Open source. Cross-platform.
And to quote the documentation: No strings attached, no royalties, nothing.
Exactly this. And when I want to do something with it, I apt install or emerge it and it works, no shady binaries, no mess.
It's just transparent. It feels like alot of lessons were learned from the broken abstractions of older ecs engines. It might not be as powerful yet, but the foundation is solid and it's easy to implement the more complicated stuff.
Also, dotnet 6 implementation is a breath of fresh air.
The way it's designed is just nice - in unity if you're trying to do something the engine doesn't do by default, it feels like you're almost fighting it. But in Godot a lot of the engine's built in features are just things you can add yourself - resources, nodes, and editor plugins.
Also, support for serializing/deserializing dictionaries. When I used unity a few years ago it didn't have that feature and afaik it still doesn't.
The scene tree based approach just clicked with me well.
It's open, free and hackable. It also has nice UI tools.
It's lightweight (~350mb after decompression, I'm not fooled by the small executable), fast startup, generates relatively small executables, compiles to several platforms
I'm not learned enough in Unity or UE to make proper equivalent benchmarks to see who makes faster 2D or 3D stuff
GDScript being pretty much syntathically identical to Python makes it simple to learn and understand, which I enjoy. I've yet to learn how to use nodes, which I suppose won't be too different from Blender's? Don't know how to mess with those either
Fantastic UI tools makes creating pretty applications trivial
Signal system struck a chord with me. I've always loved signal systems compared to referencing everything (though I still do reference things). It's very fleshed out compared to Unity's version.
Lots of great QoL features. I love how Autoloads make singletons super easy to use. I love how all the parameters I need are there. I love how seamless the Git integration is. I LOVE Godot 4's Tweening system. I had to do a project last month on Unity and there is no built-in Tweening support so I had to use a library called DOTween. Throughout the entire project I really missed how easy Godot's tweens are.
It's super light. You know how Unity creates like 300mb+ shaderlab files whenever you create an empty project? It feels wonderful looking at my Godot projects and they're like ~500kb each excluding assets. It's also super snappy and I don't have to wait for THE DAMN SCRIPTS TO COMPILE every time I edit a file.
Mind you I recognize Godot isn't perfect. There are some pretty critical physics issues. The web export is kind of unfinished. I miss how you can see and move around the scene while playing like in Unity. Still, it's the best game engine I've used, and I've jumped around quite a bit before landing here half a year ago.
Small, lightweight, open source, a large active community, and honestly even gdscript has started to grow on me
Pretty much all this, plus:
The thing Godot is lacking is a real good way to work on adaptative music and sound design.
Welcome to the programming.dev Godot community!
This is a place where you can discuss about anything relating to the Godot game engine. Feel free to ask questions, post tutorials, show off your godot game, etc.
Make sure to follow the Godot CoC while chatting
We have a matrix room that can be used for chatting with other members of the community here
We have a four strike system in this community where you get warned the first time you break a rule, then given a week ban, then given a year ban, then a permanent ban. Certain actions may bypass this and go straight to permanent ban if severe enough and done with malicious intent