Hey all (anyone that comes here + empty
space).
It's pretty obvious that I haven't been
doing a heck of a lot in the last few months. Well I'm finally bored
with playing games, so now I'm back in a (try) make one, frame of
mind.
As I'm sure those of you that use Unity
already know that they have finished its final 5th life cycle and now
plan to move to a subscription based model. As I mentioned in a
previous post, I'm not a fan of the new model. The new model makes
it twice as expensive for people like me that have no interest in
developing for mobile platforms. Anyway, what's done is done. Now
that it's March, Unity will find out if their master plan was as good
as it sounded on paper. If you ask me, I think their “new” CEO
finally EA'ed the company.....
So I finally decided after some
consideration that I should probably be looking into a new game
engine (for a backup if anything). Unity is great, but I don't like
the path the company has taken and I suspect that this is a prelude
to, more “fun” to come.
Looking around the web I got the
typical big name engines and a few unknown(ish) ones. I finally
found a post somewhere were someone mentioned an engine called Godot.
What I found was a free open source engine that pretty much fit
nicely next to Blender in terms of available. So with nothing to
lose I gave it a go.
The interface resembles Unity somewhat,
but took me a while to get use to making a full scene that functions
similar to how prefabs worked in Unity. Although this engine could
use quite a bit more polish, I think it's the diamond in the rough I
was looking for. While it's definitively usable, I kind of feel a
few things could be improved on. I'm still fairly new to Godot, so
some of this could be my own lack of knowledge on the engine.
-Exposed variables and adjusting things
during run time: maybe there is a way to do this in Godot, but in
Unity it made debugging and tweaking a lot easier as you could
outright see what was going on under the hood while your game was
running, and make tweaks without having to relaunch over and over
again.
-The animation player: while it is
usable, it feels a bit buggy and funky, the FPS setting when
inserting your clips feels/is broken as I didn't notice any speed
difference when adjusting the value. You can still adjust the time
in second value during key frame insertion to change the frame rate.
But it would be nice to adjust the FPS value instead of
stretching/squishing the timeline.
Those are pretty much the two major
things that I had some issues with. Some other minor stuff that I
won't bother to get into right now. Overall though, this is a
surprisingly good engine, and who can argue about the price/contract?
So~~~~
As of right now I'm in the process of
learning how to script in GdScript and generally how to do all the
stuff I learned to do in Unity. Thankfully my time in Unity wasn't
wasted as I'm having a much easier time learning to use this one. On
top of that, this engine has a somewhat simpler layout compared to
Unity. It's tilling system is far superior to Unity IMO (Note:
haven't tried the latest Unity build yet, but I suspect it won't be
as good as Godot judging from screenshots)
My current goal is to remake that god
awful platformer I made in Unity, Cat Attack!!! FFFF&M.
Hopefully I can improve it more this time around :)
