Godot Engine is an open-source game engine. With the 4.0 release on the horizon, it’ll gain quite a bit of attention. And it’s an engine worth keeping an eye on.
Internet Gaming. Serious business.
Game development is serious business. The global gaming market size was 203 billion USD in 2020 (per fortunebusinessinsights). It is predicted to grow by another 125 billion USD until 2025 per yahoo!finance.
The market is dominated by Unreal Engine and Unity, which are mature engines with strong ecosystems of assets, plugins, middleware offerings, tutorials, and licensing.
Why Godot?
The Godot Engine is one of the most approachable engines for anyone starting their game development journey. It offers language support for every skill level and demand; its own language GDScript, C#, and C++ via modules. Community bindings for other languages. Godot is attractive because it’s approachable, and because it’s going to go through an accelerated growth phase.
I think of Godot Engine more like a web browser, executing a type of script. Godot works with nodes that make up the scene tree. This is roughly the equivalent of web browsers’ DOM elements. In Godot, collections of nodes are called scenes, web developers know them as web components. Conceptually, a scene in Godot is roughly the equivalent of a Single File Component in Vue or a React component. Conceptually, there are a lot of similarities.
While defining behavior via scripts is still imperative, it’s possible to craft components that provide both design-time and run-time functionality and thus essentially offer low-code/no-code solutions, lowering the barrier to entry for aspiring game creators.
Most engines have similar concepts — scene tree, property inspectors, and all that, but Godot is ideal because you have access to every line of source code. If you want to know how it works, it’s all there. The engine itself is distributed under a friendly MIT license.
Any sufficiently large code base needs documentation. Documentation tends to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Among them are high-level architecture and design docs, class and method interface documentation, and inline comments to explain optimized or complex algorithms so the reader doesn’t have to parse the logic in their head (often, this is …
Creating network connections with Godot is simple — as long as you have the other party’s IP address, and there’s no NAT gateway involved. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem in most cases. You don’t know the other party’s IP, and these days, just about everyone is behind a combination wifi router/gateway/firewall with NAT. Conceptually, NAT …
It’s been a while, but it was worth the wait. The latest version of the Inventory System is now available, with a long list of features, improvements, fixes, and documentation. This time the focus is on multiplayer. Let’s cover the features first: Bug fixes:
The first alpha of the inventory system v2 is now available. For v2, a lot of refactoring work has been done with a focus on improving the developer experience. As part of that, the naming convention of the addon classes was streamlined and is more consistent now. The GDScript documentation comments have been improved significantly …
Is Godot is the Linux of Game Engines?
Godot Engine is an open-source game engine. With the 4.0 release on the horizon, it’ll gain quite a bit of attention. And it’s an engine worth keeping an eye on.
Internet Gaming. Serious business.
Game development is serious business. The global gaming market size was 203 billion USD in 2020 (per fortunebusinessinsights). It is predicted to grow by another 125 billion USD until 2025 per yahoo!finance.
The market is dominated by Unreal Engine and Unity, which are mature engines with strong ecosystems of assets, plugins, middleware offerings, tutorials, and licensing.
Why Godot?
The Godot Engine is one of the most approachable engines for anyone starting their game development journey. It offers language support for every skill level and demand; its own language GDScript, C#, and C++ via modules. Community bindings for other languages. Godot is attractive because it’s approachable, and because it’s going to go through an accelerated growth phase.
I think of Godot Engine more like a web browser, executing a type of script. Godot works with nodes that make up the scene tree. This is roughly the equivalent of web browsers’ DOM elements. In Godot, collections of nodes are called scenes, web developers know them as web components. Conceptually, a scene in Godot is roughly the equivalent of a Single File Component in Vue or a React component. Conceptually, there are a lot of similarities.
While defining behavior via scripts is still imperative, it’s possible to craft components that provide both design-time and run-time functionality and thus essentially offer low-code/no-code solutions, lowering the barrier to entry for aspiring game creators.
Most engines have similar concepts — scene tree, property inspectors, and all that, but Godot is ideal because you have access to every line of source code. If you want to know how it works, it’s all there. The engine itself is distributed under a friendly MIT license.
Related Posts
Generating documentation for GDScript
Any sufficiently large code base needs documentation. Documentation tends to come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Among them are high-level architecture and design docs, class and method interface documentation, and inline comments to explain optimized or complex algorithms so the reader doesn’t have to parse the logic in their head (often, this is …
Creating a UDP peer-to-peer connection
Creating network connections with Godot is simple — as long as you have the other party’s IP address, and there’s no NAT gateway involved. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the problem in most cases. You don’t know the other party’s IP, and these days, just about everyone is behind a combination wifi router/gateway/firewall with NAT. Conceptually, NAT …
Inventory System v1.13 available
It’s been a while, but it was worth the wait. The latest version of the Inventory System is now available, with a long list of features, improvements, fixes, and documentation. This time the focus is on multiplayer. Let’s cover the features first: Bug fixes:
Inventory System 2 Alpha 1 available
The first alpha of the inventory system v2 is now available. For v2, a lot of refactoring work has been done with a focus on improving the developer experience. As part of that, the naming convention of the addon classes was streamlined and is more consistent now. The GDScript documentation comments have been improved significantly …