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.
wow, this release looks really cool! this part especially:
> 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
For 3D, the return of in-engine inverse kinematic nodes (SkeletonModifier3D descendants) has been a big deal for me.
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.
Afaik due to how .NET webassembly works, it expects to own the main loop, so I think the main motivator of this change was to enable .NET in Wasm builds.
That is actually pretty amazing for a game engine. I'm not a game dev and I've only ever made some tiny games in Unity back in college but this makes me want to install Godot and try making games again.
As something to compare to, I picked a random repository from what GitHub Explore showed, clicked on the first that looked like a desktop application (https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan/releases/tag/v3.5.4), and their Windows binary is currently 166MB for a "privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software".
I'd claim 80MB for an entire game engine + editor for said engine is very good.
They're still quintupling down on their sad Python-lite clone language and toy inbuilt text editor, what a damn shame. Still no way to avoid GC in C#. Godot had real potential, but they continue to insist it is a playground for learning about game development, rather than a tool to release a real game. If a fraction of gdscript and editor manhours had gone into real engine development, it would be better than Unity by now.
Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.
Is the GC in C# actually that much of a problem? Slay the Spire 2 is made with Godot + C# and the devs seem to be fine with it. Of course, it's probably not a computationally very demanding game but still the GC in C# does not seem to be a problem there.
Yes it is a big problem. StS devs cannot write normal C# code, you have to really work around the C# integration to avoid lag spikes. See my other comment GitHub thread. There's also things like this https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/86926 and that the underlying types aren't compatible (Godot collections) that make it clear they aren't serious with the C# support.
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.
I use visual studio pro and when I hit F5, my game runs in the godot ide. I can pipe the log output back to visual studio. So, I think the integration is quite good, imo. ( sorry for formatting on phone )
> StS devs cannot write normal C# code, you have to really work around the C# integration to avoid lag spikes
Do you have any sources for this? A while ago I had a small chat with the StS devs on the Chickensoft Discord server and they didn't mention this. Instead they were overall just very positive about their Godot + C# experience.
> The other huge problem is the terrible external editor support
Have your recently tried JetBrains Rider for Godot + C# development? Lately, they've been quite actively improving the Godot integration https://github.com/JetBrains/godot-support and also showing some significant commitment https://godotengine.org/article/jetbrains-joins-dev-fund-sup... and tbh I can't share your experiences since I'm using Rider. Even hot reload works really well without losing the running game state.
> There's a good reason that there are barely any games using it, and they're all extremely technically simple
Well, as of now when checking https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/ there are 6,109 games made with Godot engine on Steam with 2,568 of them having been released in that last 12 months so there is a strong growth going on right now. But I agree that most of those look technically simpler.
> but rather a million DX papercuts that a good ambitious developer would just never accept
I think you're generalizing a bit too much here. You're implying that the StS devs or the devs of Road to Vostok are not ambitious?
I don't know man, there's more nuance to this. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that Godot + C# still has a bunch of shortcomings and there's still some catch up to do but overall it's imo already quite pleasant to use.
Very true. While I believe there can be a place for a language tailored specifically for gamedev, GDScript certainly is not it.
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.
Can you please elaborate why you think C# is not really well integrated into Godot? I'm using it myself and it seems fine to me. There's quite a community around Godot + C# check out https://chickensoft.games as well. FWIW the Slay the Spire 2 devs also seem to be happy with Godot + C#
For the record I would still choose C# out of all the options for a bigger game (GDscript with strict type-hinting might suffice for small ones). My main complaints that I can still remember:
- deprecated web export for C# with Godot 4. This is basically my main gripe and why C# has been a non-starter for me.
- Engine still has a separate binary for C# support. I think they are working on unifying them. But once you use the .NET one you can't export to web even when you don't use C#.
- setting up debugging+lsp was a pain and consistency was very flaky afterwards
Also a lot of the editor workflow is built around using GDScript with the built-in text-editor. I don't actually mind it that much, but you asked why it's not as well integrated and that's an obvious one for newbies.
If your experience was wildly different, please do tell.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Mostly very fair points.
Yes, exporting Godot + C# games to web is not possible right now and it seemingly takes the maintainers quite a lot of time to figure it out. It's apparently an official priority https://godotengine.org/priorities/#enable-users-to-export-t... but I wouldn't hold my breath for now.
Similarly for the new GDExtension based C# bindings https://github.com/raulsntos/godot-dotnet which have been cooking for quite a while now. Those would make it possible to only have a single Godot build and get rid of the .Net build. Tbf, the maintainers were teasing that godot-dotnet will soon™ be ready for early testing so who knows.
About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles? Personally, I'm quite happy with JetBrains Rider Godot integration https://github.com/JetBrains/godot-support and JetBrains seems to be quite committed to supporting Godot https://godotengine.org/article/jetbrains-joins-dev-fund-sup... you even get support for Edit and Continue (EnC), which is what's easy to confuse with hot reload but EnC is actually the thing that makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state. Really handy. AFAIK you can't get this with open source C# tools like netcoredbg so I'd understand if you'd think that the Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed. I think VSCode has actually pretty good support but the really good tech behind the C# extension is proprietary and cannot be used by forks like Cursor or Windsurf.
