Reviews and Testimonies

The following is a compilation of notable reviews of Godot Engine and testimonials from individuals who have discovered, used, contributed to, or maintained Godot, including observations from people outside of the Godot community. If you are interested in the testimony of the author of this book specifically, please refer to the No Longer a Blue Robot section. However, you can also take a look at some of my notable posts where I share my experiences and interactions with Godot’s CEO, Juan Linietsky:

Please note that this list is not exhaustive. If you wish to contribute something to this list or provide your own review or testimonial, you can contact the author of this book for suggestions.

The quotations are cherry-picked to showcase various aspects of Godot in relation to topics covered in this book. They are not meant to be presented out of context. It is advisable to read the entire content to gain a comprehensive understanding. Emphasis may be added to underscore notable or typical sentiments that are balanced out across quotes.

In case the links below become broken, unavailable, or taken down, you can access them through archives like the Wayback Machine. Full text down below is provided for convenience and for sources that are prone to be lost (such as YouTube comments).

Notable Reviews and Testimonies

Former and Current Members

  • Andres “cybereality” Hernandez, former admin of Godot Forums:

    I’ve been promoting Godot for 3 years, dedicating my time to helping people for free, and recently paying to host these forums (which costs hundreds per month). I really did believe in Godot, but as time has gone on, I’ve just seen broken promises, lies, and suspect behavior that makes me think at some point the Godot Engine turned into a scam. […] I think the first time I noticed this was in 2020 when I started trying to use baked light-mapping. I noticed that it was essentially completely broken.

    In a video, a disappointed Godot believer dissects the situation above and concludes:

    Godot is mismanaged very badly and I feel like the community doesn’t really care about anything. Everybody’s eating up every update and announcement as if it’s the best thing ever happened. There was a lot of hype surrounding 4.0, but when we finally got 4.0, it was a complete disappointment. It was released as a stable version, but nothing about that engine was stable.

    Aftermath: Godot Forums were acquired by Mike Lundahl and his company. Mike partnered with The Mirror, a Roblox-like game development platform made with Godot Engine.

  • abrasivetroop, long-term user of Godot Engine:

    I have 4 years of experience with Godot and I published 2 commercial games with it. I have believed in Godot for years and it has been my passion. Since I started to realize the problems within Godot I never backed down on pointing them out. I care about the future of Godot. These problems stem from the incompetent leadership of Juan and Remi. My only intention is to make people aware of these problems so that Godot can have a better future.

  • Lilly Byte Games, former moderator of Godot’s Discord server:

    I am tired of getting shit on by “Godot bros” whose only experience with Godot is what they see/hear in their limited experience of being fresh and new to the Godot train, and not yet had the curtain pulled away from their eyes to Godot’s reality. […] If you are not a part of the “Godot Cult Insiders” your time is wasted. We weren’t the only people to see this either… […] The “belief” I had in Godot being community driven was an absolute lie.

  • Camille “pouleyKetchoupp” Mohr-Daurat, former contributor and maintainer of Godot, physics programmer at Rockstar Games:

    I’ve been bullied two times by different people on this project and every time project management reacted by siding with the bully, so I’ve left and I’m never going to contribute again. […]

  • Winter Pixel Games, contributor of Godot, creator of Rocket Bot Royale:

    And there are just some very unergonomic things about the Godot source right now. Stuff that would just never fly with experienced teams or devs. And from what I’ve seen it seems to put off experienced devs and more established teams. […] I think it’s just due to the lack of actually using the engine by the core team to ship real products. This is really why dogfooding is SO important, and why Epic/Unreal have such an unbelievably great advantage with their engine development practices.

  • Endri “Lauson1ex” Lauson, contributor of Godot, software engineering consulter:

    I implemented the new lighting/tone mapper used in Godot 4 and I also back-ported it to Godot 3 which, we all agree, is a fairly significant contribution. […] And yet, they did not even have the decency of adding my name to the list of contributors. […] I have not contributed since and I won’t be contributing to the upstream project anymore. […] Now, imagine that the couple of people running said project are receiving MILLIONS, while I donate my time to receive nothing in return. This is why many talents are leaving.

