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.
Development snapshot #4 of Godot Engine 4.1 is here. Among many other changes, it fixes a lighting issue related to using Light-only mode in CanvasItemMaterial (#44559). Unfortunately, it also introduced a UX issue with gradient color pickers (#77745), which makes it quite difficult to work with gradients at all. If you use gradients, I recommend …
This release finally uses Godot Engine 4.4. It adds the GGCraftingSystem singleton and updates the GGInteractable2DStrategyCrafting class to use it. The crafting editor nodes now have prefixes, which makes it much easier to search for specific recipe or item nodes in larger crafting libraries. Some syntactic sugar was added as well. You can now easily …
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 …
The Terrain3D addon for Godot lets you create and manage 3D terrains within Godot. It looks quite promising for making landscapes, hills, valleys, and other natural environments. The addon provides tools for sculpting the terrain, and you can paint different textures like grass, dirt, or rock, and blend them smoothly. It also supports features like …
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
Godot Engine 4.1.dev4 is available
Development snapshot #4 of Godot Engine 4.1 is here. Among many other changes, it fixes a lighting issue related to using Light-only mode in CanvasItemMaterial (#44559). Unfortunately, it also introduced a UX issue with gradient color pickers (#77745), which makes it quite difficult to work with gradients at all. If you use gradients, I recommend …
Inventory System 2 Alpha 4 available
This release finally uses Godot Engine 4.4. It adds the GGCraftingSystem singleton and updates the GGInteractable2DStrategyCrafting class to use it. The crafting editor nodes now have prefixes, which makes it much easier to search for specific recipe or item nodes in larger crafting libraries. Some syntactic sugar was added as well. You can now easily …
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 …
Terrain3D for Godot has been released
The Terrain3D addon for Godot lets you create and manage 3D terrains within Godot. It looks quite promising for making landscapes, hills, valleys, and other natural environments. The addon provides tools for sculpting the terrain, and you can paint different textures like grass, dirt, or rock, and blend them smoothly. It also supports features like …