Godot Engine has a new Platinum sponsor with gambling game dev Interblock

Nice! With all the new sponsors they should be able to hire another full-time dev soon, I guess?

Godot is truly awesome. I decided to learn it a bit last weekend and made a little platformer (~18 Mb of web assembly). It demonstrates some basic elements like moving platforms, ladders, boxes, enemies and arcade physics. Only 2 simple levels, WASD controls. Uses free assets from itch.io (there are surprisingly many packs there!).

I'm enjoying the engine pretty much, it's obvious that it's made by the people who know what their users want and need. Everything is where it's expected to be, many handy utility functions and elements everywhere and it's not dumbed down and has all the extension points you need including turning off its entire scene system and doing all the heavy lifting by yourself! I don't remember the last time I used a tool without constantly fighting it and Godot is exactly this. Compiling it is also a breeze, it only needs the Mesa development libs (for OpenGL), X11 libs and Pulse/ALSA libs for sound. If you ever compiled any GUI app you most likely already have all this. Everything else is included so you just run scons and get a single working binary. Even building it for Webassembly and Android is pretty easy. Great documentation that even covers some general gamedev topics like linear algebra! And their scripting language is simple, concise and on-point. I mean what scripting languages do you know that directly support true multithreading (not like Python with its GIL)? How many of them don't have garbage collection that unpredictably decides to freeze your game? GDScript is yet again the winner here.

I tried UE4 several times but it's so complex and... enterprise that I decided it's not worth the time. I'd spend weeks trying to make something simple and lose enthusiasm much earlier. Also UE4 isn't well suited for 2D games I think and I didn't even try Unity because it's too proprietary and C#-oriented for me.

Quoting: rkfgI tried UE4 several times but it's so complex and... enterprise

That, and IIRC the way it handle 2D isn't much suited for solo project. On the other hand Unity way to do 2D make it weird to use for 2D.

But seeing the support Godot get is amazing.

Tho, IIRC, vnen is already hired (so we are a bit above the mark here), but the way the widget / patreon work don't let them merge nicely the outside funding they get (and there is the Software Freedom Conservancy having to do some paperwork). I read all that in some reddit thread (here, akien-mga is part of the team)

And If I'm not wrong, not all engines allow making casino games, so Godot is filling in for all the homebrew tools, it's a good thing, some good funding should be available for this niche.

Yes, it somehow grew from "an engine" to "The Engine". There are no other FOSS "full-stack" engines of this quality. I remember Ogre3D was popular at the time but it's graphical only. For sound, network, physics etc. you'd need to manually add something else and make it all work. Other small engines fill some roles but there was no complete 2D and 3D FOSS solution that checks all the boxes like the big commercial engines. Now there is and I gladly became a patron albeit not a big one. But hey, every penny helps! Even if I most likely won't become a game developer it's good to indirectly help the others (and the devs of course) who have no money or time to learn the big ones.

Quoting: MisterPaytwickAnd If I'm not wrong, not all engines allow making casino games, so Godot is filling in for all the homebrew tools, it's a good thing, some good funding should be available for this niche.

Seriously, every Tom, Dick and Harry thinking they got a natural right to dictate others want they can use their products for is one of the strongest arguments in favor of FOSS. It's funny how we all seem to concentrate fire on government censorship, when at least in Western countries, the private sector is the much bigger problem these days. The list of things you can't publish on the AppStore is hilarious all by itself, and the rest of them isn't much better. Steam seems to be the only large private market facilitator that realized that they have no right to prevent a product from being sold on their store as long as it's legal.

At least with Godot you don't need to worry about a horde of lawyers breaking down your door because you made a game with it the engine creators don't morally agree with.