I work as a maintainer for the Open 3D engine. To echo some of the statements in the blog, the engine definitely has a higher learning curve compared to some of the other engines, like Godot, but I've been impressed with the progress being made to improve the engine each release.
For some perspective, the history of O3DE's development involved wrangling the legacy code of CryTek and Lumberyard combined. That is a massive undertaking, and most of the work went into cleaning that up. I think now it's beginning to reach a point where O3DE can start shining on its own. Time will tell though
If anyone has questions for me, feel free to ping! email: tkothadev (at) gmail.com
I've switched over to Godot years ago, and for mobile I roll my own solution using pixijs (a JS rendering engine) with Cordova. I haven't published any games for consoles (yet).
A good option you don't hear that much about: Heaps.io. It's an engine built on the Haxe programming language, and games can be published anywhere. It has been used for some high profile games like Northgard and Dead Cells.
I personally am going to attempt switching to Bevy first because I'd like to use Rust, but if I find it insufficient for my needs, I assume I'll move to Godot and try to use their new(ish) GDExtension feature to try using rust that way. I can't handle writing any more C#
I've been playing around with Bevy, and it's a fun little thing to make stuff with if you're happy to do 99% of your development in a text editor or in other tools. Right now, it is not finished, and a great deal is subject to change. I'd say that it's worth keeping an eye on if you like working with Rust or if using an ECS driven engine is interesting to you, and you can absolutely put out a high quality game with it if it's reasonably small in scope, but I wouldn't recommend it for large scale projects yet. To quote the readme on their github page:
Bevy is still in the early stages of development. Important features are missing. Documentation is sparse. A new version of Bevy containing breaking changes to the API is released approximately once every 3 months. We provide migration guides, but we can't guarantee migrations will always be easy. Use only if you are willing to work in this environment.
I’ve had bad experiences with UNIGINE. It isn’t even that good as a simulation engine. The simulation industry tends to care more about deterministic real-time performance than games do, yet UNIGINE has big stuttering and overall performance problems. I’d stay far away.
Pygame is pretty sweet. All you need is a little Python knowledge and a quick tutorial and you'll be up and running! I've heard it's not as performant as other libraries/engines, but I haven't hit that bottleneck just yet.
Python is inherently slow, because it isn't compiled code and it wastes so much CPU time interpreting code at runtime. And you're pretty much guaranteed to have cache-misses. You should be able to mitigate some of that if you use Cython (or equivalent) for the most critical sections - but in general I just think you should know that you're setting a performance ceiling of at least 100x worse than if you wrote it in a procedural language - 10,000x is neither atypical - simply from not being mindful of how it maps to CPU execution. The staggering amounts were surprising to me when I learned about it, so I just want to give a heads up. I thought it might be like 3x or 5x. Not 10,000x.
You might not care as a beginner - and if the project is small enough, then it might never matter - but I've seen many game developers find themselves struggling with this when they eventually get to a point where they want their game to include more performant features. Good luck.
I personally really like Godot, I've made a few small games on it, and it would be my first choice for a game jam. I use the gd script rather than C#
I am also really loving raylib and am using it to learn how to program in C. I spent an entire day just making tetris but along with what I've learned from your lessons and your handmade series I feel like I can really make something in C. Raylib also comes with version of notepad++ that is bundled with gcc and a default build script which really helps with the initial time investment of setting up before you can even start programming in C.
Started by Unigine's ex CTO, Alexander Zapryagaev, extraordinary talented individual.
Based on modern gpu driven tech. Has a lot of cool lower level APIs that allow you to set up your custom compute rasterization or hierarchical LOD graphs in a hundred lines of cross platform rendering abstractions.
One thing I don't see mentioned often when stating that "Godot doesn't support consoles" is that there is https://w4games.com, which seem to exist to alleviate this problem. They provide a professional solution for devs that do need to port their game to consoles. The company is run by those who developed godot themselves. Sort of like a "Red Hat" arm to godot's community.
I don't think that's really what people are talking about, though. They want to be able to build their game for multiple platforms. Paying people to port it is kind of a different thing... I assume W4 doesn't sell a Godot add-on that lets you build for consoles yourself?
I looked into it further and I don't see much public exposure on their rates. Based on what they posted, they're offering to provide a fork of godot with that platform layer covered using a subscription model.
This is the first announcement from what I could find:
"... We are developing and plan to offer fully middleware approved console ports for all platforms (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). This will place Godot in the same category (...) as the large commercial game engines.
Instead of offering porting services (...), W4 Games will offer fully working console ports. These ports are intended to be middleware approved, meaning that the console manufacturer approves the port and certifies that it meets the required standards of quality, as well as supporting the full (or as close as possible) feature set of the console, including full integration to the console SDKs (...)."
End quote.
A follow-up update in August from their site indicates they just launched the service "in early access" (with some shipped titles but I can't find their portfolio):
I work as a maintainer for the Open 3D engine. To echo some of the statements in the blog, the engine definitely has a higher learning curve compared to some of the other engines, like Godot, but I've been impressed with the progress being made to improve the engine each release.
For some perspective, the history of O3DE's development involved wrangling the legacy code of CryTek and Lumberyard combined. That is a massive undertaking, and most of the work went into cleaning that up. I think now it's beginning to reach a point where O3DE can start shining on its own. Time will tell though
If anyone has questions for me, feel free to ping! email: tkothadev (at) gmail.com
Also might be worth noting Unreal has a "Unity to Unreal" conversion guide in their documentation: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.3/en-US/unreal-engine-for-unity-developers/
Here is my experience as a unity developer learning Unreal. https://open.substack.com/pub/nooparmygames/p/learning-unreal-as-a-unity-developer?r=1mevny&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I've switched over to Godot years ago, and for mobile I roll my own solution using pixijs (a JS rendering engine) with Cordova. I haven't published any games for consoles (yet).
