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Yes and no. The main benefit of Godot 2D is that it is strictly 2D, 2D and 3D are split. If you do things without needing 2D, it will edge out over Unity (UI t

Yes and no. The main benefit of Godot 2D is that it is strictly 2D, 2D and 3D are split. If you do things without needing 2D, it will edge out over Unity (UI tends to be better, pains with window sizing etc. tend to be better than Unity). The moment you want any 3D feature, you either do a shoddy hackjob retroactively fitting it into your 2D game, or you rewrite a lot of things to get 3D. Unity's main benefit is everything essentially being a 3D game, and 2D games being hamfisted in a 3D scene, making it so adding the slightest 3D feature is far easier. Simple example, if you wanted to spin sprites a la Paper Mario, you can't just do that in Godot 2D, but you can easily do it in Unity '2D'. On top, Godot's general lack of community and features still means going beyond a certain level of polish, even in 2D, becomes a bit more annoying. Support for 3rd party plug-ins are limited*. VFX examples are extremely limited. Particles are still fairly barebones in features compared to Unity (Godot 4 is bringing updates to this), and Unity has the added benefit of having a far larger community. In general you'll find similar issues you'd find in Unity, with less history or support to get you out of a bind. Godot does particularly well in fairly simple games and styles, but the moment you go beyond that scope it's basically a toss-up whether you're better or worse off using Unity right now. That should be changing in the future as more people adopt Godot, but it isn't as cut-and-dry as "2D for Godot is better". Anyone saying that may as well vouch for GameMaker, Ren'py, RPGMaker or something else based on their requirements. *: Especially art. There are tons of art workflows being popularized now to make art production easier for artists, many coming from Japan. Their support in Unity is already fairly minimal, in Godot it is practically non-existent. I imagine having good plugins for say, Spine 2D, Live2D etc. would help bring over the mobile crowd in particular and cross over to the PC/console markets as indies start trying more than just pixel art.

darkteflon 4y ago
> There are tons of art workflows being popularized now to make art production easier for artists, many coming from Japan. This sounds really interesting. Could you elaborate?
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Loads of mobile games use 2D models and meshes to speed up development time. They allow animation without having to draw frame by frame, and still have elaborate animation. The same as in 3D. Rendering to frame by frame makes a tradeoff between choppier animations or exploding the space required. Spine 2D is an example of a product where these animations can be made in full. Unity is big in the mobile market, which in turn has more addons and plugins to support these workflows. Godot can support it without rendering the animation to frame-by-frame, but it doesn't have a universally known plugin yet. Most artists don't look forward to doing the exact same thing in Godot with worse tooling.
  - darkteflon 4y ago
    That’s really interesting - thanks for taking the time to come back to this. When I first clicked over to Spine 2D I assumed it was skeletons for sprites. But it actually looks like skeletons for 3D meshes, which are then exported for use in 2D applications. This sort of workflow implies to me - a layman - that the 3D modelling part is less onerous than creating a whole bunch of sprite art. Which is surprising.

darkteflon 4y ago

> There are tons of art workflows being popularized now to make art production easier for artists, many coming from Japan. This sounds really interesting. Could you elaborate?

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Loads of mobile games use 2D models and meshes to speed up development time. They allow animation without having to draw frame by frame, and still have elaborate animation. The same as in 3D. Rendering to frame by frame makes a tradeoff between choppier animations or exploding the space required. Spine 2D is an example of a product where these animations can be made in full. Unity is big in the mobile market, which in turn has more addons and plugins to support these workflows. Godot can support it without rendering the animation to frame-by-frame, but it doesn't have a universally known plugin yet. Most artists don't look forward to doing the exact same thing in Godot with worse tooling.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  That’s really interesting - thanks for taking the time to come back to this. When I first clicked over to Spine 2D I assumed it was skeletons for sprites. But it actually looks like skeletons for 3D meshes, which are then exported for use in 2D applications. This sort of workflow implies to me - a layman - that the 3D modelling part is less onerous than creating a whole bunch of sprite art. Which is surprising.