But I totally agree, the GDScript integration is what Godot cares the most about and it shows in many places in the editor. So my experience is not wildly different in that sense. Just some different aspects I focus on maybe. But I'm always curious to see how people approach this stuff and what they feel about it.
I've been following the github issue for C# web export and let me tell you: It's not been a priority.
> EnC makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state.
sounds exactly like code hot reload to me? It would be very nice to have.
> About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles?
> Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed
you got me. I tried integrating a Godot workflow using neovim and at some point with emacs. Both were subpar. This actually reminds of another pain point: gdshader. Also very integrated with the editor just like GDscript, which makes it another thing you have to work on getting integrated with your IDE of choice - or you bite the bullet and just use the editor for this. But shaders are such a massive shitshow that I can't really blame Godot for this.
FWIW, Rider has very good support for keybindings - I can't vouch for vim bindings directly but their emacs keybinding scheme is brilliant, IMO it's the next closest thing to working from Emacs itself. So I'm guessing the vim bindings support is similarly fantastic.
I spent ages trying to get Emacs to work well with C# stuff, because I can't stand using IDEs that don't have some sort of emacs-style keybinding support, but eventually I bit the bullet and started using Rider and honestly it's been amazing and worked seamlessly with everything I've thrown at it (especially Godot). Highly recommended.
that's not been my experience at all. I've found that Godot works exceptionally well with C#, and I've felt zero pressure to use GDScript. It integrates really well with Rider too, which is the C# IDE I use. Even when there's places online that use GDScript examples, they tend to translate pretty much directly 1:1 to C#.
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!
Hats off to your son too, I'd say.
> 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.
wow, this release looks really cool! this part especially:
> 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
For 3D, the return of in-engine inverse kinematic nodes (SkeletonModifier3D descendants) has been a big deal for me.
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.
I'm pretty excited about libgodot! Let's see what use cases people can come up with for it.
Afaik due to how .NET webassembly works, it expects to own the main loop, so I think the main motivator of this change was to enable .NET in Wasm builds.
Is there anything in this which will make it easier/better to make GUI applications?
https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor
kind of has me considering using Godot for creating a drawing program....
I am curious to see how much the editor have been increasing in executable size after each version
Comparing the win64 build for each version. For 12 years of growing scope, that seems pretty good to me:
That is actually pretty amazing for a game engine. I'm not a game dev and I've only ever made some tiny games in Unity back in college but this makes me want to install Godot and try making games again.
As something to compare to, I picked a random repository from what GitHub Explore showed, clicked on the first that looked like a desktop application (https://github.com/siyuan-note/siyuan/releases/tag/v3.5.4), and their Windows binary is currently 166MB for a "privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software".
I'd claim 80MB for an entire game engine + editor for said engine is very good.
They're still quintupling down on their sad Python-lite clone language and toy inbuilt text editor, what a damn shame. Still no way to avoid GC in C#. Godot had real potential, but they continue to insist it is a playground for learning about game development, rather than a tool to release a real game. If a fraction of gdscript and editor manhours had gone into real engine development, it would be better than Unity by now.
Agreed 100%, C# is obviously a second-class citizen and I'm not going to waste my time with GDScript. It really is a shame because there are so many things to like about Godot, but the litany of issues with C# support due to their focus on GDScript has just soured the whole thing for me. Unity is just not an option as far as I'm concerned due to their bizarre licensing fiasco (and their own mountain of technical issues). So it's Monogame/FNA for me I suppose.
My philosophy has always been “ergonomic scripting or drop to C++”, so I’m quite okay with it.
C# has always felt a bit clunky to me. It’s nice to have alternatives.
Is the GC in C# actually that much of a problem? Slay the Spire 2 is made with Godot + C# and the devs seem to be fine with it. Of course, it's probably not a computationally very demanding game but still the GC in C# does not seem to be a problem there.
Yes it is a big problem. StS devs cannot write normal C# code, you have to really work around the C# integration to avoid lag spikes. See my other comment GitHub thread. There's also things like this https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/86926 and that the underlying types aren't compatible (Godot collections) that make it clear they aren't serious with the C# support.
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.
I use visual studio pro and when I hit F5, my game runs in the godot ide. I can pipe the log output back to visual studio. So, I think the integration is quite good, imo. ( sorry for formatting on phone )
> StS devs cannot write normal C# code, you have to really work around the C# integration to avoid lag spikes
Do you have any sources for this? A while ago I had a small chat with the StS devs on the Chickensoft Discord server and they didn't mention this. Instead they were overall just very positive about their Godot + C# experience.
> The other huge problem is the terrible external editor support
Have your recently tried JetBrains Rider for Godot + C# development? Lately, they've been quite actively improving the Godot integration https://github.com/JetBrains/godot-support and also showing some significant commitment https://godotengine.org/article/jetbrains-joins-dev-fund-sup... and tbh I can't share your experiences since I'm using Rider. Even hot reload works really well without losing the running game state.
