Unity VS Godot: How Do They Compare?

three weeks ago we made a video comparing goto and game maker to help you get a sense for which you might want to try you asked us for a good o versus unity so i interviewed two developers who worked with both engines they are going to share the experience they had with each engine as well as the advantages and drawbacks they found hey my name is ben i'm a 28 year old software engineer and hobbyist game developer i run a youtube channel called devduck where i post development logs of the games that i'm working on and try to show how i make progress on those while balancing out a full-time job and a healthy lifestyle i'm franco beller i've been a freelance game developer for eight years now and a hobbyist for twice that i've worked on mobile cross-platform and prototype games using unity java and other tech like c plus i'm working with gd quests making tutorials for godot what do i like most about godot i think it's a pretty long list but the first thing that comes to mind is the size of the toolkit that godot gives me i really think the tools that godot provides is just the right amount for me to be able to turn my ideas into a playable game without just overwhelming me with a huge set of functionality another incredibly important feature of the godot engine for me is the scene system and if you're not quite sure what that is i would certainly recommend visiting godot's documentation they do a great job describing it now i think godot's scene system and unity's kind of entity component system both have their pros and cons but for me godot's scene system has really pushed me to favor composition over inheritance which had a really positive impact on the quality of the code in my games i've also found godot to be a really great fit for my kind of 2d pixel art style of game it only took me about five minutes to understand the project changes that i needed in order to get my artwork rendering and animating smoothly and crisply which i just really appreciate finally and unsurprisingly i love the godot is free and open source that mit license means i never have to worry about creating a successful game and having someone wanting to skim something off the top it's a great peace of mind just knowing that i own every line of code that i'm writing for my games kero is the underdog it's the up-and-comer with lots of good ideas and it's just brimming with potential you just want to root for it more technically though one obvious advantage is that it's fully open source there's over a thousand contributors fixing bugs and implementing features even i was able to go in and discover a couple bugs i could fix i'm also a fan of the scene within a scene concept it's similar to unity's prefabs if a little more intuitive it's definitely easier to edit since every other part of your game is also a scene what do i like most about unity after spending close to a year with unity developing my first two mobile projects i think my number one answer has to be just the massive set of free functionality you get out of the box with unity and the huge community of practice that goes along with it if you're just starting out with unity you can find a beginner-friendly tutorial for almost anything whether it's pong or pac-man or mario or even learning the basics of designing an rpg there are so many ways to get started with unity and so many ways to learn and i think that's really great i also found unity to be really great for mobile development and this is something that i've not yet tried with godot so i can't really compare and contrast the two but i will say that i had no trouble at all implementing in-app purchases on both ios and android and implementing unity's ad network into my games it was just super easy and i think that's really approachable for someone who's new to mobile game development and finally one of my personal favorite things about the unity engine is that c-sharp is its first class development language i didn't know a lot of c sharp when i first started using unity but after about a year i really started to appreciate it it just allowed me to organize my code in a way that made a lot of sense to me and i really liked how i was able to get features like really rich auto completion with my favorite editors like visual studio code i think c-sharp is a great fit for the unity engine and i really enjoyed using it as far as what i missed from unity you've probably picked up on the fact that i missed c-sharp a little bit but apart from that i think there are a few features and pieces of the toolkit that unity does a little bit better than godot and off the top of my head those would be things like the tile map editor and the particle system just a little more fleshed out a little more mature in unity but i think the tools that are equivalent in godot are moving in that direction being open source is a double-edged sword if there's a bug or a feature you want implemented that's not there if you aren't coding it or fixing it to yourself someone else says to want to and there's no guarantee that someone's featured will still be in maintenance if they lose interest down the line a lot of goodo's built-in tools feel like they're first or second version prototypes they're there but the animation editor and the tileset editor feel like they need a lot of work then you have goto's lack of pedigree it's improving but unity has a 15-year lead and a backing of a multi-billion dollar corporation unity is a good introduction to the concept of composition the idea of aggregating a bunch of little components together to make a complex object it just got this massive user base and support which means a massive amount of resources too tutorials books courses assets game demos code samples plugins editors extensions it also uses c-sharp which means you can use c-sharp libraries that aren't about game dev but are still quite useful my transition from unity's c-sharp to godot's gd script was kind of a big one there's a lot of differences there but it was a smooth transition and i think i picked up a couple of important takeaways from that process the first of those is that from a programmer's perspective i did not find gd script to be difficult to pick up at all i think just a couple hours and i was up and running understanding the basic syntax of the language it's very concise compared to c sharp so i kind of felt like i was able to get a lot more work done in a shorter amount of time and with less typing which is certainly something i can appreciate looking back to my c-sharp unity days there are definitely some things i miss about that language one of the first thing that comes to mind actually is a bit of