Comment by electronstudio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by electronstudio | Hacker News Reader

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When I started developing RetroWar[1], I found Unity quite a disappointment, and so I developed my own custom engine in Kotlin. It works very well, but it took several years.

Recently I tried Godot because I was looking for something simple I could teach to kids[2], and I was amazed how easy it makes game creation. I made these games with no experience in just a couple of days!

https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_racing

https://github.com/electronstudio/godot_space

GDscript is great. It's similar enough to Python that kids who know Python won't notice much difference, and it actually simplifies things for beginners, e.g. you can use objects without the need to define classes because they are created automatically when you create a script.

Godot is still a little rough around the edges, e.g. not everything has keyboard shortcuts, sometimes it crashes, some of the built in tools like map editor are very fiddly to use. But it's open source so I'm sure they will be fixed eventually (and if they aren't I can always do it myself.) The only major issue I can see for the future of Godot is the lack of exporters for Xbox, Playstation and Switch.

[1] http://retrowar.net

[2] https://loughton.me.uk/2020/01/22/godot.html

*lack of public exporters. Because of the NDAs around shipping for these platforms, no one can "advertise" that they have the exporters, but the truth is that there are consultants/gamedev shops who have done this work for all of the current platforms. You just have to get in touch with them via the community.

EDIT: This page has some backstory: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/tutorials/platform/conso...

Sure you can hire someone to do the port - they do advertise it on that very page.

But there is another open source game library, Monogame, that distributes their code for free for consoles. You just have to vertify that you are have signed the NDA before you get access to the code. They advertise this. So there is no reason that Godot couldn't do the same if they wanted to open that code.

A lot of assumptions going on in this comment. You should actually consider testing some of them to see if they're true or just mistakes on your part.

Putting that aside: developers who do this kind of (difficult, tedious and thankless) work are entitled to ask compensation for their effort, on top of everything else they do for free.

Yes people are entitled to sell proprietary forks of free software - it's a non-copy left license so perfectly legal. However it puts Godot in a poor position relative to competitors. If you want a free console game engine you could use Monogame. If you want a non-free console game engine then you could use Unity or Unreal and you would have the advantage that you know up-front what it will cost and you know that it will be well supported by well-known developers throughout the lifetime of the console. Godot is a very compelling choice for PC and mobile, but the current situation of “there is console support but it’s a secret so we can’t tell you who makes it, how much it costs and how long it will be supported in future” makes it very difficult to recommend Godot over those alternatives to anyone developing console titles.

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