it's 2016 and i escape the evil lair with godot knowledge

I started using Godot in 2016 as part of an internship at an evil evil evil evil place creating virtual reality training simulations.

I interned at the evil evil evil place after Google accepted me for an internship, but just wasn't filling slots that summer. Huge bummer. But I took the internship at the evil place instead, understanding they're usually an at-cost hiring pipeline, and I'd come out with experience and money and references, and they'd lose a potential candidate (and that money).

That was back when Godot was in the 2.X series and the engine was full of rough edges. It was more general-purpose than GameMaker (which I had previously used) and was still being developed (whereas the Blender Game Engine was being deprecated shortly).

In research for what game engine we should use, I had done a deep-dive of the existing engines at the time. Most proprietary engines had a ToS clause that you can't use it for our purposes, so we mostly looked at FOSS engines. Godot looked obviously the best, and I feel constantly vindicated in that decision.

I took my time learning Blender, Godot, etc. I thought I was really milking time there. But by the time the exit interview came around, I found people were genuinely amazed by my productivity, in a way that seems really weird looking back on it? They didn't know interns could work this hard and pump out so much so fast.

The weird cynical guy who espoused how nonsensical family is hugged me at the end. The brony who worked for IT wanted to collaborate on a videogame that only ran on HaikuOS. They wanted to give me a bonus , something very atypical for interns, and I ended up with a bonus in the form of an Amazon giftcard.

But this was a shop where people were still using Ada and OpenGL and XMotif and were adding changelogs in comment blocks at the top of their old C files. Nobody wanted to be left "Waiting for Godot", so they went with "Amazon Lumberyard" instead. (lmao)

I'm happy to report that management decided to throw all of my hard work away in favor of the proprietary Lumberyard engine, which is now defunct. I indeed got financial independence, experience (Blender and Godot and Ada and OpenGL and RHEL stuff yayyyyyyyyyy), and they got NOTHING B)

(Even if they didn't throw it out, I like to think I have paid my debt back to society!! I am still doing that I think.)

in the decade since, i am contributing to society

Godot's philosophy was that you should just start using it, instead of waiting for that one feature you really want. Don't be left "waiting for Godot."

The feature I really wanted was GameMaker style 'scene painting', which it doesn't exactly have yet, as of 4.6.

But I was too busy doing PhD stuff. Since 2016, I had mostly using these game engines, incidentally:

• GameMaker, as I had used it for over a decade before.

• Blender Game Engine, for a bit.

• Unreal, for the CARLA simulator based on it, for autonomous vehicle research.

• PyGame and SDL for various renderings and visualizations in other projects.

• Nannou and Bevy for procedural art.

Godot was (and is) relegated to my hobbyist tool of choice. Despite the pun on "Waiting for Godot", the entire engine is a ~130MiB single binary which loads instantly. You are never waiting for Godot to load. This is very good for productivity.

I made a ton of tiny games as stepping stones to becoming "good enough". A lot of the weird edges come together and everything makes sense after enough small projects.

Since this time, Unity famously alienated tons of devs, which boosted Godot's adoption and found its first hit game in Slay the Spire 2. This might be a moment

it's 2026 and Godot is awesome

With every Godot update, there are tons of new features and changes and enhancements that get me very excited. This is similar to Blender's updates! There is a lot to love. It's like Christmas but cool.

Godot 4.7 is bringing the scene-painting feature I eagerly anticipated, (plus tons of other goodies). I'm happy I didn't spend all this time "waiting", y'know?

One of my frustrations with modern computer is that I get very skilled at using certain tools or workflows, and then those tools get changed, or my skills become obsolete. I think dev skills are less transferrable than people like to think, and so it matters what basket you put your eggs into.

With the Unity licensing rugpull still fresh, and with that risk being present in every proprietary engine, it feels like FOSS is the only reasonable choice. And with Godot now being the most mature, complete, and widely-used FOSS engine.

good news puppies

Godot is "dogfooded", meaning the Godot engine is also made in Godot. This means engine improvements become Godot improvements, etc. There are a lot of abstract reasons that's good.

But more tangibly this means you can add the line@tool to a script and your game critters can literally crawl around your engine!! (More on @tool here.)

If there was ever a bit of tooling you wanted in your engine, Godot is the most feasible engine for hackability. The same skillset you use for making your games is something you can use to upgrade your editor.

You can also use this to make parts of your game run while you're in the editor, a more feasible and common use case.

I cannot stress how awesome it is to be able to extend the editor inside the editor.

tldr

I feel really confident in saying Godot should be the first choice for anyone who wants to make a game and doesn't know what engine to choose.

i love godot yay yay godot yayyyyyyyyyy