First impressions with the Godot engine
2025-06-27
In my last blog post I presented a game I made in Godot. The primary purpose of doing this project is so I could learn Godot. I've been casually reading the Godot docs the last couple years and decided to finally kick the tires and see how making a Godot project feels in practice.
Quick TLDR on my experience with Godot
I decided to take this Summer off and a big reason was I wanted to finally spend some time with Godot. I wanted to really get into the Godot environment so I opted to use GDScript entirely and not rely on my C# background with the .net version of the Godot engine.
I have to say the experience far surpassed my most optimistic expectations! I have loved pretty much every minute I've had with Godot so far.
More information about the game on its profile page and you can download and play it on its itch.io page. Here's a screenshot :
My background and context and initial outisder perspective
I've probably used around 10 or so game engines in my career including Unity, Unreal, quake and source engine. It's gotten to the point where learning a new engine isn't as time consuming as it used to be since there's a lot of common theory shared across different engines. That said, sometimes I'll hit a snag learning a new engine because they have a unique way of conceptualizing a feature. I was interested to see how smooth learning godot would go.
I first heard about Godot around 2021 via various chats at work. The overall concept sounded like a dream but my first reaction was to not pay too much attention for 2 reasons. First I was now on a Unity project and I didn't have much Unity experience at the time so I had to focus all my time on learning and improving my Unity skills. Second it seemed like quite an ambitious project and I was worried about whether or not it would survive in the long term.
I also intially wasn't very interested in learning GDScript because I wasn't really interested in learning a new domain specific language when they could have used an existing langauge I already knew such as c#. I'm also not the biggest fan of python so hearing GDscript compared to python didn't exactly fill me with excitement.
Nevertheless Godot was an interesting and I periodically would check out the latest Godot news and see how development is progressing.
My first impression
As per the TLDR I was very impressed with Godot. It was a pleasure to use. Everything was very clear and easy to figure out. I don't think I really got stuck figuring out the Godot way to implement anything I was trying to do. From the character controller to the post processing fx I authored, with the help of docs I never got stuck for more than a couple mins. It's possible this is partially from my aforementioned experience with a lot of different engines but I honestly think the majority of it is how well designed the engine is.
I think the only thing that kind of confused me was the "mode" buttons at the top center of the editor. For a while I wasn't able to figure out how to get out of the code editor but a friend explained to me those buttons and I was on my way.
Specific initial first impressions
Here's some of the more memorable first impressions I had with the Godot engine :
Portable small download
The Godot engine download was not only extremely small, on Windows I didn't have to even it install anything. It was fully portable. I was up and in my first project within 15 minutes.
If this was the Unreal engine I would be about 5% through the setup process even if I had a very powerful computer.
Packaged games have decent size and build quickly
My game size was about 50MB compressed (120MB uncompressed) and I would guess about half that is the uncompressed soundtrack audio. I also had a lot of unused assets hanging around in my project. I'm not sure if Godot is smart enough to not package them. Nevertheless the file size was quite good!
Also the build time for a windows build was so fast I thought it was broken. Even doing a different platform build (linux) from windows was quite quick.
Runs on a bucket
My preferred development machine at home is a 15 year old computer with a 970 Nvidia card. These days this machine can't really run Unreal, I have to use my newer laptop or a work computer for that. Unity still runs pretty decent as of version 2023 (haven't tried newer versions).
Godot runs wonderfully in all graphics modes. I mainly work in forward+ and it's been smooth as butter.
GDScript surprisingly pleasant
Maybe the most pleasant unexpected surprise is that I really like working with GDScript. The comparisons to Python I think didn't do it any favours for me but I think once you start using it you will find it's not really that much like python except for the fact it uses whitespace indentation for scope.
There's quite a few things I like about GDScript
- The language has static typing. It's opt-in but it generally works quite well. Because of the static typing the editor auto-complete is quite functional.
- The tooltip documentation for the Godot nodes and standard library code is excellent! Great example and great overall tooltip formatting. The documentation itself is also very well written.
- There are a lot of Godot specific language facilities such as the signal/slot support and the autoload singleton support. It certainly justifies GDScript a lot better to me. It really allows them to mold the language to fit the engine features rather than vice versa.
Blender and .blend file support
Setting up the art pipeline is not the most glamourous part of a game project but I was plesantly surprised to see the Godot reads .blend files directly and in addition to that has a pretty good built in art pipeline that properly recognizes sub-objects and allows the option of saving a sub-object as its own godot scene file. It also has great material name replacement.
Here's an image of the world Blender scene vs the scene in Godot. A lot of the large greyblocking and structure I was able to do entirely in Blender which is a bit of a change for me. I usually do the major structural layout in the engine editor but I wanted to try something new. There's some positives and negatives working this way which I will get more depth in a future article about a FOSS game development stack.
Very good docs
Finally the Godot docs are really good. I initially was doing web searches for information and had the usual collection of blogs, forums posts, AI summaries but found the docs were so well written it was just easier to search from within the docs for whatever topic I was working on.
Considering how 95% of the time I was able to find the information I need from within the docs I would say if I were on a desert island with a game engine and no internet, Godot would be that engine.
Conclusion
I love Godot and will definitely be using it in the future. I'm looking forward to really digging into the engine in the future. I'll be looking at the C# support as well as the native extension/plugin methods soon too. Interested to see how those work but the engine alone with just GDScript is incredibly powerful and as a developer a joy to work with.
Tags: godot article
