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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. Figu
by skrebbel 9mo ago
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!
- Fraterkes 9mo agoHats off to your son too, I'd say.
- dismalaf 9mo ago> 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. Super cool though, learning Godot at 13 is a great opportunity.
- skrebbel 9mo agoThanks! I bet I've had it confused with something else then.
- hacker_88 9mo agoLibGDX?
- lynndotpy 9mo agoI would bet SDL; it's a C library that a ton of other libraries are influenced by or based on. It's not usually thought of as an engine on its own nowadays
- skrebbel 9mo agoNah, like you said, SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc. If that counts as a "game engine" then so does every web browser. EDIT: Sorry if I seem grumpy, I'm not actually grumpy at you, I'm grumpy at PyGame for calling itself a game engine when really it's just SDL + the ability to blend images.
- krapp 9mo ago> SDL is just window creation and a bit of audio etc. It's a bit more than that, especially the current version. You're right that it isn't an engine in and of itself but you could probably build a decent engine on top of it. SDL3 + WASM + Lua would be chef's kiss.
- lynndotpy 9mo agoI wasn't alive or making games at the time, as I was a baby, but I believe SDL would have been understood as an engine when it released. I wouldn't call it one nowadays, except in so far that someone looking for an engine might find themselves happy with SDL (or PyGame, etc)
- dismalaf 9mo ago
- pjmlp 9mo agoGreat experience, thanks for sharing, a great way to get them motivated.
- Andrex 9mo agoIt got me motivated! I downloaded Godot and I'm gonna do something with all those level designs I made years ago... Reading OP comment made it clear how little excuse I really have.
- lagniappe 9mo agoThat's awesome! What type of game is your son making now?
- skrebbel 9mo agoClone of some popular game that I forgot the name of where you're a block and you move around a maze (tile-based, 2d) but you can't take small steps or slow down, you always slide quickly in one direction until you hit a wall. It's a puzzle game, you gotta make it to the exit without hitting the kill blocks. He wants to figure out how to make an in-game level editor for it but he still only 10% groks the node/scene system so that'll take him some attempts for sure :D
- nycdotnet 9mo agomight be geometry dash.
- socalgal2 9mo ago> My son had tried Unity first, but the C# compile cycle was so slow that he kept getting out of the flow. I'd like to know more about this. Were you comparing similar sized projects? I've only done very small projects in Unity and the cycle was near instant. Loading up some of their 3gig+ samples, there was an initial build that took 40+ mins but that's because it had 3gig of assets to process.
- npinsker 9mo agoIt’s probably not compilation, but “Domain Reloading” (https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.2/Documentation/Manual/DomainReloading.html https://docs.unity3d.com/2022.2/Documentation/Manual/DomainR...) which is laughably slow and on by default. I think Unity does this because the same process is re-used for Play and Editor modes, whereas Godot does the normal thing and spawns a new process when testing.
- skrebbel 9mo agoMy entire experience with Unity is "my kid said it took long to run the game he was trying to make". Sorry that I can't be more helpful. He might've been unreasonably impatient, I never looked over his shoulder when he was trying out Unity. All I know is that he says he likes Godot way more, in no small part because it's "faster" (and I'm pretty sure he doesn't mean engine performance when he says "faster").
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]