Its Monday so we're continuing on with the daily questions of the day!

  • popcar2@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    Don't use frameworks, jump straight into a game engine.

    I've wasted a loooooot of time wrapping my head around creating games with frameworks and while I did get some experience there it was ultimately a pretty frustrating experience. I tried all the popular ones like MonoGame, Love2D, HaxeFlixel and while Haxe was pretty fun to use it ultimately felt like I spent ages reinventing the wheel and never really had time to... Well... Make the game. It didn't help that I wasn't very good at programming at the time.

    At some point I threw my hands up and just went to Unity and now Godot and it was suuuuuuch a good decision. Now I can quickly prototype and have a much better workflow without all the spaghetti. It's more convenient, and chances are the end result will be way better and more optimized than whatever I was hacking up in frameworks at all. I'm sure a lot of people disagree, though.

      • popcar2@programming.dev
        ·
        1 year ago

        Pretty smooth, actually. The workflow isn't too different from Unity and I got used to things quickly by reading the docs. After getting the basics down it's mostly a matter of finding the things I'm looking for (for example Tags in Unity are called Groups in Godot). I was impressed by how smoothly everything ran and how tiny the engine itself and its files are. Unity feels like a bloated nightmare in comparison.

        There are a few pain points in Godot though that people need to be aware of before getting into it though. Godot 4 has big issues with its web exports making them not very viable, and there still isn't an official way to port your games to consoles. Some of the features in Godot 4 are also somewhat experimental and aren't nearly as "battle tested" as Unity, so if you're super serious about game dev it may not be the best engine for production.