Bodeville Learns Godot
This is a crosspost from our Bodeville blog here!
It’s been a while since our last dev log! The last one was about our soft launch and we skipped writing about a few things, but we released Grift and started making a walking gardening game in Godot. We both decided we wanted to try something new. We’d both been using Unity for quite some time, and decided it would be prudent and smart to diversify our knowledge while we have the ability to. So we started dabbling, Alexia in the aesthetic bits, and Bo in the engineering bits.
Here’s some of the biggest learnings from working in Godot for the last couple of months:
1. The shader community is large, there’s an entire website dedicated to shaders in Godot. People do a good job of documenting them, providing videos or images, and typically link to their Github with further documentation.
2. The Godot documentation needs way more examples. Sure, it’s open source and people post their work to Github. But every time I look something up (Alexia is not a practiced engineer) there’s so few examples of how to use it, and I always have to search “method name Godot 3 to Godot 4 reddit”. Godot has included a list of updated nodes and resources that were renamed here.
3. The information hierarchy of the inspector took some time to get used to. Anchoring, layouts, and transforms are too far toward the bottom, unlike up at the top like other engines.
4. Anchoring the user interface on the GUI is so easy! I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s the visuals along with the labels, but anchoring the ui on the canvas is way simpler than Unity for me.
5. I wish I could hit play and see the scene in action like in Unity. But I do like that I can switch from 2D to 3D.
6. Making animations is super easy! Just stick an animation player node under the object and add keys to the animation timeline
7. iOS/Android native plugin support is decent but not quite as robust as Unity. There is a pretty good suite of iOS plugins here, but I found nothing on the internet for HealthKit so I had to write our own. This less-than-ideal amount of plugins is understandable for a relatively new game engine, but it slows down development nonetheless.
8. The built-in IDE isn’t good enough for power users in my opinion. I switched to using Visual Studio Code which has a Godot plugin, but really I’d prefer to see a well-supported Rider plugin.
Go Godot!
Our first git commit for Garden Walk happened on January 3. In less than six weeks, we’ve not only learned how to use Godot, but built a nearly complete game on top of it. It’s been a fun experience learning a new (and open-source!) game engine.
