Rémi Verschelde @akien@mastodon.gamedev.place

@noelle It's definitely a box of small legos with no defined structure. There's no distinction between a scene, an object, a character, or a 3D model imported from Blender -- Godot treats them all as the same type of "Node tree", and can instance any one of them into any other one, at any time. (eg. creating seamless transitions from one map to the next are just as effortless as spawning a single entity; you would load and spawn the entire next room the exact same way.)

So the main source of issue is generally just figuring out how to set up effective ways for one object to find another outside of collision testing. 😅 You can hardcode a path in the scene editor, or link up signals to parent functions, or write a relay script... There's guidelines and tutorials on how to do it effectively, but it's really up to you.

As far as what those individual lego Nodes can do for you, each one has a very specific purpose: The Sprite node displays a single graphic, the AnimatedSprite node has systems to automatically change the sprite's texture for you for simple sprite animations, and the AnimationPlayer node can animate literally every property in the entire engine over time -- sprite frames, object positions, rotations, and scale, and even function calls.

With clever use of the AnimationPlayer, connecting Signals in the editor (eg. on animation finished), and understanding the best way to organize all of the different Node types at your disposal, very few things need to actually be programmed in their scripting language (the esoteric GDScript, or its VisualScript counterpart) to accomplish what you want to happen in the game -- mostly just physics movements (eg. controlling the player pawn), changing scenes, and delaying before starting the next animation that controls everything.

That kind of power lends itself to making rapid janky hack games very easily once you learn how to use it, and in the long-term it can do basically anything Unity can -- It has both 2D and 3D rendering and physics engines built in, can switch between them and mix them freely, handle online connections and make HTTP requests, and even handle AR and VR devices.

The entire editor for Godot Engine itself is built inside of Godot Engine, so (almost) anything you can do in the editor, you can do for your players in realtime; You could just as easily make Tabletop Simulator or VRchat in Godot Engine, no problem, and the game assets it packages for your project are 100% cross-platform OpenGL (Vulkan coming soon in Godot 4.0) and open source, with simple exports to specific platforms an easy push of the button that uses prebuilt official executables or any optimized custom build you care to make.

10/10, there's very little incentive left for me to use anything else ever again. 🤔