  • David “Demindiro” Hoppenbrouwers, contributor of Godot, creator of Godot Rust bindings for the Rapier3D physics:

    Even as a contributor I’ve found it very frustrating to contribute to Godot. I’ve found lots and lots of bugs while working on my own projects using Godot. I spent a lot of time digging in the engine code to figure out the cause, make an issue and a patch if I could. However, even small changes take a lot of time and effort. While I used Godot 3 for my own projects most of the PRs had to be based against 4. At the time Godot 4 was in a very sorry state and I ran in many, many issues that made it hard to test if the same fix for Godot 3 also works in Godot 4. I wrote some libraries to work around issues that I (or others) could not get fixed or reverted (e.g. I replaced the physics engine with Rapier3D because I really needed more stable and working joints) but I eventually threw in the towel and decided to focus on other hobbies.

  • Mariusz ‘koder’ Chwalba, creator of ΔV: Rings of Saturn:

    I took a leap of faith by developing my game using Godot 3 - when I started it was in early beta stage. Now I feel like your focus is on Godot 4, but the 3.1.1 you are publishing currently on your site is not stable as advertised. I would implore you to revise the release cycle to favor stability of published project over development of next feature or major version. Having an “unstable stable” engine is not doing anyone any favors.

  • Favkis Nexerade, long-term Godot user:

    I spent 3 years working on my games and this engine still has broken graphics, broken animations, broken file system, broken physics, broken importer, broken resource instancer and dozens of other broken “features” […] I feel cheated, I spent so much of my creative energy into this engine and now met with “we wont continue making G3”.

  • jarsin, former Godot user:

    I switched to Godot from Unity. Ya I lasted about 2 months and now I am back to Unity. Really depends on what you are doing but Godot has tons of bugs and it just gets old real fast, assuming you actually want to build a game. And trying to fix those bugs is not so easy in a lot of cases. Obviously depends on what you are doing though.

    Switching from Unity to Unreal or vice versa is a wash imo as both those engines have proven themselves. Godot hasn’t and still has a much longer way to go than the fanboys will have you believe. Maybe someday for some types of projects but I just don’t see it ever having all the conveniences of Unity or Unreal.

  • jayrulez, former Godot user:

    Some people may say that Godot will be better for 3D with the 4.0 release. Most of them are just fanboys or they don’t know what they are talking about (or both). So far, the Vulkan render in Godot has been poorly implemented. It will offer a marginal improvement at best.

Independent Developers

  • Tynan Sylvester, creator of RimWorld:

    This lack of decided focus manifests as IMO mis-spent effort on things that almost no serious indie should be using (advanced rendering features which look pretty in demo videos, visual scripting), while deprioritizing things that absolutely every indie should be using (C#). […] GDScript looks nice for really really tiny games, but it’s obviously never going to scale close to anything like RimWorld; its performance is way too low and the code isn’t nearly safe enough. Most indies beyond the “my first game” level should not be using this.

  • Alexander “nicholatian” Nicholi, computer scientist:

    Godot’s entire existence is measured in Unity copium. […] On paper, Godot is a game engine. The reality is much more Soviet: it’s an online clout farming operation for a couple of random Argentinians. […] As long as everyone believes in them, nothing else matters. They can have a broken game engine as long as people want to pay them for it.

  • Pawel Jarosz, creator of Witchcrafter:

    I’m reading all those tweets and the worst thing for me is that Godot spreads hate to other engines, instead of love. Community and open source foundations are totally OK with some of the behaviors and movements, but when other makes mistakes. Oh boy, Defold licensing thing was nothing when you compare it to how the Godot community was triggered after Unity stuff this year…

  • Ross Grams, illustrator, concept artist, and fine artist:

    Godot has some nice core ideas (the scene/node system), plenty of features, and is fairly easy to learn, but it’s also bug-ridden, slow, has very incomplete documentation, and a cultish community. […] There’s a strong focus on adding new features, very little on fixing things. His [Juan’s] most common response to serious bug reports was “oh yeah, there’s no point fixing this, I’ll be rewriting it for 3.1”. So there are lots of broken or unfinished features lying around. There’s really no such thing as a stable release of Godot.

  • NegInfinity, veteran Unity user:

    The reason why people heard of Godot is actually because of the “Godot prophets” that kept trying to spread the word on other forums, due to feeling strongly about it. Such behavior is a major red flag for me, and those people are the reason why I’m not planning to touch this particular engine for at least the decade. Personally, due to that behavior I believe that investing time and paying attention to another engine that is not Godot would be a good idea. Hence the mention of Stride3D.

