What Is It?
Godot is a an open source game engine that is becoming widely popular among developers. A co-worker of mine was the first to tell me about it, and a few days ago I decided to download Godot and take a look at it.
What About Game Maker Studio?
Coming from Game Maker Studio, I can say that the concepts of design are there, but Godot is very different in terms of how you make things work. Objects are replaced by scenes, and each scene has one parent node that can have multiple child nodes. The editor is open source, and can be changed to your liking.
I will say Game Maker Studio seems more like an intro to what Godot is getting at. Game Maker Studio to me is a great tool, and a ton of awesome games have been made with it, but unless you are willing to dish out the money, you can’t do much.
Godot Development Thought:
One of the biggest challenges I always face when I try to learn a new engine, or code is where to start. I have thousands of great ideas in my head, but to convert them into a game, or an application is a different story. I have however found a great YouTube series on how to recreate Flappy Bird in Godot. The reason that this series is so great, is the developer shows you how to do everything, and explains what he is doing and why he is doing it. There is a good amount of code cleanup, and a lot of going back and making the code simple. The only issue I have so far with the series is the developer does not comment the code much, so you really need to know what you are looking at.
You can find the series here.
I am going to keep pressing on with this and see where it takes me. My co-worker and I might even go in on making something together. In the meantime I will continue to try it out on my own and see what I can do. Comment below if you have used Godot before and link to anything you have made.