to dive into the beta and make something to test it out when the next MechJam comes around.

On the community issue, I find that if you're in it, you're 'in it.' There's a lot of people in the community that are especially harsh to Unity and, by extension, people that stuck to Unity as their primary engine. Now, I understand the disdain for Unity as a company - although I see the strides they are making to course-correct (firing leadership figures that mandated the licensing fee, for instance), I'm still waiting to see actual results from their efforts (although I am patient and understand that these things take time) - but there are those in the community that will absolutely disrespect the hell out of you once they learn your project is made in Unity, and every week there's a thread on the Unity subreddit trying to disparage devs working in the engine with troll/meme posts and the like. Absolute filth behavior, that.

Still, I am hopeful for the engine as a whole. I know there are more members of the community acting in good faith for the good of the future of gaming, and being community-driven as a FOSS product makes me feel like there's always progress being made in it. Not to mention tons of resources, and the docs are chef's kiss absolutely fantastic. I code in C# (it's the language I use at work so it makes switching to projects at home super easy) and the API is easy to use and extremely well-documented. Can't wait to see where it goes next.

The reason I got started using Godot is 1) it was a 2D and 3D engine. I like to make 2D games, but with an element of 3D like on Contra 3: Alien Wars on the Super Nintendo 2) I don't have to install Godot. I could build my game strictly from a USB flash drive. And I don't have be on my computer. I could be using a computer at school, in the library, in my classroom and show my students and anywhere. So, these are some of the reasons I personally chose Godot.

Reason I haven't change to Godot yet is the fact that the engine doesn't feature Visual Scripting like Unreal's Blueprint System. See, my brain has problems when it comes to reading and writing. I have trouble fallowing and keeping track with large wall of text, so much so that I can end up with headache and/or lead to a mental breakdown if I made to look through so much text. Not only that I have difficulties with spelling and gramma so if I miss-spelled any code it would be a heavy task of trying to find the error and of course making look through that wall of text. This is why I love the blueprint system because it completely removes these issues with cutting a large portion of the coding to visual and giving me freedom to lay out the visual coding in ways that I can fallow with ease. Unlike standard coding that is fixed to being a list setup.

Now luckily I did discovered that someone made a plugin called Godot Orchestrator that basically makes a Blueprint style system to Godot, but it still has some work to be done and it seems pretty obscure that not allot of people talk about it or do videos on how to use it so I am hoping that in time the plugin fully becomes a really good alternative to Blueprints and maybe it gets more attention or maybe Godot will make the plugin a part of its engine. But until that happens I am pretty much stuck using Unreal.

I'll be honest, I switched from Unity to Godot just because it loaded the project faster.

Ga....Doh.......they need a water node like unity has.

This is a question better asked to those who actually released commercial games

I keep meaning to try Godot, but can't get my brain into gear long enough to sit still and do it.
Also been waiting for a bit more adoption and maturity in the engine, but perhaps it's finally time.
Thanks for the encouragement.

I've grown to love godot after learning python for so long using pygame as my starting point for a year. So far I'm learning so much about it and it's very similar to python within the coding system so far for me where it's easy for me to grasp. which is the reason i chose godot as my starting point as a solo learning dev. :)

Have you looked into the Stride game engine? I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

Unreal engine has one of the worst documentations ever. And Godot has one of the best documentations ever.

I had a project corruption that I couldn't resolve where it didn't recognise one of the .tscn files and I lost a lot of work (I know I should have used source control but it was a casual project). None of the forum posts with similar issues revealed what was happening. Also I had an issue with crackling audio (a resolved bug now in newer version of Godot) but those two things chased me away from Godot for the time being. The mysterious error messages referring to certain lines in the Godot source code don't help since I'm running it from the binary. Unreal feels much more stable, even if it is a bloated resource hog by comparison. I really hope Godot gets sturdy enough for me to trust it again since all other things being equal, it's the better offering for hobbyists and game jams.