I've made several games in Godot and continue to use it, but it has serious issues that hamper it from prime time. Here are some I've encountered in my latest project, a point-and-click adventure in the vein of Myst
- When playing non-OGV video files there will always be a black screen in the first frame of the video, no way around it
- OGV video streams suffer from sound stuttering problems on playback
- There are some performance bottlenecks around 3D and occlusion culling, which will hopefully be fixed in 4.0
- No browser web view so you cannot use HTML for markup or design, meaning making interactive pages (like an in-game wiki) is a massive slog
- Font-rendering issues with blurriness and lack of pixel-perfect sizing (if you are doing retro pixel art fonts they will suffer from anti-aliasing)
- Importing 3D assets is wonky and you still need to write custom import tooling scripts in order to make it even slightly usable. Even then you will most likely have to redo all the lighting on your models
I think Godot 4.0 will be a great leap forward and I'm very much rooting for them. But if you are trying to make a big 3D A-level game, you will spend a lot of time with your head in your hands. At least with Unity and Unreal they have large asset marketplaces and very active communities so you can get around a lot of frustrations. Godot is still quite small in that regard. However for 2D or smaller scoped 3D indie games, it's really powerful and versatile. I personally enjoy the Godot workflow with nodes and signals connecting them much more than my experience with Unity and prefabs, which I found to be a bit convoluted.
On the other hand, being fully open source means if you've got a good development team you may be able to hack Godot itself to work around whatever limitations are currently biting you the hardest, and your shipped product doesn't lock you into any sort of revenue share or subscription fees because of the engine choice. This seems to be the approach done for the Sonic Colors: Ultimate remaster and as Godot gets better it may get even more attention from teams developing an "almost certain success" like a new big-IP game.
But I agree that they're still the underdog, and people who were holding out until 3.0 might continue holding out until 4.0 if they're planning on doing a demanding 3D game. I'm rooting for them still too though.
Absolutely. I actually compiled my own version of Godot in order to enable a speech-to-text module (https://github.com/menip/godot_speech_to_text) for a project. While some might see that an overly arcane technical annoyance, the fact I was able to do so just shows the promise of a powerful open-source libre engine. Hope to contribute a patch to Godot proper someday. I also find it so cool that it's bootstrapped - that is to say, Godot is created using Godot!
- When playing non-OGV video files there will always be a black screen in the first frame of the video, no way around it
- OGV video streams suffer from sound stuttering problems on playback
- There are some performance bottlenecks around 3D and occlusion culling, which will hopefully be fixed in 4.0
- No browser web view so you cannot use HTML for markup or design, meaning making interactive pages (like an in-game wiki) is a massive slog
- Font-rendering issues with blurriness and lack of pixel-perfect sizing (if you are doing retro pixel art fonts they will suffer from anti-aliasing)
- Importing 3D assets is wonky and you still need to write custom import tooling scripts in order to make it even slightly usable. Even then you will most likely have to redo all the lighting on your models
I think Godot 4.0 will be a great leap forward and I'm very much rooting for them. But if you are trying to make a big 3D A-level game, you will spend a lot of time with your head in your hands. At least with Unity and Unreal they have large asset marketplaces and very active communities so you can get around a lot of frustrations. Godot is still quite small in that regard. However for 2D or smaller scoped 3D indie games, it's really powerful and versatile. I personally enjoy the Godot workflow with nodes and signals connecting them much more than my experience with Unity and prefabs, which I found to be a bit convoluted.