I've played with Unity and Unreal a bit, each with their own pros and cons, but for me Godot is the one I found most intuitive and easy to test new ideas with. Worth checking out.
If your game has more than trivial amount of UI, particle-systems, 3D, etc then it becomes very time consuming. To write and tweak a full blown responsive UI like in-game windows, alerts, animations etc with code-only is not trivial. With a full-featured editor like Unity and Godot, UI, particles, tweened-animations and such becomes much easier as you can keep interactively tweak things around until its perfect without the edit-code & recompile cycle.
There's also King's "Defold" engine which uses Lua and has a visual editor but the last time I used it over a year ago, I found there was almost no in-game UI libraries so although making the prototype was fun and relatively easy adding UI became difficult.
Do you only use it for quick prototyping of ideas and then move over to a different engine if you like the idea and want to expand?
I imagine the answer could come down to the scope of the game.
I agree with the comparison to GML, but whether one finds Gdscript intuitive depends on one's existing background. I personally found it frustrating because I was used to C/C++, but with time I can see getting used to it. It's not a bad language by any means.
Also, both Game Maker and Godot share the problem of their scripting language being essentially a form of lock-in, since no one is going to use Gdscript anywhere else, and any code you write it in is no longer portable. Also, they use their own shader script rather than GLSL, which means your shaders aren't portable either.
Godot can support different languages (unlike Unity or Game Maker), but IIRC that requires recompiling the engine and may break the editor.
- GDScript : included by default
- C# : you have to download the Mono version of Godot (and install the Mono SDK)
- Any other language (Rust, Python, C++, D, etc...) : using GDNative
(- And of course you can also directly modify the engine source code in C++ if you need super low level modifications (like writing your own render engine))
>Finally, one of our brightest additions for the 3.0 release: GDNative allows scripting in C++ without needing to recompile (or even restart) Godot.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.1/getting_started/step_by_...
Personally i've been using this for godot:
https://github.com/GodotNativeTools/godot-d
It's been working well for me.
I compile my code and include it as an .so in my project. No recompiling the editor.