> There's a good reason that there are barely any games using it, and they're all extremely technically simple
Well, as of now when checking https://steamdb.info/tech/Engine/Godot/ there are 6,109 games made with Godot engine on Steam with 2,568 of them having been released in that last 12 months so there is a strong growth going on right now. But I agree that most of those look technically simpler.
> but rather a million DX papercuts that a good ambitious developer would just never accept
I think you're generalizing a bit too much here. You're implying that the StS devs or the devs of Road to Vostok are not ambitious?
I don't know man, there's more nuance to this. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware that Godot + C# still has a bunch of shortcomings and there's still some catch up to do but overall it's imo already quite pleasant to use.
You can make up some 'critical defects' for every tool and engine in the universe. So what game engine is perfect for an 'ambitious developer' to use?
It has been used for pretty successful games on steam
Very true. While I believe there can be a place for a language tailored specifically for gamedev, GDScript certainly is not it.
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.
Can you please elaborate why you think C# is not really well integrated into Godot? I'm using it myself and it seems fine to me. There's quite a community around Godot + C# check out https://chickensoft.games as well. FWIW the Slay the Spire 2 devs also seem to be happy with Godot + C#
For the record I would still choose C# out of all the options for a bigger game (GDscript with strict type-hinting might suffice for small ones). My main complaints that I can still remember:
- deprecated web export for C# with Godot 4. This is basically my main gripe and why C# has been a non-starter for me.
- Engine still has a separate binary for C# support. I think they are working on unifying them. But once you use the .NET one you can't export to web even when you don't use C#.
- setting up debugging+lsp was a pain and consistency was very flaky afterwards
Also a lot of the editor workflow is built around using GDScript with the built-in text-editor. I don't actually mind it that much, but you asked why it's not as well integrated and that's an obvious one for newbies. If your experience was wildly different, please do tell.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Mostly very fair points.
Yes, exporting Godot + C# games to web is not possible right now and it seemingly takes the maintainers quite a lot of time to figure it out. It's apparently an official priority https://godotengine.org/priorities/#enable-users-to-export-t... but I wouldn't hold my breath for now.
Similarly for the new GDExtension based C# bindings https://github.com/raulsntos/godot-dotnet which have been cooking for quite a while now. Those would make it possible to only have a single Godot build and get rid of the .Net build. Tbf, the maintainers were teasing that godot-dotnet will soon™ be ready for early testing so who knows.
About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles? Personally, I'm quite happy with JetBrains Rider Godot integration https://github.com/JetBrains/godot-support and JetBrains seems to be quite committed to supporting Godot https://godotengine.org/article/jetbrains-joins-dev-fund-sup... you even get support for Edit and Continue (EnC), which is what's easy to confuse with hot reload but EnC is actually the thing that makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state. Really handy. AFAIK you can't get this with open source C# tools like netcoredbg so I'd understand if you'd think that the Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed. I think VSCode has actually pretty good support but the really good tech behind the C# extension is proprietary and cannot be used by forks like Cursor or Windsurf.
But I totally agree, the GDScript integration is what Godot cares the most about and it shows in many places in the editor. So my experience is not wildly different in that sense. Just some different aspects I focus on maybe. But I'm always curious to see how people approach this stuff and what they feel about it.
> It's apparently an official priority
I've been following the github issue for C# web export and let me tell you: It's not been a priority.
> EnC makes it possible to change C# code while the game is running and the changes are reflected without losing the game state.
sounds exactly like code hot reload to me? It would be very nice to have.
> About setting up debugging+lsp, what were your struggles?
> Godot + C# DevEx is quite lacking if you use something like Neovim or Zed
you got me. I tried integrating a Godot workflow using neovim and at some point with emacs. Both were subpar. This actually reminds of another pain point: gdshader. Also very integrated with the editor just like GDscript, which makes it another thing you have to work on getting integrated with your IDE of choice - or you bite the bullet and just use the editor for this. But shaders are such a massive shitshow that I can't really blame Godot for this.
FWIW, Rider has very good support for keybindings - I can't vouch for vim bindings directly but their emacs keybinding scheme is brilliant, IMO it's the next closest thing to working from Emacs itself. So I'm guessing the vim bindings support is similarly fantastic.
I spent ages trying to get Emacs to work well with C# stuff, because I can't stand using IDEs that don't have some sort of emacs-style keybinding support, but eventually I bit the bullet and started using Rider and honestly it's been amazing and worked seamlessly with everything I've thrown at it (especially Godot). Highly recommended.
https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/7842
For starters. Read through this thread and be appalled.
that's not been my experience at all. I've found that Godot works exceptionally well with C#, and I've felt zero pressure to use GDScript. It integrates really well with Rider too, which is the C# IDE I use. Even when there's places online that use GDScript examples, they tend to translate pretty much directly 1:1 to C#.