Why Use The Godot Game Engine?

hello ladies and gentlemen it's Mike here at game from scratch in the Godot 4 game engine recently shipped alongside it I got some interesting questions and probably the most interesting amongst them is why should I use the Godot game engine and the thing is there is a very passionate Community around Godot uh that can sometimes be a little bit overzealous in their sales pitch what I thought I'd do in this particular video is look at the strengths of the Godot game engine look at legit reasons why you may choose the Godot game engine over the two elephants in the room that being the Unreal Engine and the unity game engine now in this video I'm going to focus on those strengths of Godot so I'm not actually going to be talking about godot's weaknesses nor am I going to be talking about uh the strengths or weaknesses of the unity or unreal game Mansion I'm going to be talking about Godot relative to those engines so if there is interest I can do follow-up videos of why you should choose the unity game engine why you should choose the unreal game engine and why you shouldn't choose those engines as well let me know if you'd be interested in that so now in no particular order the biggest reasons why you might choose the Godot game engine over unreal and unity are and the first one is you can run on a potato so if you've got a very restricted Computing running the Unreal Engine is not a fun Prospect even the unity game engine not the biggest best Prospect out there where's Godot uh the game engine is like a hundred megabytes in size even with all the templates downloaded the install templates you're still looking at about a gigabyte in size in terms of the amount of machine you need to run it you need to have an opengl 3.1 compatible GPU and that's it literally that is it you could probably run Godot on a Celeron you could run Godot on an Android machine it's actually available in the Google Play Store you can run it on a Chromebook you can even run it in a web browser so if you're someone constrained in your processing ability Godot is by far and away the smallest footprint game engine out there now the next one is about a simple ad explanations get it is the only free and open source game engine of the bunch now you may be thinking yourself okay wait a minute the source code is available for Unreal Engine yes it is Source available not open source there are definite limitations of what you could do with that source code you couldn't in turn make uh you know unrealer engine and resell it whereas in Godot you definitely could do that Godot was under the MIT open source license it is the only Foss a free open source software or OSI uh certified licensed engine out there it's available under the MIT code license whereas Unreal Engine source code is under a proprietary license and you can actually get access to the unity source code but you've got to Fork out a ton of money now the ton of money is the other part of where this free kicks in now all of these engines have a free tier available now we're talking free as in beer as a you know cash spent with Unreal Engine you can make up to a million dollars and for most Indies you're never going to make a million bucks to be honest and anything beyond that you have to pay a five percent royalty that's a very fair licensing scheme now with the unity game engine they have a different approach they don't have a royalty instead they have a flat rate the pro tier is 399 dollars per developer per year and that is if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year here so again for a lot of Indie developers there's never going to be a price tag on the unity game engine either and if there is for either Unity or Unreal Engine it's because you're making bank so the free as in cost aspect isn't as important as it used to be but definitely with Godot you can scale your game up you could sell a hundred thousand million trillion copies and you don't have to pay anyone a cent if you want to change the source code you can do whatever you wish because it is the only truly open source option of the three out there so free and open source is definitely a big thing to some people now the next thing is uh actually an area that I am not that interested in but I know some people are very interested in this and that is running on Linux now you can actually run the Unreal Engine on Linux and you can run the unity game engine on Linux but both of those are basically second-class citizens there's always going to be some catches involved or they're going to lag behind on development Etc when it comes to Linux on the Godot game engine uh I believe a lot of the lead developers on the project actually develop on the Linux operating system it is basically the lead platform and Linux support on Godot is as good or better than any of the other platforms it supports so if your primary development platform is Linux and your primary target it's I guess or your primary target is Linux such as say the steam deck uh the Godot game engine is honestly the best Linux based implementation of the three engines now if you work with unreal or Unity on Linux and you find that I'm out of date with my impressions of it please do let me know that in the comments down below but from my understanding it's not a very pleasant experience working in that operating system on those engines whereas if you're on Linux and you're using the Godot game at you're going to find it a very pleasant experience now this next one uh kind of a strength kind of a weakness in the same category and what I'm talking about here is the Godot game engine is good enough simply put the union unreal game engines both have more features than the Godot game engine like it's just the truth of the matter is they're both probably at least a decade older uh and it shows so they have a bit more mature a bit more battle tested than the Godot game engine a lot of times in godo you may have one way of doing things whereas an unreal or uni you have five this course can be a double-edged sword do you actually need these features is the go feature set good enough to make the game that you have in your head if the answer is yes a bunch of features you don't need isn't really a selling point it just adds a layer of complexity so if you have all the features you need and not a whole lot more it does make the learning curve a bit easier and for sure if you are creating AAA game this is actually going to you know work against you those tools are definitely needed in those environments and I'm not saying those features aren't meaningful especially on a bigger team where we're the larger scale project but for many of you you you just don't need them the question you ultimately need to ask is is Godot good enough for what I need again not really a strength or weakness but a way to look at the Godot game engine for sure and it's one of those things I would cover differently and if I was doing this video about the things