Playing with Godot

I guess it is quite common to start the path towards programming by making games. I started with a simple guess the number on my dad’s zx81 back in the day. He must have written most of it, but I felt proud of the result, so I will claim that it was mine.

I’ve experimented with various ways to get my kids into programming. Everything from board games, online resources, scratch, building shitty robots, and so on. They get it, but it is hard to move on from the basics to being able to start from a clean sheet of paper and create something.

During the summer, I decided to look into the various options and tried using Unity and Godot. After a couple of experiments, I settled on using Godot. Partly because of its open nature, but also because as a tool, it does the job I need it to do just as well as Unity.

From my perspective, Godot is interesting, as it is a tool that is based around a visual editor. You do write code, but you add the code to the visual model, and not the other way around. This is somewhat backwards to me, as I come from a Qt background, but I’m positively surprised over how well it works.

Another positive surprise to me is that Godot also comes with export presets. These are pre-built run-time environments for common targets such as Windows, Linux/X11, Android, iOS, HTML5. Using these, it is trivial to cross compile and distribute your project – from any platform, to any platform. Very convenient. You can even build your own export presets.

When it comes to the not-so-good, Godot comes with its own language, GDScript. It does the job, and I quite enjoy working it it. You can use VisalScript as well, or C# with external tooling – you can also use GDNative to interface with the engine using your language of choice, but that is less straight forward. I do understand that there is some history that explains the choices, but to me it does feel like Python, without the huge library of Python libs.

Next up, I’ll blog about some of the games I’ve made, so prepare yourself for boardgames, classic game remakes as well as my humble experiments into VR.