Unity announced a new fee structure today, and developers are none too happy. “We are introducing a Unity Runtime Fee that is based upon each time a qualifying game is downloaded by an end user,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the change.
This is a great opportunity to tell people about Godot, a free open source engine that has been killing it lately.
Here’s link to it, https://godotengine.org/
I’m a dad with a full time job and 2 toddlers. If I wanted to dip my toes into game development for the first time and I wanted to use Godot, what kind of project should I do first? Something that’s great for starting out and learning the absolute basics.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/first_2d_game/index.html
Thank you!
As typical as it is for the current indie game dev climate, making a ‘Vampire Survivors’ type game is probably a really good starting point for game development. 2D games are somewhat easier to make than 3D ones, so a 2D roguelike could be fun (but get’s very complex very quickly) or a old-school Zelda styled game would also be pretty cool in my opinion while remaining fairly simple.
Here’s are a couple other avenues to learn off the top of my head:
Follow along with one or two of the large amount of tutorials they have for the engine and adding new features and gameplay mechanics to them when you feel like it.
Think of a cool but simple idea and try to execute it yourself through trial and error, referencing the online docs and asking questions to the Godot game dev community.
It can be super daunting as there is a lot to learn. Try to learn by working on something that you yourself think is fun and that’ll keep you more motivated :)
What @dack said for your first game that is a great resource. If you wanted an overview of how the godot engine works later you can start from the Intro
If you have some coding knowledge, this series of videos was amazing: https://youtu.be/mAbG8Oi-SvQ?si=Tyy2hjrdrvafSo6z
Not everything he does is right and some things he doesn’t even understand that well, but it gives you a good idea into everything you’ll need and you can then quickly learn how to expand from that.
I was waiting for that.
Thank you for this! Last FOSS engine I used was OGRE but it was fairly inconsistent across hardware and PC only at the time.
Shoutout to Bevy as well. It’s not as user friendly or polished as Godot but it’s a lot more powerful. If you’re a talented game dev I’m sure you could do some amazing things with Bevy.
Bevy is a very different kind of beast. It’s basically “here’s the ECS, have fun!” while it rides into the sunset.
My next project will use bevy, but mostly because its API is so ridiculously small that I can map it entirely into my own engine (which then exposes the ECS through my own API). That would be a lifetime’s task with Unity (don’t know enough about Godot to say definitely, but I bet it’s the same, since it has the same architecture).
To be fair it does have a huge plugin ecosystem that handles most of the common use cases, so it’s a bit more than just an ECS, but the docs have some pretty big gaps in them so you could be excused for thinking it’s more bare bones than it is.
how are the AR applications for Godot?
I would have used it if they didn’t focus so much on their own GDScript instead of keeping C# support.
But Godot 4 has excellent C# support?
Only for Godot 3, not 4?
Edit: Godot 4 supports C#, but only for desktop games, not web, android and iOS.