Thread by @pawel_developer

In 2020 I realistically was considering making Witchcrafter in Godot.

It was (and is) very promoted, all around was bragging about it, I was envy of some glossy features and as a budding #indiedev I thought it's an easy way.

But why I didn't moved to #Godot in the end?

🧵

Godot is presented to us almost anywhere I can imagine, so it's not strange I bumped into it at some point.

It is also promoted as a perfect tool for indiedevs with a lot of tutorials and examples and ngl - it's impressive (the same with Unity, I also considered moving to it).

Envy of the glossy features, out of the box solutions, I started making a simple platformer base with all the stuff I want.

But, oh boy, was I misguided by the easy learning curve.

Having using Unity, Defold, Blitz 3D and some other smaller engines I though it would be natural.

I couldn't make simple stuff, because Godot's core/workflow is way different than others.

I imagine now also how hard it is to switch from Godot to other 😅
But this is only my impression, my experience.

I started asking others about their experience.

And even back in 2020 I came into opinions that Godot is overhyped and is for them a pain you know where. I finally came upon the opinions highlighting Godot's strong points too, but also realistic for what it is good.

Some of the gamedevs opened my eyes then:

"I think it’s a great example of the failure of “Open Source®”—a big buggy mess with hundreds of contributors and no quality standards, terrible, half-finished documentation, and a cultish community with thousands of rabid fans (most of whom have never even used it)."

This is from a person with a vast experience and who used UE, Unity, Godot, Defold, Love2D. This person said too:

"We ended up having to scrap it because the performance was just too bad. The per-pixel rendering was at least 5x as slow as Defold, and GDScript was very slow too."

There are also bad and good points for the other engines, so I was then very thankful for the whole comparison and some really practical advices.

What was a shock for me back then was this:

"You probably noticed on Twitter, Remi (the unofficial vice-leader behind Godot) was the first and most vocal person harassing the Defold guys about the licensing nonsense, “it’s sad to not be opensource”, and bragging about his number of contributors," "

"and Juan (the great cult leader) was bashing them from his personal account too. They are not good people. Ugh, they even got a $20k grant from the Mozilla foundation specifically to improve Godot’s use of web technology. Juan said that he used it to pay for his living expenses"

"and... a year or so later, Godot still didn’t even have functioning web builds. How that wasn’t considered fraud, I don’t know."

And it was, again, in 2020.

This year you might started seeing #cancelgodotengine posts by one of the banned contributors @Xrayez

The narrative is so weirdly same.

I'm reading all those tweets and the worst thing for me is that Godot spreads hate to other engines, instead of love.

Community and open source foundations are totally OK with some of the behaviors and movements, but when other makes mistakes

Oh boy, Defold licensing thing was nothing when you compare it to how the Godot community was triggered after Unity stuff this year...

I got into that bubble myself 😔

I then digged deeper into Unity's case and while some things are still 🚩 to me, I formulated broader opinion

Indie community is amazing, because there are people realizing their dreams, living the passion ❤️

No matter what tool we are using.a

And while I myself am promoting Defold mainly, I never claim it's the best engine for everything, because I was misguided by Unity and Godot's bubbles, they're best for everything.

In fact Defold is focusing on a very narrow audience and tries to please them at first.

So, I am also not very experience, so my opinions are still not so mature, but another gamedev with a vast experience (and talent), who's advice I took to my heart ❤️, when I naively asked about which is the best:

"Actually Defold or Unity or Whatever - is not important.

Choosing correct tools for the right kind of game is the most important thing in game development. It is all about the experience.

That is it.

People should be aware of this."

"Other than that this is a pointless popular bubble."

It wasn't then so clear to me, but - how wiser those words sound when you actually experienced such bubbles.

Others, whom I asked back then was saying simply the same thing:

"In the end I am an advocate for “Using the right tool for the Job”. If you are trying to build a GUI heavy app and not a game then use Flutter or React Native, if you want to do a beautiful 3D game then Unity or UE is probably the way to go."

"But if you want to make small 2D games then I do think Defold is currently the way to go."

I am making small 2D games with a priority for easiness of use/ prototype and simple multiplatform builds. This is WHY I chosen Defold. Plus it's free 😅

Godot has its advantages, is definitely something phenomenonal and the support from community for this is (in most cases) very pleasant and broad ❤️

I believe some things might have been better, but that's the case with everything.

Nothing's perfect.

I know myself a lot of talented devs using or switching to Godot and making successful games.

Don't get me wrong, it's definitely not about claiming Godot itself is bad. It's not perfect, but it's not useless either.

It's about consideration of your choices always.

Focus on choosing the right tools for your game.

And don't spread hate.

We are an amazing community, we don't need toxicity.

Support each other, because that's our strength! 💪❤️