Quite difficult to say, for me it is a combination of it being open source and feeling a lot less cluttered compared to Unity for example.

For me it’s a different reason from other people.

I’ve had this idea of an overlay like rainmeter that works like a mini game for my twitch stream but the software didn’t exist yet.

I just wanted pet slimes moving on my screen while I streamed, and I knew the technology was possible.

So I started with Python, pymunk (chipmunk physics), and pygame, realized that pygame couldn’t do transparent windows, neither does TKinter, then Pyglet failed me hard with their messed up documentation and community so I ended up finally accepting I would have to use PyQt5 and it just worked until…

Using PyQt opengl widget I could achieve per pixel transparency and capture on OBS , I did click through and used a mouse library to track clicks outside the QT window, but then my new bottleneck became the pymunk library.

Handling physics was a nightmare because doing anything took way too much effort and that library loves to just crash stop and burn the runtime anytime it doesn’t like something, for example anytime I removed shapes bodies or constraints that were already removed (multiple instances remembering each other and trying to detach separate) it would crash. Or trying to figure out which slime collision, because you can’t easily put our take info from pymunk physics space, so I had to just iterate==everything to check which slime is touching what every frame and that is O^n which is not good.

Once I gave up on the increasing complexity and difficulty of these simple base systems I slowly troubleshooted my way into trying Godot. Video tutorials showed me that you can do transparent click through windows (unity and unreal cannot), you can do soft body easier with a much easier physics engine handling (probably the biggest reason at this point), and I never even tried the twitch integration but I already know it’s gonna be easier too.

My actual game idea will require unreal as I love blueprints and specific features, but I also fell in love with Godot for anything else. ❤️

I can’t wait to have 2D pet slimes in Godot, (if you think about it, slimes are actually just fantasy snails 🦠🐌👀)

• It’s light. Compared to Unity which spends ages creating projects, compiling scripts, building, etc. Godot feels very snappy. Unity also generates about 350mb of placeholders every time you create a project, something I always held a grudge against because my drive isn’t very big (500gb)

• It’s open-source. Obviously a big reason for a lot of people, it feels good not to have to worry about any licenses or a business suit CEO saying devs are idiots

• It’s more cohesive. It increasingly feels like you need a lot of extensions to get work done on Unity, and there are like 3 different systems to do one thing. In Godot everything feels more straightforward, and it’s batteries-included so you have support for things like Tweens out of the box compared to Unity. Things are generally easier too like Autoloads compared to having to manually make singletons.

• I love signals. Probably the most subjective thing, but for me, I think signals are great and a way better alternative than blindly calling functions on another object. Other engines may have it but usually they don’t work very well.

One of the biggest advantages Godot offered me was that there is “barely” any bullshit to get started. Download the engine, start it and you have everything ready to go. Included script editor, API documentation and no huge downloads or user accounts you have to create. And when you want to give your game someone else you can easily export and be done with it. It’s that “batteries included” feel that I think is really powerful. And that is also why I chose it for my projects. I can get a simple idea for an android app running in half an our without fighting with android studio. I can deploy applications to windows, linux and web without the headaches that python deployment brings.

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