amitmathew

At my last startup, our product required information that didn't exist in the digital world - the table of contents of hundreds of medical books. So I used to spend nights and weekends visiting local Barnes & Nobles and university bookstores pulling down books and manually typing out the table of contents with chapter titles, pages numbers, etc. Quite possibly the most boring job ever! Most bookstores didn't mind my presence, but I did get kicked out of one (thanks Harvard Medical School!). I tried to use OCR and other techniques and it just wasn't accurate enough (this was a decade ago so the tech wasn't quite as advanced as it is now). Eventually the company got big enough where I could have dedicated staff to handle the process, but for a long time it was how I spent my free time.

Awesome! The 3D shooter course is in production now, and is looking great so far. We try to inject best practices in all of our courses as well as weighing tradeoffs when discussing different approaches to a problem.

Wow...I wrote up a whimsical account of what could happen after the price increases. I got the timing wrong (I thought it would take several months for the CEO to step down), but some of it is starting to come true: https://quiver.dev/blog/stepping-into-the-unity-ceos-calfski....

At Quiver, we’re building comprehensive, polished courses for Godot. We aim to take you from the basics to more advanced concepts. Our content isn’t free though, but we’re doing our best to make it worth the cost. You can check it out here: https://quiver.dev. (Disclosure: I’m the founder).

Totally agree, that's why I submitted this article. I'm personally invested in seeing Godot become successful, but this type of constructive criticism is great for the ecosystem (even though some people get very defensive). I think it's exciting that there's so much room for improvement and shining light into Godot internals is a great way to expose what needs to be done.

There's a good post on Reddit of a dev creating small web exports using custom builds: https://old.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/16lti15/godot_is_not....

I'm less concerned about Unreal pulling a Unity. The bigger issue is just a lack of attention. The last numbers I saw was that Unreal was pulling in $100m a year for Epic. That's a drop in the bucket compared to what Epic makes off of Fortnite. In my experience, products that matter a lot to the consumer but not the company tend to stagnate. Just look at Google outside of search.

There are a couple of projects working on this. These are two of the best ones that I know of:

* Unidot: https://github.com/V-Sekai/unidot_importer

* UnityPackage For Godot: https://github.com/barcoderdev/unitypackage_godot/

If anyone's looking for a quick intro to Godot 4, you can take a look at our video series: https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-godot-4-game/. Disclaimer: this is offered by my company, but the tutorial is free and the code and assets are liberally licensed.

This move by Unity isn't completely unexpected if you've studied their financials. Smaller devs are basically dead weight for Unity, so it seemed like them putting the squeeze on them was just a matter of time. Bottom line: don't count on a public company to do the right thing if you're not helping their bottom line.

W4 Games, which was founded by some of the Godot devs, also recently announced console support: https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-....

It's funny, I met the two co-creators of Godot at GDC this year and they both pronounce it differently. So there may never be a consensus!

We have a free tutorial for Godot 4 that takes you from the start to a complete game in about two hours. You can find it here: https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-godot-4-game/.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of the company that produced this course, but the tutorial is free and the custom assets used in the tutorial are liberally licensed.

Depends how you define well-known. The Godot showcase lists some of the popular ones: https://godotengine.org/showcase/. I believe Dome Keeper did $1m+ in sales with a 2-person team and I assume Brotato and Cruelty Squad are probably in 7 figures as well. So far, the hits have definitely been on the smaller side, but I expect things will change with Godot 4 being released. Another big factor is that most of the games released so far have been developed by tiny teams.

That's not correct. They don't even mention the asset store in their annual reports or shareholder letters any more, but in 2020 the Asset Store revenue was part of a category that was less than 8% of revenue. Their main revenue drivers are their ad solutions and engine licensing for large studios.

Very possible! I'm in the process of building a C&C-like prototype, except 2D. I'm hoping to post a tutorial + code in a couple of weeks on our site (link in profile). If you want some assets to get started, you can use a free asset pack we released and the one I'm prototyping with: https://quiver.dev/assets/art-assets/outpost-assault-tower-d.... You'll definitely want to read up on the navigation system in the Godot and I imagine fine-tuning that will be a bulk of the work. If you have any questions, feel free to send an email (in my profile).

If you are looking for a 3D tutorial, this one seems pretty good: https://www.godotrts.com/courses/rts-game-development-course... (but I haven't used it myself).

If you're just getting started, I'd recommend trying out a few engines to see what clicks (I find it usually takes at least an afternoon to get a feel for an engine). JS engines tend to be easier to get started with as a web developer, but you'll often run into limitations when you start building more complex games.

This article is pretty shallow, but I agree with the broad strokes. I'm personally betting on Godot reaching an inflection point (I have $$$ personally invested in a startup betting on this), but I think it's totally a great outcome if the market is shared between Godot, Unity, and Unreal. I think the most likely scenario is that Godot enters in the indie/low-end market and moves up the ladder, Epic continues to dominate the AAA market, and Unity is squeezed somewhere between.

With that said, none of this is guaranteed and will require significant commercial support to make Godot remotely competitive. Some problems are immediately obvious like the lack of tutorials and an asset store (that's what we're working on in the near-term), but it also involves more sophisticated multiplayer options, a better asset pipeline, and much much more, so it's going to be a long road.

