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I used XNA, then MS killed it for no reason, then I switched to Unity, been using it since 2012, today I'm learning Godot.

Imo Godot is the new indie engine. it has the same feel as XNA and Unity. There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same. XNA / Unity / Godot / indie engines, u just sit down and start writing C# code and can write your whole game and ignore the engine features.. Unreal feels more like modding an existing game where you must use the existing systems. As a lone indie dev I find it very tedious and slow to use, but I can see how its good for big teams, there is a big rigid system already in place they everyone must follow in order to do anything.. So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

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> There's nothing wrong with Unreal, its a great engine, but it does not feel the same

don't worry, I can do plenty of complaining about Unreal.

But in all seriousness, Unreal focuses on delivering content with graphical fidelity first, and iteration times are a distant 10th place in the priority list. Part of that is due to their choice to focus on C++ (and that's not a slight. UE is 25 years old, c++ itself was brand new back then. Let alone C# existing as an option). Part of it is a focus on highly spec'd computers with larger monitors. But the end result: developing a simple game with Unreal will feel slower because the compilation times and memory footprint are literally larger (even if you are really smart and take out a bunch of the unnecessary add-ons that are included by default).

>So if u have 1000's of workers it will stop individuals going off and doing crazy stuff, cus they cant.

oh you underestimate what crazy pitfalls designers can fall into :). But I can leave my rants about Blueprints and hard references for another post.

People who never developed a game on a large team like that don't know that there's nothing, nothing at all, stopping you from going crazy and doing crazy stuff. Often, it's a hack disguised as novel. Blueprints aside, even just doing hacky systems is allowed. Since it's C++, there's no stopping you.

I have history with XNA. What’s your take on MonoGame?

I haven't used it but a friend of mine has. His opinion is yeah good. Basically they more or less made XNA work again using Mono, so if u liked XNA its very similar.

There’s been quite a few games released with MonoGame. It’s a direct port of XNA API to open source. Like I said, I have history with XNA. No one heard of our games but they heard about XNA/Silverlight. The precursor to MonoGame. Shout out to Bill Reiss wherever you are.

One niche Godot (or any OSS game engine) can't fulfill is seamless console ports.

Godot can't but Godot* can, where Godot* is a downstream fork of Godot maintained by $COMPANY that provides a seamless console port. There are a couple of companies trying to do this.

In the long term, if Godot gets big enough then console makers have incentive to assist in this themselves, because if an engine with major marketshare can seamlessly port its games to Xbox but has difficulty porting to Playstation then Xbox will have a competitive advantage.

In such a scenario I don't think the difference between Godot and Godot* matters that much, IMO - I could imagine an Xbox devkit shipping with a Godot* compiler, for instance, so devs don't even have to think about the issue.

Exactly. After all, it’s not like consoles are magic black boxes. They are pc’s in brutalist form. If you get a console contract, you’ll be able to do a console port. Before then, don’t even worry about it. Just focus on making the game. All the Xbox services or PlayStation sdk stuff comes after.

$COMPANY in this case is called W4 games, by the way: https://w4games.com/

oh and speaking of Godot: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-developer-fund/

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