I’ll admit I’ve been struggling lately.

I started suffering a lot from the grass is greener fallacy. I like Godot, I see why people like it, but I’ve been feeling so much lately like I’ve been making my game in spite of the editor, rather than alongside it.

Okay, let’s see… examples.

Godot’s signal system works really great when you’re using it in the editor. It’s absolutely abysmal when you’re using it in code. It’s loosely typed, but also makes demands that you only emit Variants. It demands that the signal name exist, but also allows you to just write in any old string and incur the wrath of runtime errors.

Godot’s rpc system works really great when you’re using it in the editor. It’s extremely frustrating when you’re using it in code. And the funny thing is, it’s for many of the same reasons as the signals suck. When the client wants to make a call from the server, it passes uses a fucking string as the function name to call, and then just hopes that the function exists on the server. Again incurring the wrath of runtime errors. Unity, on the other hand, lets you simply call a function and the Rpc knows it’s a Server-side-only function, because you’ve marked it as one.

Okay, those are better in the editor but worse in the code. Let’s go the other way.

I have dictionaries of integers to npcs. Because I want to do stuff with npcs, and I want to pass around an integer identifier for that npc instead of passing around a big old reference to the whole npc object. First of all, Godot’s dictionaries fucking suck. I’m not allowed to use a System dictionary because everything has to be a Variant, so Godot has written their own Dictionary, which is a Variant, and it doesn’t even have feature parity with System dictionaries. Like what. the fuck. And, if you put a node in the scene tree into a Dictionary in the inspector … Nope. It gets FULLY DELETED at runtime. And this is THE EXPECTED BEHAVIOUR.

Then there’s the biggest problem…

C# is a second-class citizen in the Godot world. Everything is built in their precious GD Script.

As an OO programmer, I pure, straight, hate GD Script. I find the syntax irritating, I find the fact that so much of it is still so loosely typed absolutely baffling. I hate using it.

But good news, right? C# is in and has almost everything GD Script does! Almost.

You know what it doesn’t have?

Community support.

Every tutorial, every plugin, every piece of documentation is written in GD Script. If you try to google an issue you’re having, the answer is in GD Script. If you ask chat gpt (ugh) a question about Godot, the answer is in GD script.

Some documentation also has a C# version, which is great, but not all of it. Which means almost everything I look at, I have to do mental conversion to C#. Or, even worse, I have to go track down the equivalent code in C# by churning through documentation. It wastes so much time and energy.

And, people don’t refresh their tutorials. So even though Godot 4.0, which brought a TON of engine changes with it, came out a full two years ago, most people’s tutorials are still written for Godot 3. Half of the code that was written for Godot 3 doesn’t even fucking work anymore.

So now when I’m following those tutorials, not only do I have to convert from GD Script to C#, I also have to convert from GD Script 3 to GD Script 4.

Okay you’re bitching a lot, but what are you gonna do about it?

Well, therein lies the rub. I started remembering the fond, good old days, coding in Unity, before the heartless bitch cheated on me and divorced me and took all my money.

I started thinking… maybe the grass is greener. Maybe I won’t be fighting with the editor, the engine, the language, so much over in Unity land.

And all I have to do is sacrifice those pesky morals and ethics to achieve it.

I’m not proud.

I started the process of porting the game. I opened Unity, I installed all my favorite plugins which work even better now than they did the day I left it. I copied all the code over. I started converting it into Unity’s preferred syntax.

Oh shit so you’re fully back

No, I’m not. I just wanted to answer two questions:

1. Would it even be possible to port the game over?
2. Would it actually help me make the game faster?

The answer to both of these questions was, of course, yes. It is definitely possible to port the game after converting enough code. And in the end, it probably would be faster to make the game in Unity instead of Godot.

But I could shake the icky feeling. I couldn’t shake the fear. Unity burned us all so hard, and they could do it again at any time without any warning for any reason they felt like.

Some people I talked to about this said “The best engine to use is the one that makes you finish your game.”

Some people I talked to about it said “You should look into (names one of 19 other terrible engines) instead of Unity because if you go back to Unity you’re a traitor.”

I already felt like a traitor. I had felt like a traitor since the moment I even asked the question.

So I ported, and I questioned, and I ported, and I felt sick, and I ported, and eventually my question shifted. After porting enough code, I just wanted to answer a single question.

Is it worth it?

You know what?

It isn’t.

Because here’s what I found out in the process of porting.

There’s a bunch of things about Unity that suck too.

The engine is so hefty that hitting the save button on a code file means 20 seconds of reimporting assets. 20 seconds doesn’t sound like a lot, but imagine saving your code, waiting 20 seconds, adding a semi-colon, waiting 20 seconds, removing a console log, waiting 20 seconds.

Hitting the play button is an even worse beast. It’s a 30 second wait just for a window to pop up to tell you it’s working on serving your play mode.

Unity’s RPC is even worse than Godot’s if you can imagine it. Granted, Unity’s refreshed RPC is brand new and is going to go through some growing pains. But they also only just added the ability to run multiple play views to test multiplayer, and it’s also buggy and slow.

And Unity’s RPC still demands you make some of the same concessions that Godot’s does! Some of the terrible design decisions I made to work around Godot’s (understandable but frustrating) demands got worse in Unity, because it makes the same freakin’ demands.

So in the end, what I discovered was this:

Both engines have their issues. Both engines have their limitations. Writing code in Unity feels more natural. I like that GameObjects in Unity can have multiple scripts, and that they’re all just considered a component of the script. I like that GameObjects aren’t required to have a ridiculous degree of nesting like Godot’s.

But I also like that Godot is a program funded and maintaned by volunteers. I like that there’s no corporate overlord lowkey threatening to turn the engine into nothing more than an ad serving platform. I like that the community is the development team. I like that if someone tries to take control of Godot, legally anyone in the universe could fork the codebase and say “fuck you and your ads, I’m making Godot 2”.

And I like that it’s growing. Fast. Unity has felt stale for a long time. Their improvements have come too little and too late, and every time it seems like they’re onto something, the wheel turns and they shift to focus on something else leaving it half-finished.

The improvements I’ve seen Godot make from 4.0 to 4.4 have been astounding. I have no idea what’s in store for 4.5 but I’m more excited for that than I could ever pretend to be about Unity 6.1.

I don’t feel like a bad person for working in Godot and I’m not afraid they’re going to try and take something from me that isn’t theirs.

And in the end, that’s the reason we all left in the first place. I have to admit that I’m a little surprised myself that the hurt Unity caused ran this deep. I wasn’t affected by their changes and in all likelihood would never have been, but the fact that they did it, unilaterally, and retroactively, is terrifying. It was Darth Vader “I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it further” levels of malicious. Even when they walked it back, even when they promised to focus on their core audience again… The damage really is done, I guess.

So it’s Godot for me in the end.

Sorry about that little tangent there y’all. I needed to have that journey. I needed to answer the questions. I needed to know.