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.
It’s not Far Cry, nor Crysis, but it could be. The Realistic Jungle Demo demonstrates that Godot is capable of impressive visuals. If you want to run it yourself, download it from https://wrobot.itch.io/jungledemo. It was announced in this Reddit post. Update: The source code was released (with the commercial assets removed).
Version 1.0 of the Inventory System is now available. It includes a few new additions since the closed beta: Lots of fixes found their way into this release as well:
In this 2018 GDC session, Spry Fox‘s Daniel Cook explains how to keep human beings from being treated as interchangeable, disposable, or abusable when designing multiplayer games. If you’re developing, or thinking about developing a multiplayer game, this is a great talk to better understand the challenges of designing multiplayer interactions that result in more …
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
The Godot Jungle Demo
It’s not Far Cry, nor Crysis, but it could be. The Realistic Jungle Demo demonstrates that Godot is capable of impressive visuals. If you want to run it yourself, download it from https://wrobot.itch.io/jungledemo. It was announced in this Reddit post. Update: The source code was released (with the commercial assets removed).
Inventory System v1.0 available
Version 1.0 of the Inventory System is now available. It includes a few new additions since the closed beta: Lots of fixes found their way into this release as well:
Design Patterns for Building Friendships
In this 2018 GDC session, Spry Fox‘s Daniel Cook explains how to keep human beings from being treated as interchangeable, disposable, or abusable when designing multiplayer games. If you’re developing, or thinking about developing a multiplayer game, this is a great talk to better understand the challenges of designing multiplayer interactions that result in more …
Fire, Rain, and Black Hole particle effects
This video is from December last year and uses Godot 4.0-beta7, but I thought it was interesting, because… particle effects!