Why I switched from GameMaker to Godot

GameMaker's strength

To me, the appeal of GameMaker Studio 2 is in how easy it is to just put a project together and publish it.

You don't have that many things to learn before you can make cool stuff.

That's what made me stick with gamedev when working with Unity was feeling super boring.

But it comes at a cost: you basically have to make everything from scratch.

You want smooth camera movement, support for different screen resolutions, localization or a settings menu? Code it yourself.

It's really good for small games and jams. But it's harder than it needs to be for bigger commercial games.

Licensing shenanigans

On October 28th, 2021, YoYo Games made a post about a new GameMaker Studio 2 update.

In there they announced that some of the new features would only be available to paying subscribers. Users weren't too happy about it.

There's been a lot of changes since they got acquired by Opera earlier this year.

Some good: unlimited free trial, game jams with cash prizes...

...and some more controversial: turning the perpetual license into a subscription.

I don't blame them for renewing their business model and trying out new things. But it does make me a bit worried about the future of GameMaker Studio 2.

On the other end, Godot is free and open-source.

No accounts needed, no licenses, no subscriptions.

I once got locked out of GameMaker for a few hours and had to slightly delay an update because there was an issue with their registration servers.

No chance of that happening with Godot. It's just simpler.

Why Godot over Unity

I actually have more experience with Unity than Godot.

I made a small game called Potato Tactics with it and used it professionally as a tool programmer for a bit over 3 months.

It's popular, big and powerful. But I just don't like working with it.

It feels unintuitive to me, it takes forever to load, you still have to manage accounts and licenses and there's a ton of features, plugins and assets all over the place.

On the other hand, Godot is a very minimalistic engine.

You can just download a 50mb .exe file and get started working right away.

I see it as a bit of a mix between GameMaker and Unity.

It's small and slick but also gives you some advanced functionalities like editor tools and 3D support with none of the fluff.

The engine is still in its infancy but I think it has a bright future. It feels like the perfect step-up from GameMaker.

Godot's downsides

With all of that said, I can still see some downsides to Godot:

• The learning curve is steeper than GameMaker's. There are more features to learn and you have to know more about programming to use it properly.
• It seems harder to port to consoles. I haven't looked much into it yet but its open-source nature forbids it from having native export buttons to consoles. Meaning we probably have to go through a third party company to do it for us? Not sure.
• There are fewer tutorials and courses to learn it. It can be hard to find answers to very specific questions about the engine on Google.
• There are basically no Godot jobs available in the industry right now because it's so new and targeted at smaller teams. If you want to find a game programming job, you should learn Unity or Unreal instead. GameMaker shares the same downside.
• The 3D support seems lacking right now. It should be fixed when Godot 4.0 comes out sometime in 2022 though, and it's still better than GameMaker in that regard anyway.

To me, the advantages far outweigh the downsides.

My plan moving forward

At this point, I've been learning Godot for a few weeks.

It's been a bit all over the place and my learning process has been far from optimal.

I've been following a bunch of courses and tutorials haphazardly without having much to show for it. (more on that later)

So from now on, I'll try to heed my own advice and learn by completing and publishing a lot of small projects.

I'll share my progress, lessons learned and the things I make in these articles.

I hope that following along my journey of learning a new engine from scratch to eventually publishing a new commercial game will help and inspire you to see your own projects through to completion.