A good option you don't hear that much about: Heaps.io. It's an engine built on the Haxe programming language, and games can be published anywhere. It has been used for some high profile games like Northgard and Dead Cells.
https://heaps.io
Also built with XNA: Terraria, one of the best-selling games of all time.
I personally am going to attempt switching to Bevy first because I'd like to use Rust, but if I find it insufficient for my needs, I assume I'll move to Godot and try to use their new(ish) GDExtension feature to try using rust that way. I can't handle writing any more C#
I've been playing around with Bevy, and it's a fun little thing to make stuff with if you're happy to do 99% of your development in a text editor or in other tools. Right now, it is not finished, and a great deal is subject to change. I'd say that it's worth keeping an eye on if you like working with Rust or if using an ECS driven engine is interesting to you, and you can absolutely put out a high quality game with it if it's reasonably small in scope, but I wouldn't recommend it for large scale projects yet. To quote the readme on their github page:
Bevy is still in the early stages of development. Important features are missing. Documentation is sparse. A new version of Bevy containing breaking changes to the API is released approximately once every 3 months. We provide migration guides, but we can't guarantee migrations will always be easy. Use only if you are willing to work in this environment.
I’ve had bad experiences with UNIGINE. It isn’t even that good as a simulation engine. The simulation industry tends to care more about deterministic real-time performance than games do, yet UNIGINE has big stuttering and overall performance problems. I’d stay far away.
All those Steam porn games are made with RenPy.
Pygame is pretty sweet. All you need is a little Python knowledge and a quick tutorial and you'll be up and running! I've heard it's not as performant as other libraries/engines, but I haven't hit that bottleneck just yet.
Python is inherently slow, because it isn't compiled code and it wastes so much CPU time interpreting code at runtime. And you're pretty much guaranteed to have cache-misses. You should be able to mitigate some of that if you use Cython (or equivalent) for the most critical sections - but in general I just think you should know that you're setting a performance ceiling of at least 100x worse than if you wrote it in a procedural language - 10,000x is neither atypical - simply from not being mindful of how it maps to CPU execution. The staggering amounts were surprising to me when I learned about it, so I just want to give a heads up. I thought it might be like 3x or 5x. Not 10,000x.
You might not care as a beginner - and if the project is small enough, then it might never matter - but I've seen many game developers find themselves struggling with this when they eventually get to a point where they want their game to include more performant features. Good luck.
I personally really like Godot, I've made a few small games on it, and it would be my first choice for a game jam. I use the gd script rather than C#
I am also really loving raylib and am using it to learn how to program in C. I spent an entire day just making tetris but along with what I've learned from your lessons and your handmade series I feel like I can really make something in C. Raylib also comes with version of notepad++ that is bundled with gcc and a default build script which really helps with the initial time investment of setting up before you can even start programming in C.
Few words about Tellusim
-----------------------------------
https://tellusim.com/
https://twitter.com/tellusim
Started by Unigine's ex CTO, Alexander Zapryagaev, extraordinary talented individual.
Based on modern gpu driven tech. Has a lot of cool lower level APIs that allow you to set up your custom compute rasterization or hierarchical LOD graphs in a hundred lines of cross platform rendering abstractions.
(see https://tellusim.com/blog/)
Here is an example of implementing Gaussian Splatting rendering using their SDK
(https://tellusim.com/07_hello_splatting/)
Not for indies, but if you have a challenging project, I'm sure Alexander Zapryagaev have a tech for you to be covered.
For Go aficionados, there is Ebitengine (https://ebitengine.org/) as a 2D game engine.
One thing I don't see mentioned often when stating that "Godot doesn't support consoles" is that there is https://w4games.com, which seem to exist to alleviate this problem. They provide a professional solution for devs that do need to port their game to consoles. The company is run by those who developed godot themselves. Sort of like a "Red Hat" arm to godot's community.
I don't think that's really what people are talking about, though. They want to be able to build their game for multiple platforms. Paying people to port it is kind of a different thing... I assume W4 doesn't sell a Godot add-on that lets you build for consoles yourself?
- Casey
I looked into it further and I don't see much public exposure on their rates. Based on what they posted, they're offering to provide a fork of godot with that platform layer covered using a subscription model.
This is the first announcement from what I could find:
https://twitter.com/W4Games/status/1630608566557216768?s=20
Their press article quotes:
"... We are developing and plan to offer fully middleware approved console ports for all platforms (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). This will place Godot in the same category (...) as the large commercial game engines.
Instead of offering porting services (...), W4 Games will offer fully working console ports. These ports are intended to be middleware approved, meaning that the console manufacturer approves the port and certifies that it meets the required standards of quality, as well as supporting the full (or as close as possible) feature set of the console, including full integration to the console SDKs (...)."
End quote.
A follow-up update in August from their site indicates they just launched the service "in early access" (with some shipped titles but I can't find their portfolio):
https://w4games.com/2023/08/06/w4-games-unveils-w4-consoles-a-practical-console-porting-solution-for-game-developers/
So the current situation for most devs is probably same as this blog post's back in July, 2022:
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know/
Edit - Some additional info:
https://twitter.com/Akien/status/1701945597631078635?s=20
Self plug: my Game Script "engine" on itch.io, it can also code itself on Android: https://galaxystore.samsung.com/detail/com.GameScriptREDGPUVersionForAndroid
Kudos!
What about Roblox, isn't it a game engine, and a successful one?