But I'm optimistic about Godot's future. I'm currently putting together a simple 2D RTS game with Godot 4 beta to use as a tutorial and template and it's been such a joy. Despite the bugs and the warts, I've gotten so much done in just two weeks. If you squint really hard, you can see an army of indies in the future making simple, but great games with Godot in half the time they do today and that gets me really excited.

Our company creates Godot courses and while we have scripts for our videos, we’ve found it difficult to turn them into books. Game programming is just so visual, especially introductory content. Things like walking someone through the Godot editor is hard to convey in text. We’re working on it though!

Our company, Quiver, has a free Godot 4 course that takes you from basics to a finished 2d infinite runner in about 2 hours. https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-godot-4-game/. Feedback welcome!

Full disclosure: I’m the founder.

If anyone's interested in learning the basics of Godot 4, we just launched a free tutorial series: https://quiver.dev/tutorials/create-your-first-godot-4-game/ (also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWoyLDmwvJl1ZY6DmsEJb...).

I agree that Unity has a head start, but we're betting on Godot catching up, especially for indie developers. We're doing our part by helping to plug some of the holes in the Godot ecosystem by releasing assets, game templates, and plugins.

The company is Quiver (https://quiver.dev). There's not much to see right now, but we're looking to launch in the next month or two.

That's a good question and to be honest, we're still figuring it out. Making our templates open source have the benefits of allowing the broader community to contribute, helps make Godot more accessible, and seems to more in the spirit of Godot. Of course we're a business and we're trying to build something sustainable, but right now we're betting on Godot and its community and we think elevating Godot will help us in the long run. Of course, maybe this a terrible idea, but let's find out! Part of the reason I started the company was to try out some off-the-wall ideas.

Agreed! I don't think there's anything really standing in the way of building high-quality games with Godot. As Godot continues to mature and with the right tools and support for the indie community, it's just a matter of time before there's a breakout hit built with it.

Our company is building some open source game templates that will hopefully spark some cool creations with Godot 4. So far we have templates for a Streets of Rage-type beat-em-up game, a tower defense-style game, and something similar to Binding of Isaac. We're also including some high-quality art assets to go with the templates. We're still a few weeks away from launching, but I hope to post our work on HN when they're ready.

Our company is building a community for solo devs and small teams around the Godot game engine. We’re a few months away from launching, but I’d love to hear what indie devs would want in a community and what resources would speed up their development (email is in profile). We’ll have tutorials, game templates, and art assets to that will help people get started. We’re also sponsoring open source plugins and tools for Godot. Let me know if you know of a deserving project to support!

Slightly dated, but from their 2020 annual report: https://s26.q4cdn.com/977690160/files/doc_financials/2020/q4...

- 30% of revenue from Create Solutions (ie engine licensing) - 61% of revenue from Operate Solutions (ad platform, IAP, multiplayer, build server, VOIP, CDN, analytics) - 9% from strategic partnerships

Although they are known for catering to the indie developer crowd, a bulk of their revenue is from a relatively small number of companies (~120).

That’s true, but it would help Google get out from Apple’s shadow on mobile. From a strategic perspective, you want your competitor being forced to make moves because of your actions. Then you get to dictate the next few steps. But for any of that to matter, you have to view mobile as more than another ad platform, which Google doesn’t seem to.

I figured there must be sensible people within Google trying to fight the good fight. On the surface, it makes business sense to follow the status quo. But I wonder if that's true for the long term. Wouldn't the Android platform be worth a lot more if they gave developers freedom to explore different strategies and business models? What if we could get proper demos? What if we could properly interact with our customers and do things like easily issue refunds? I don't know, maybe I'm way off, but I always thought that Play Store revenue should be a lot higher than it is now if Google exhibited some leadership.

I agree - clumsy is a great way to describe their approach. In my many negative experiences with the review process, I never got the sense that there was evil intent. In the end, it's clear the business as a whole doesn't care about third-party developers - they fulfilled their goals of commoditizing their complements and rode that wave to enduring success.

I do wonder how many amazing products and companies never got started or failed because of their fickle and Kafkaesque review process and their 15-30% revenue cut. For me personally, I've had to nix several business ideas and product features because it was too dependent on Apple's whims.

But that's just Apple being Apple. What really blows my mind is how Google blindly followed Apple. Google could have carved out such a valuable market. No developer fees! Clear and consistent review process! No taking 30%! Instead they blindly walked into the ditch with Apple. Talk about a lack of vision...

The idea is there would be a paid tier of tutorials, art assets, game templates, and other goodies. Eventually we’d like to become a publisher of sorts, spotting the promising games that are being developed by the community.

Well I'm doing both. Like many of my intended audience, I'm doing it part-time (nights and weekends), while working on Quiver doing during the day. It's progressing quite steadily and over the last 10 years, I have learned to become a lot more efficient with my time. My last startup was also about time management, so I have a lot of experience helping people finish what they start.

I should add that this is really scratching my own itch. I wanted a place where I could learn and build in public, so I decided to create a place like that.