Ludum Dare 46

Godot is awesome.

Keep it alive was the theme of Ludum Dare 46. And no theme would fit better to resurrect this half dead blog. Sorry, it's been a while since my last entry! To make up for it, you can play my game Living Light, made for Ludum Dare within (almost) 3 days.

Living Light gameplay teaser. — A level of the game Living Light. The player needs to pick up all white orbs while avoiding enemies.

There are many reasons why I haven't actively worked on this blog for months. But in the end it's easy to explain: Writing blog entries is not difficult, but not writing blog entries is easier. Life sometimes gets in the way and laziness does the rest.

However, there is also a technical reason: I have immersed myself in the game engine called Godot and I am thrilled! As you probably know, I've been struggling with Unity for the last years. Unity is an incredibly powerful game engine, but I spent increasingly more time implementing workarounds and features that Unity didn't or only partially implement well. Moreover, the innovations of the last years are so numerous and complex that I can't justify the time investment anymore.

Unity Dots. I don't understand anything anymore.

I don't want to make a fool of myself. Of course I understand Unity's roadmap. To keep up with other engines you have to deal with new technologies to deliver performance and eye candy. AAA games lead the way. But I doubt that small indie developers can keep up.

Godot on the other hand feels like a breath of fresh air. First and foremost: it is Open Source. Everything is possible via the editor. The API documentation of the script language GDScript is fully integrated in the editor. There's an integrated script debugger. Many things like the scene-graph or animation editor are surprisingly intuitive. And on top of that I can let out new builds for Windows, Linux and the Web in one go within 10 seconds. Moreover web builds are extremely performant, small and compatible (if you can live with OpenGL ES 2.0). They even work on my not so fancy mobile phone!

And I did not even mention the best thing yet...

Build all in Godot. — Creating a new release of Living Light for windows, web and linux in Godot takes 10 seconds!

Of course not everything is perfect. You need to get into its own scripting language GDScript first, which takes some time. And occasionally you may find a bug or feature which is not yet fully developed. However, no show stopper so far.

Well then. Lets go and write some games!