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!
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.
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.
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.
Reading OP comment made it clear how little excuse I really have.
> With the new LibGodot, you can now embed the engine directly into your own applications. Instead of running Godot as a separate executable, you can control startup, manage the engine loop, and integrate it seamlessly into custom workflows.
it might seem like a small thing but the IoC setup of Godot makes it really annoying to build certain game infrastructure (specifically in my case, automated testing) because everything is beholden to the main engine loop, to the node tree getting mounted, etc. being able to take control of that and have the engine run under your own terms is super cool.
that being said, I'll probably wait for a couple versions before trying it out on my game since I'm sure it's not exactly battle-tested yet
Who better to do the battle-testing?
Godot is slowly becoming the next Blender, a dominant open source success story.
Like their predecessors, they were initially conceptually clean and simple in the beginning too. But then decades of feature development, the scope creep overcomes the clean architectures and design decisions. Lets see if Godot remains the same in 10-20 years, I'm cautiously optimistic :)
Having said that, I do agree that Godot has a bit of complicated identity: it is at once geared towards being a good first programming experience, and a general purpose replacement for stuff like Unity.
I'd prefer a focus on the second part, there's a huge industry of game-devs right now, and providing them with the stability of a solid, free, transparent engine would be a great service.
There's a lot of downplaying of the advantages of C# in the Godot community, seemingly moreso by people who are amateur game devs/programmers, who perhaps just don't need the advantages for their particular kind of game.
https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
kind of has me considering using Godot for creating a drawing program....
Godot from project setup to running on my Android is way more effortless/lightweight experience than doing the way of AndroidStudio and/or Flutter stuff.
What I dream of is making a Lua binding for essential godot GUI control nodes using GDExtension and using this LibGodot to own the engine loop, so I can do all the app code in Lua.
So, I may have drifted away from your question, but the point is that I love Godot for gaming, and I can handle GDScript plus the engine editor, but for writing a complete application I would want to develop in my language/editor/ecosystem of choice.
In that sense, LibGodot(plus GDExtension) may help indirectly developing GUI applications by letting people own Godot in their ecossystem of choice.
For well over a year now, you can use an external editor (VSCodium or whatever) and set it in Godot settings (so that clicking a script icon in the scene tree opens that file, and clicking a signal handler in the properties pane jumps to that line), and the LSP for GDScript (which is hosted by your running Godot instance, and which your editor's LSP client connects to) has been excellent back when I last dabbled in it.
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/ui/creating...
1.0 – 9.4 MB (2014)
2.0 – 12.3 MB (2016)
3.0 – 20.2 MB (2018)
4.0 – 51.6 MB (2022)
4.6 – 79.4 MB (2026)I'd claim 80MB for an entire game engine + editor for said engine is very good.
Engines like Unity and UE include those in the primary download already.
The old 3.x system was a mess, so it was dropped in 4.0. The community filled a lot of the gaps in the meantime, but having the new system (in-engine) is great.
I've been working with it for a few weeks from git master, and everything just works as I expect. It definitely needs some more user-level documentation, though: if I hadn't been following development, I don't think I'd know what everything does, and if someone were new to IK generally, it'd be hard to get off of the ground.
Godot runs on Wayland using Xwayland, which causes a variety of UI issues, when not running in single window mode. [1] To get around this, start Godot with godot --single-window, then open a project, and enable single window mode in the editor settings.
This issue has been resolved in Godot 4.1.1. [2] This issue seems to have recurred in Godot 4.2 [3]
With Godot 4.3, Wayland can be used natively. [4] There are two ways to do this:
Set the command-line argument --display-driver wayland.
Enable the editor setting located at run/platforms/linuxbsd/prefer_wayland.
A "native" text editor, style properties viewer, profiler timeline, (and more, e.g., animation curve editor), instead of the ones we've got (like the one in Firefox, that they wrote in React[1] where you can see visible, whole-panel flicker when the UI repaints itself every time the cursor blinks)? Yes, please.
1. <https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools/frontend/re...>
https://itch.io also has a lot of free assets as well.
The GDScript hate is so odd.
If you know any scripting language you know GDScript. How much time are you wasting when it takes one afternoon to learn? And nowadays it even has gradual typing support for those that are scared of dynamic types.
I have seen C# devs coming to Godot being super prejudiced against GDScript and then end up using GDScript anyway because it is just more pleasant to use.
C# support seems to have been added reluctantly, because the prospect of attracting unity devs was to good to pass on. But then they switch over and realize it is treated like the ugly stepchild and the hope is that you will just use their scripting language to avoid the friction.
And don't get me started on using GDExtension for other languages. Claiming C/C++ is available as a scripting languages in the same sentence as GDScript is a joke.
I'll look into Libgodot, maybe it's an option.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzt36EGKEZo https://github.com/migueldeicaza/SwiftGodot
(I've had some fun dabbling with Swift Godot but all of the documentation seems to be a bit out of date)
C# has always felt a bit clunky to me. It’s nice to have alternatives.
The other huge problem is the terrible external editor support, it does not work well at all. This means your vim, jetbrains, whatever muscle memory from a lifetime of professional dev work becomes useless, and you have to use a gimped text editor worse than notepad++. You can use an external editor, but then lots of things don't work very well, scenes get randomly corrupted, hot reloading doesn't work, etc. It's many issues like this that prove Godot's only priority is attracting and entertaining people who have never written code before, instead of making an engine viable for shipping games.
I gave Godot a real chance for years, but at the end of the day it's a toy. There's a good reason that there are barely any games using it, and they're all extremely technically simple; surprisingly, that reason is not an unsophisticated underlying engine, but rather a million DX papercuts that a good ambitious developer would just never accept.
https://unity.com/blog/games/games-made-with-unity-2025-rele...
I wont claim it works flawlessly, but you don't have to use GDScript or C# to program Godot.
You can also use C++, Go, Java, Typescript, Zig, Scala, Kotlin and Swift: https://github.com/Godot-Languages-Support/godot-lang-suppor...
[0] https://ziva.sh