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.
Arguably, more fun than writing code is removing code. I was assembling a split-screen multiplayer UI. The goal behavior is to show/hide the appropriate displays for the players, depending on how many players there are. Initially, the code to update the UI was very simple, because I started with two players. In that case, you …
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).
Years ago I purchased a game dev bundle on HumbleBundle. Part of that was a sound library called Pro Sound Collection. It’s pretty comprehensive, whether RPG or FPS, there are sounds for a ton of use cases. I might as well use them for something. Luckily for me, the sound collection is pretty well organized. …
Godot Engine 4.0 has been released per official announcement. With version 4.0, Godot has gone through “3+ years of breaking and rebuilding from the ground up, a complete core overhaul and a full engine rewrite, through 17 alphas, 17 betas and 6 release candidates“. The announcement post is credited to “2000+ Godot contributors.” It’s a …
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
A GDScript refactoring exercise
Arguably, more fun than writing code is removing code. I was assembling a split-screen multiplayer UI. The goal behavior is to show/hide the appropriate displays for the players, depending on how many players there are. Initially, the code to update the UI was very simple, because I started with two players. In that case, you …
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).
Audio Manager to handle the loading of sound effects in bulk
Years ago I purchased a game dev bundle on HumbleBundle. Part of that was a sound library called Pro Sound Collection. It’s pretty comprehensive, whether RPG or FPS, there are sounds for a ton of use cases. I might as well use them for something. Luckily for me, the sound collection is pretty well organized. …
Godot Engine 4.0 released!
Godot Engine 4.0 has been released per official announcement. With version 4.0, Godot has gone through “3+ years of breaking and rebuilding from the ground up, a complete core overhaul and a full engine rewrite, through 17 alphas, 17 betas and 6 release candidates“. The announcement post is credited to “2000+ Godot contributors.” It’s a …