a technical nitpick and that is interfaces i really always enjoyed using interfaces and protocols in my code and c-sharp just supported those in a much more robust way than gd script does so that's just a little bit of a nitpick that i have on top of that i've also realized that i kind of started to appreciate the verbosity of c sharp a little bit more i tend to be a person who likes to write pretty explicit code so i enjoyed declaring a specific class as abstract and c-sharp rather than trying to emulate that in gd script i'll also tack on that i miss having robust code completion of my c-sharp code in a tool like visual studio or visual studio code i think gd script is moving in that direction but it's just not quite there yet i will say that overall if c sharp became a first class citizen in godot i think i would choose that over gd script edius script looks like python but it acts more like a c language so it was pretty comfortable coming into it from c sharp or java there's no compilation step so big changes to even huge classes is just instant but that means it's slower to run optimizing means trying to get the c plus engine to do as much of the work for you big loops full of math will end up being pretty slow it's a solid and pretty complete programming language but there's a few things it lacks like generics private variables or interfaces now when considering unity over godot i definitely think there are a few important points to consider the first of these is that i think it's fair to say that unity has a much greater amount of funding and maturity that has led to a much more robust feature set and going along with that it's been around for so long that the community around unity is just massive there's such a huge breadth of tutorials and resources to get you started with unity i think that's a great opportunity for someone who's trying to learn the engine a few more advantages that unity has over godot in my opinion are slightly deeper support for mobile platforms a built-in asset store and one consideration that was particularly interesting to me and that was that unity may provide you with more professional opportunities while i was working in my first year with unity i actually had the opportunity to use unity at my work because of that experience that i built up in my free time which was awesome so if that's something that's important to you i think unity may have the edge in that space at least for now having just finished a course all about shaders and post-processing unity's render layers is probably the freshest thing on my mind in ud graphical elements are part of a layer and cameras only see specific layers in godot you instead use these parallel universes inside of viewports that are populated by these proxy elements that are controlled by remote transform nodes a simple minimap that's three game objects and you need like six nodes and godot i also miss being able to use c-sharp libraries without needing to switch my project to mono but it also needs to work on its package management it's one big issue to reuse scenes and resources from one project to another without the exact same folder structure one of the biggest advantages of godot over unity for me as i mentioned before is the size of the toolkit it's a small download nothing to install no updates every day and you're not going to be overwhelmed by the feature set you get out of the box if you're just starting out with game development i think godot is a much more approachable alternative to get you up and running with your very first project i've also found that while godot's community of practice is currently much smaller than unities the quality of the content that's out there to teach you how to use the godot engine and how to make games with godot is of an extremely high quality and the community is ever growing so now is a good time to jump in and of course godot is open source and unity is not you have the opportunity to influence the growth of the godot engine which i think is really amazing and on top of that if you launch a successful game you're not going to owe the developers or contributors to godot anything you own all the code you wrote no one's skimming anything off the top and i think that's just a fantastic piece of mind to have as a developer the two biggest advantages good o's editor runs in the good old engine and also the fully open source part the editor's gui is gudo's gui so if you can navigate it you can control and add to it like it's your own game running a button in inspector react to the editor cameras preview checkbox stuff like that plus the interface is clean everything i use a lot is in the editor's main view either as a button or just a shortcut key and stuff that isn't as important or used as often is inside a drop down menu and it's all one package you get an editor an id a debugger profiler tileset editor so on and so forth i hope the video could answer some of your questions each developer has different needs and it's always hard to figure out which engine can be a good fit for your project if you're interested in godot you can learn more with our video godot explained in five minutes we also make video tutorials written guides courses and free and open source demos for it all the links are in the description below with that i want to thank you kindly for watching be creative have fun and let's see one another in the next one bye

Channel: GDQuest

Views: 81,214

Keywords:

Id: kahPeM0scpM

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/NathanGDquest]

This video was requested by people in our community, following Godot VS Game Maker: How do they compare? that featured Heartbeast and Emilio.

It's the last part of a series of videos we made to help promote Godot.

The goal is to give people some insights into the pros and cons of each and hopefully poke at people's curiosity regarding Godot. I invite you to share it with your friends who are considering Godot but aren't sure where it stands relative to Unity.

Big thanks to DevDuck for the interview. His devlogs are great if you haven't seen them yet: https://www.youtube.com/c/DevDuck/

[u/[deleted]]

Interesting video! Weird that they both basically didn’t acknowledge godots c# implementation. Is it really that bad?

I haven’t seen any documentation that outlines what it’s lacking and using it briefly I didn’t run into any issues outside it not really being supported in the editor.

[u/Aspring15]

It's a good video but they pretend like C# doesn't exist in Godot when in reality it's almost a 1st class language

[u/Denxel]

Mmm I don't know man, I think that this promoted Unity more than anything.

[u/RadicalNinjaPC]

!remindme 15 hours