Hacker News Reader

Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

Godot has a few different successful games made with it. Cruelty Squad and Brotato coming to mind. Also Buckshot roulette which was made in Godot 3 though I think I heard they updated it to 4 at some point (which likely took some work as the syntax of gdscript changed).

View on HN

The impression I get from r/gamedev is that since the Unity screw up one third or maybe even half of the indie developers have switched to godot.

Godot is extremly easy to work with. It does not have all the bells and whistles of Unity or Unreal, but in turn is very small, simple and stable.

Just having less painful compile times at the start of projects is so nice. When I was using Unity even simplistic projects felt like they took forever. Even dotnet godot projects get running faster on average in my experience. Though sadly current c# godot projects cannot export to web. And even though projects can certainly slow down as they get bigger, at least getting bootstrapped is less painful (I haven't built anything of significant size, biggest thing was a jam game with one moderately sized level that loaded up pretty fast but I also cheated with a single bit of geometry for the level).

Most people posting to /r/gamedev have never shipped a game or even seriously attempted to (neither have I, to be clear). It's largely a forum for (beginner) hobbyists.

My point being: it's very easy to "switch" to Godot when you've created nothing of note in other engines to begin with. You're not going to actually ship a game, so concerns about platform compatibility, stability, collaboration and so on are significantly less important than in an actual commercial project. There are real commercial games built with Godot, some of them even decent, but the vast majority of Godot users are never going to actually ship a game, same as with any other engine. I think we can only evaluate the true popularity of Godot years in the future; there's a lot of talk right now, but not much is actually being shipped.

> My point being: it's very easy to "switch" to Godot when you've created nothing of note in other engines to begin with. You're not going to actually ship a game, so concerns about platform compatibility, stability, collaboration and so on are significantly less important than in an actual commercial project.

I think that this is a bit of an unkind take, but also a truthful one. I've shipped a few (mediocre) games in my freelance developer days with Unity and actually finishing a game and getting it out the door is more time consuming than most might believe, same as with software and the 80/20 principle. Especially when the majority of game developers are quite starry eyed and have fantasies of grandeur that lead to attempting projects with unchecked scope creep.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with engines that let you iterate very quickly and come up with game jam worthy games, ones with smaller scopes, oftentimes not even 3D graphics. That's why even arguably technically limited platforms like GameMaker have also had good games developed in them that have seen success.

It's just that there's definitely a bit of a disconnect between what the loudest voices will say/praise and what the more corporate projects will require.

Also Cassette Beasts.

May not be as much as Unity, but there are enough success stories.

But in the case of Bevy, can you tell a game is made with it?

I actually almost edited my post to add Cassette Beasts as I remembered it after the fact.

As for Bevy I haven't heard of any success stories like the Godot ones, but I also don't keep up with it to that degree yet, I'm mostly keeping an eye for when it gets closer to 1.0 and the editor at which point I want to take a deeper dive.

Godot was released in 2014. That's ten years ago, so it's 6 years older.

Bevy was also quite rough for the first few years, focused a lot on foundational work.

It will take a while longer to see whether it can become a success or not.

And how old was godot when they were made?

No further questions, your honour

Reply on news.ycombinator.com