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What is, in your opinion, a good game engine?

A topic by subtra3t created Jan 05, 2022 Views: 514 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 4
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I want to get into gamedev, but am seriously confused on what engine to use. Unity/Unreal is what most people seem to recommend, but my laptop is a toaster (4 GB RAM i3) and neither of those engines run on my setup. Godot seems perfect for me, as I have programming experience with multiple languages, but I’ve heard that it is buggy, and way too advanced for a beginner. Game Maker Studio 2 is what I use right now. It’s perfect in every way, except that you can’t distribute your games without paying a hefty fee. I’ve heard of GDevelop, but their online demo doesn’t work on my laptop, so I can only assume it is like Unity in terms of its sys req.

So, fellow gamedevs of itch.io, what game engine do you use, and why?

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Maybe Godot was buggy, but it certainly isn’t any more, at least, not for 2-D in my experience. Godot’s node system is a little less intuitive than Unity’s system of entities and components, but it shouldn’t take too long before you can make effective use of it. I would say Godot is probably the best engine out there for 2-D games or low end devices; At least, as good as you will get using a generic engine. Godot is also libre software, which is a huge bonus when it comes to distributing your game (you don’t have to pay anything or even tell anyone that it is made with Godot).

Definitely give Godot a try. I used it for a couple of games that I made for school and I never encountered a bug in the stable version. I did encounter some weird behaviour when I tried out the C# support, but that feature is still in beta and the editor warns you about that when you start it with C#.

Godot 4 (when it is released) will have an upgraded 3-D engine and C# support will be coming out of beta, so that’s something to look forward to.

Edit: Fix grammar.

Thanks for replying. After reading your post, I'll give Godot another try.

However, I'd like to ask you this. On a scale of 1 to 10, how beginner-friendly would you rate Godot?

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I don’t think I can accurately answer that, since I didn’t go into it a complete beginner; I had used Unity previously.

That said, I found it rather simple to learn and there are a lot of good tutorials.

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A good engine is the engine that helps you develop games the best.

So what you are looking at is an engine that is:

  • Easy to learn
  • No bugs that needs to be worked around, you don't want the engine to create a net positive work for you to do
  • Reduces the amount of work you need to do
  • Supports the game you want to do
  • Playable test version of the game as soon as possible
  • Re-usable gameplay components that you can just plug into your game (player characters, damage system, ability system, AI, navigation etc)

The first step would be to decide what kind of game you want to do and what gameplay mechanics it needs to have. Then you need to compare your game needs to what each individual engine offers and see how good of a match it is.

I use Unreal because once you get over the learning curve, it is easy to use and I can develop games fast using it. It comes with a powerful character class already which means setup up your protagonist movements can be done in minutes and you'll be walking around in your test level within 15 minutes. Assuming you want to make a game with a single humanoid player character that is.

Thanks! I think I'm going to be using Game Maker Studio 2, since it's very easy to learn,  and I can get distribute my games on GXC for free.

I'm most interested in Godot right now because it seems to have about the same functionality and generally the same style of usability as Unity, which I was using previously, and it's open source (besides being free, it means I have the option of going into the code to figure out what's going on and even fixing it, whereas if there was some bug or mystery with Unity, I was at the mercy of their support).

Also the Godot doc is pretty good - one reason I started using Unity over ten years ago was because I could read through the doc (the manual and scripting reference) and understand basically how everything worked, not just infer it from tutorials, and similar with Godot. I recommend taking a pass through their doc and see if you find it accessible and if you like their approach. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/

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Thanks for replying!