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Comment by insomagent | Hacker News Reader

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

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You should try Godot. Open source and extremely lightweight compared to Unity and Unreal. It's pleasure to use, none of the baggage of the other engines. I'm a patron contributor. Fantastic for hobbyist tinkering and also viable for full blown commercial games.

https://godotengine.org/

Can you share any references for finding the top quality or best known games made using Godot? I haven’t looked in a while.

There is a decent showcase page on their site https://godotengine.org/showcase/

The most visible title made with Godot in the last few months I can think of is Brotato.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1942280/Brotato/

Another fairly popular one is Dome Keeper: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

Here are some games created using Godot that you can find on Steam: https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/

If you prefer, there's also a collection of Godot games on Itch.io: https://itch.io/games/top-rated/made-with-godot

Personally, I highly recommend checking out Cruelty Squad: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad - It's a fun game with a unique art style.

Circling back late here, but thank you.. and thank you to all the sibling commenters as well!

Take a look at this showreel videos[1][2].

[1] Desktop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAS_pUTFA7o

[2] Mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF3QiQfQxeQ

Yeah Godot editor is snappy and smooth, unlike Unity and Unreal. However Godot's 3D and physics implementation leaves a lot to be desired. Not sure if Godot 4 solves those issues.

For a solo indie dev it is far more than enough. There are solutions to any physics problems you encounter. The 3d in Godot 4 is quite beautiful

When I was moving away from Unity I looked at Godot and really liked it. It's nowhere near as performant or feature rich as other engines and it's future is undecided but it was fun to tinker with and get things moving. I hope to return to it in the future.

The lack of easy testing made me not use it. There were a couple testing plugins users had made which could kind of do unit and integration testing but they were super finicky.

Not sure when you last tried it out, but GUT (Godot Unit Test) is what I use and it integrates very well with the IDE.

3.4~ as they were preparing early 4.0 releases was when I was experimenting with godot.

I should add that I was specifically trying to use c# ecosystem for godot at the time and their plugins for testing. Since I ended up with Unreal I'm refreshed enough in c++ that I might check Godot 4.0 out this weekend again.

OK, I have no idea about C#, I use GDScript and C++. All my tests are in GDScript.

Come now, this is complete anecdotal nonsense.

Unity had unreal are both excellent million $$ packages you can use for free(ish) that come with integrated editors and asset pipelines, massive plugin/package ecosystems and even one click playable templates.

What more do you want?

It takes too long to open the editor? Cry me a river! What do you want, a lean editor / hit code reloading / functional code only / truely free? Look at bevy or Godot.

I mean come on, this is the golden age of indie development for games, where literally anyone can make a game in like a days effort following a YouTube tutorial.

The tooling is bad. Pppohhfhfhfhfhttt.

This is like some saying they don’t use the internet because the speeds are too slow when they don’t have a free optic fibre literally from the provider to their door step.

> I mean come on, this is the golden age of indie development for games, where literally anyone can make a game in like a days effort following a YouTube tutorial.

Yeah but will it be good? I'm betting on no.

That's because game design is an actual skill that needs to be cultivated, just as much as prose writing technique or cinematography or whatever.

Making game software is only half the problem, everything from high-level concept to tweaking spreadsheets is a genuine craft that is often neglected.

Kind remind that the audience on Hacker News are Vim users who prefer a custom X Windows manager with a tile layout for four terminals.

The tooling is great, don't get me wrong. But as soon as you need to do anything that slightly deviates the norm in Unreal engine, you're constantly butted up against broken features, or terrible performance. I can't count the number of times we had to fix a feature or some silly performance problem that was broken in the engine itself.

The latest of which was Iris (to be fair, it is in an early state, but it is a major improvement to ue4's replication), there are some baffling design choices that deliberately made it way harder to make custom serializers for networking.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. It mostly depends on if you walk the well trodden path or not.

The tooling is a rabbit hole. Unity gives me the creeps and unreal (afaik) still doesn't work on Linux. However:

Löve is super fun, lua is cool but at some point it gets tiring to get more advanced things working. For 'simple' things you can't go wrong.

Haxe is amazing (I learned flash after it was dead o.O) several different frameworks to choose from, many plugins kinda dead but still big community. Compiled to everything you need, some Frameworks even have console targets.

However this coming from someone who hasn't released a real game yet.

Unreal does work on Linux, I'm currently using it on arch

Unity used to provide a UnityHub.AppImage (used for licensing and version management) that with enough duct tape worked on non-ubuntu distros. Now they maintain their apt repo to ship UnityHub and anything other than Ubuntu 20.04 is not viable for getting things done.

Unreal just provides the source code and you compile it yourself, and there are community solutions for different distros.

This brought some flashbacks : I worked with a Linux developer on a small binaural game prototype over 8 weeks. He spent those eight weeks comparing tools and beginning to hash something out in assembly which he didn't finish. We made a custom C# wrapper for the spatial sound in " Unity " instead.

Unreal works fine on Linux. M1 silicon too.

Does Unreal actually work “fine” on M1 Silicon? I very recently installed the latest version on my Mac Mini and it seemed to perform pretty poorly, even with a mostly empty scene.

3D is hard. Large studios have gotten over the growing pains, but there's still no equivalent of "Flash" in terms of those tight, fast iteration times that made flash games explode.

Same, I'm waiting for someone to make a game engine for programmers. Most seem aimed at designers. I don't want low code no code tools... I want to get into code asap.

I had the most fun on this using löve (love2d), it is pretty sweet. Just a text editor of your choice and you are good to go - you can also connect it to an ide for debugging if needed.

I am not a super fan of C# but if you are more into that there is also Monogame/FNA, but I haven't used those - I did use XNA back in the day and they seem very similar.

I actually use AGS though.

" Unity " and C# is a better way to bridge a prior understanding of programming with making games. You just need to get over it somehow. There's a lot of great games made with each engine, and all are slow to start up but you're not there for that. You're there for the 80% those engines do so you can spend more time on making the parts that are fun. If you don't start - you'll never make it.

try wickedengine!

i change the engine regularly and it compiles in 30 seconds. good linux support, nice api, and it’s fast.

the engine is compiled as a part of game source. this feels like the right way. it’s all one thing.

Yeah, honestly too many people try to pick up something like a game engine or a web framework without knowing the underlying language. It's a recipe for disaster.

Unreal requires a fast ssd these days, yeah.

Blender?

Loooooong ago blender once did have a game engine but they removed it many many years ago.

The game engine of Blender faced limited support due to its requirement for games to adhere to Blender's license (GPL) when generating platform binaries. Although there were workarounds available, such as externalizing blend files or using the binary as a loader, these solutions were not practical for most commercial games. It would have posed a significant challenge, particularly if developers intended to port their games to platforms that did not permit such restrictions. Consequently, this limitation likely deterred widespread adoption of the feature, with its usage being primarily limited to prototyping purposes.

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