Games Backstory

How I came to use Godot for my games projects

The Problem

At this point (late 2024), I had not written a computer game of any kind since "On A Summer's Day", a simple arcade type game I developed for the ZX Spectrum in Z80 assembly language back in late 1982.

I needed to find a modern way of doing things, so I decided to target the Android mobile OS, chiefly because a) everything's mobile nowadays and b) I own an Android phone.

The Java Attempts

My first attempt was Brick Bash, a straightforward clone of Arkanoids written in Java with Android Studio, using a custom game engine with canvas rendering. The game runs and plays well, but is a massive battery hog due to the techniques used. Needless to say, I will not be publishing it, although it served the purpose of demonstrating to myself that I could still do it, 42 years later.

The next attempt was QDMaze, another Java/Android Studio creation, a maze runner game vaguely reminiscent of the famous Pac-Man. This time I used OpenGL via LibGDX for the graphics, and the game didn't kill the battery. It was still a pig to play though, thanks to an on screen "joystick" that is barely usable. That, by the way, is my fault for thinking that a joystick on a touchscreen would fly and most definitely not the fault of LibGDX. Again, this one will not see the light of day here.

Ok, so that ain't working...

At this point, I decided that if I was going to create games - even simple ones - I needed to, well, up my game. That meant a proper game engine. Unreal is truly massive, ran like a sick slug on my machine and was utterly unusable to me. I'm not in the business of creating AAA games anyway so it's major overkill for my use case. Unity - well just check the date above, they'd just comprehensively shat their bed and had knocked themselves out of contention due to their stupid licensing change. Of course, that's been smoothed over now. Guess what? I still don't trust 'em.'

Some others

I looked at some other game engines, but most had either no or minimal documentation. No, YouTube videos do not count. As an aside, I find it almost impossible to learn anything from videos, even well produced ones with an intelligible speaker and without the depressingly common thumping, pounding noise (it's NOT music!).

And Finally

So, by process of elimination, I came to Godot. It's well documented with plenty of reference material to learn from. It can be a bit fiddly in places, especially when you want to optimise file sizes by eliminating unnecessary features but overall it just gets the job done for simple games like mine. I haven't looked at it recently as I've been busy with other things, but there's a good chance it's improved further in the meantime. I certainly recommend it to anyone looking to develop 2D games - maybe I'll make some more in the future.