that why you wouldn't choose Godot hopefully that made sense next up and this one is very related to the last one it's simple ish so like above uh if you have less features you have less complexity but on top of that uh this carries across all the way through the game engine the no based structure of Godot is very straightforward it's very easy to understand so once you've kind of concepted the idea of a hierarchy of nodes you all of a sudden understand the leveling system the prefab system and everything else it's a very uh easy way to learn to structure your game again it could come down to opinion you may absolutely hate the way that Godot structures are rolled but the way they do it is very simple and that is a very good strength a lot of the times and that actually carries over to the scripting language as well GD script so until Unreal Engine adds its own scripting language first if it ever actually adds it and since Unity long ago killed off both Boo and unreal script the only option out of the box for Unity are C sharp and bolt and blueprints and C plus plus unreal so GD script is designed to be simple domain specific language for easily scripting game logic so it's basically it's based Loosely on the Python programming language but the key thing about GD script you learn it in a weekend so it's not a long investment in learning it now I know a lot of people come into a Unity with some c-sharp ability but if you've had no prior uh programming experience you're going to pick up GD script in like a literal fraction of the time where you could pick up C sharp now of course you can also learn C sharp and use C sharp with the Godot game engine and this would be under the negative side of Godot C sharp has always been a bit of a second class citizen in the Godot ecosystem it always Trails a little bit behind or there's always a current feature missing or that kind of thing so GD script really is the prefer third way to program in the Godot game engine but again like the scene structure in Godot it's pretty simple and those two things combined make it easy to learn so the Simplicity also applies to the source code and this being an open source project uh for a large open source project this is actually one of the easiest code bases I've ever encountered so if you want to extend the source code the C plus plus code and you want to contribute back to an open source project I find that the code base for especially for being such a large project it's very simple uh so one of the strengths for sure of the good game engine uh it's easy to learn it's easy to get into it's easy to script and it's easy and easy to extend assuming you know some C plus so simple is definitely good although sometimes it's also obviously bad now another area where Godot really shines is it was designed from day one for 2D unreal game match it basically dropped their 2D support when they stopped supporting paper 2D so if you want to develop in uh the unreal game engine and there's plenty of commercial 2D games out there developed in unreal the thing is you're rolling all of the 2D systems yourself when it comes to Unity uh Unity is much more 2D friendly you can tell this by the huge number of ship 2D titles out there for Unity but they've really only recently started focusing on the 2D tooling uh they kind of neglected it for years and years and years although the App Store can make up for a ton of that discrepancy so Unity obviously is very good for 2D as well but with the Godot game engine it basically started life making 2D games so the very first title shipped with Godot commercially were 2D titles and it's always had a very solid 2D Focus so this means you've got built-in tile mapping tools built in 2D physics you've got multiple pixel scaling modes and you can even work in really simple straightforward pixel units and let it take care of for you that makes working into the a just a pleasant experience and the final thing that I'm going to cover on is the extensibility now I talked about this a little bit earlier on when I talked about how good the source code is to extend again if you've never dove into the source code for the Godot gamage and I highly recommend doing it you know trying to extend good deal versus say try and extend Unreal Engine you're going to get up and working and hacking away at the Godot code base very quick but the thing is you don't have to it's actually got I used to have something called GD native as an extension system now it's got GD extensions as a way to create t plus modules built on top of the Godot game engine and it's the easiest extension system of the three engines in my humble opinion it's also the most extensive in fact a lot of things written as C plus plus modules you would think were actually core built-in components things like the GD script programming language on top of that you can actually create Tools in Godot using GD script and Godot itself this is probably the most impressive part the Godot game engine editor is actually a Godot game so everything you're seeing in that editor is written in Godot so it's kind of self-hosting in a way and it gives you an idea of the sheer amount of extensions that you can do to the Godot game engine the next extensibility has actually led to some really cool tools being written on top of Godot so things like a material maker or pixelrama came to mind those were written using the Godot game engine and of the three engines I do think that the Godot engine is the most extensible although obviously you do have the Unreal Engine source code so if you really wanted to you could like Fork it and do whatever you wanted with it it's just that's a Herculean task whereas extending the Godot is almost trivial it's amazing how extensible it is and that's it for the day uh really all I want to cover is the points where I think Godot has an edge over Unity or unreal so we're like why should I choose this engine over X or Y those are the reasons at least in my mind now obviously some of them are my opinion some of them are circumstantial so obviously if you're trying to make a triple A game Simplicity is not a trait to you but if you are a beginner looking to learn things that is the exact opposite the same time there's a lot of things I didn't cover strengths of those other engines weaknesses of the Godot game imagine if you'd like to see those in follow-up videos you like this format do let me know and I can potentially make those videos as well but hopefully this video will help give you a bit of an Insight over why you may or may not choose the Godot game magic for your future project let me know what you think comments down below and I'll talk to you all later goodbye

Channel: Gamefromscratch

Views: 177,771

Keywords: Godot, Godot 4, Godot Engine, Unity, Unreal, Unreal Engine, UE5, Picking, Engine, Game Engine, Tutorial, Choosing, GameDev, Game Development

Id: pATpV7MwZr8

Length: 11min 59sec (719 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023