Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

My 13yo son recently discovered Godot and I'm very impressed by how accessible and powerful it all is. He had started gamedev a few years ago with Scratch. Figured out Roblox Studio a fair amount, but it's super quirky, plus he wanted to do 2D games. Tried some other stuff (eg pygame) but that's just super low level, inaccessible, plus you can't properly distribute pygame games for shit. Godot is on a whole nother level.

I had never bothered pointing him to it, because I remembered Godot as "a bunch of C++ libraries for gamedev". I'm not even sure whether that's ever been the case or just an incorrect memory, but today's Godot is incomparable to that. The editor UI is very full featured, and you can easily make simple 2D games with relatively small amounts of programming. It includes a level editor, animation stuff, and so on. It's just very feature complete, and I think it's very impressive for a FOSS project to be so accessible to newcomers stumbling into it by chance. Points also to the people making videos.

Also sidenote I think GDScript is great. My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow. As a developer dad, Godot's GDScript struck me as a super weird "not invented here" thing at first, but realizing what tradeoffs they're going for (familiarity, fast edit-compile-run cycle, concurrency, lightweight binding to C++ internals, etc), I now see the point completely. I'm sure it has plenty quirks but for a beginner like my son it's a perfect fit.

Bottom line, he was able to make a Flappy Bird clone and put it on his Android phone, totally solo (except the Android export, and with lots of YouTube support), in like two afternoons. Drew the art, coded the dynamics, everything. Hats off to the Godot team!

> because I remembered Godot as "a bunch of C++ libraries for gamedev".

Yeah it's never been that, it's always been an editor-driven engine. Started life as a proprietary game engine by a consultancy, then open sourced about a decade ago.

Super cool though, learning Godot at 13 is a great opportunity.

Thanks! I bet I've had it confused with something else then.

I would bet SDL; it's a C library that a ton of other libraries are influenced by or based on. It's not usually thought of as an engine on its own nowadays

Nah, like you said, SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc. If that counts as a "game engine" then so does every web browser.

EDIT: Sorry if I seem grumpy, I'm not actually grumpy at you, I'm grumpy at PyGame for calling itself a game engine when really it's just SDL + the ability to blend images.

> SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc.

It's a bit more than that, especially the current version. You're right that it isn't an engine in and of itself but you could probably build a decent engine on top of it. SDL3 + WASM + Lua would be chef's kiss.

I wasn't alive or making games at the time, as I was a baby, but I believe SDL would have been understood as an engine when it released.

I wouldn't call it one nowadays, except in so far that someone looking for an engine might find themselves happy with SDL (or PyGame, etc)

> SDL would have been understood as an engine

SDL is funny in that it kind of is an engine, à la Raylib, with SDL_Renderer (2D only), but most people use it just as a platform abstraction layer.

I don't get it. SDL has an event/messaging queue, cross-platform hardware support, basic collision detection, it packs its own stdlib, a cross-platform file storage API, a camera API, a pen API, asynchronous I/O, metadata/property support using its own hashmap, a geometry API that lets you throw triangles at the GPU, and other things, but all 99% of people ever seem do with it is open a window and an OpenGL context.

I've seen plenty of projects where people use it and reimplement things it already does because they want to minimize dependency. The entire point of using a library like SDL is dependency! Use all the things!

Might’ve been MonoGame? It sounds enough like Godot that you might’ve confused the two, it’s a code-first framework, and it’s popular enough that you might’ve heard of it (Stardew Valley, Bastion, and Celeste are all built on MonoGame)

Nah either it was Irrlicht or it was really just Godot and I simply incorrectly committed to memory what it was.

LibGDX?

> My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow.

I'd like to know more about this. Were you comparing similar sized projects? I've only done very small projects in Unity and the cycle was near instant. Loading up some of their 3gig+ samples, there was an initial build that took 40+ mins but that's because it had 3gig of assets to process.

It’s probably not compilation, but “Domain Reloading” (https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.2/Documentation/Manual/DomainR...) which is laughably slow and on by default.

I think Unity does this because the same process is re-used for Play and Editor modes, whereas Godot does the normal thing and spawns a new process when testing.

My entire experience with Unity is "my kid said it took long to run the game he was trying to make". Sorry that I can't be more helpful. He might've been unreasonably impatient, I never looked over his shoulder when he was trying out Unity. All I know is that he says he likes Godot way more, in no small part because it's "faster" (and I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean engine performance when he says "faster").

Hats off to your son too, I'd say.

Great experience, thanks for sharing, a great way to get them motivated.

It got me motivated! I downloaded Godot and I'm gonna do something with all those level designs I made years ago...

Reading OP comment made it clear how little excuse I really have.

That's awesome! What type of game is your son making now?

Clone of some popular game that I forgot the name of where you're a block and you move around a maze (tile-based, 2d) but you can't take small steps or slow down, you always slide quickly in one direction until you hit a wall. It's a puzzle game, you gotta make it to the exit without hitting the kill blocks. He wants to figure out how to make an in-game level editor for it but he still only 10% groks the node/scene system so that'll take him some attempts for sure :D

might be geometry dash.

What OP is describing is Tomb of the Mask or in that genre. There’s a good GIF embedded here showing the navigation mechanic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Mask

That’s the one!

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