  • Margaret Ó Dorchaidhe - Software engineer with AAA games experience, triple major graduate from RIT in Game Design, Computational Mathematics, and Computer Science:

    Unclear and occasionally unprofessional messaging. This one is a very fraught one to cover, and I’d rather not include specific screenshots of or links to tweets in this post. I truly do not want to point fingers at individuals, and I don’t want this to turn into a conflict between myself and Godot’s team. I wish them nothing but the best. But I recommend that anyone who has not yet already look through some of the social media posts and replies of the most prominent Godot management and contributors - it is hard to form a coherent picture of what Godot is, what it’s trying to do, and what the best way to use it is. […] And past that, the trend of criticising other engines, and other companies’ strategies, and entire software patterns is… noticeable.

  • Logan “WickedInsignia” Preshaw - Art Director and VisDev Artist experimenting with realtime environments.

    Many crucial bugs on core systems have been ignored for years. I myself have been intensively testing the graphics side of Godot and identified core issues with many of the lighting features, with many proposals and reports initially discussed or met with approval and then left to sit for a year or more untouched. […] Godot feels like it’s in a constant pre-alpha, with no “v1.0” achieved to justify the momentum towards v2.0. […] The experienced game devs who could test features more intensively simply do not interact with the engine because they come along, realize some core feature is broken in a way that completely obstructs their project, they see the PRs for this issue untouched for years, and then they move on to another engine. […] Some of Godot’s most talented contributors have left the project inorganically. I don’t believe Godot’s perceived directionless development plays any small part in this, and in talking to existing contributors it’s evident that some feel they’re simply left waiting for crumbs of info or core changes to be made in other areas they simply cannot predict.

    Aftermath: Discussion was blocked by Godot core developers, and multiple replies were deleted. Read the reactions in this post:

Posts

Videos

I Don’t Trust Godot Anymore

Godot’s devs are deceiving you

Anonymous

Here are some noteworthy anonymous reviews and testimonials that were privately shared with the author of this book. These have been deemed credible enough to merit inclusion here, either for further investigation or to provide broader context.

  • Relationship between OKAM Studio and Juan Linietsky:

    I know Juan from pre-Godot times. Before Godot, Juan co-founded a game company named OKAM. Turns out, he ham-fisted very early versions of Godot into OKAM projects and convinced the studio to use them. They had a lot of problems with it and resented him a lot because when things got bad with the engine he failed to be held accountable for them. After a lot of trouble, the team switched to Unity to find out that the productivity increased by orders of magnitude, they felt cheated by him when this happened. At that time, one of the OKAM devs told me “Juan is just using the studio as a guinea pig for his engine prototype”. They also were mad because they had to crunch and blamed Godot technical failings from it, when that happened, a common saying was that “Juan raised hands in the air, said ‘oh, well’ and left”. From second-hand testimonies, I vaguely understand that he and her co-founder didn’t end in the happiest of terms.

    Context: Martina Santoro, co-founder of OKAM Studio, has transitioned into the role of Unreal Engine Evangelist. Nowadays, her current social media activity is on Unity and promoting Unreal Engine, with no mention of Godot Engine whatsoever.

Full Text

Andres “cybereality” Hernandez

Sadly, I Think Godot Is a Scam. I’m Not Sure I Can Do This.

You know, I’ve been promoting Godot for 3 years, dedicating my time to helping people for free, and recently paying to host these forums (which costs hundreds per month). I really did believe in Godot, but as time has gone on, I’ve just seen broken promises, lies, and suspect behavior that makes me think at some point the Godot Engine turned into a scam. I do think it was real at one point, maybe when I started with it. Seemed like a nice community and FOSS project. But as time went on I started to notice weird things, specifically with my interactions with Juan. I think the first time I noticed this was in 2020 when I started trying to use baked light-mapping. I noticed that it was essentially completely broken. You could bake indirect light, but not the whole scene. I thought it was a bug and messaged Juan. He said: “Oh someone or another did that whole thing in 1 night, and then it must have broken. But we are developing a new system that is better”. Well, strange, if someone made it in 1 night, they could certainly fix it in 1 night. The new system did come, but an entire year later. So for 12 whole months, there was no lightmap support, a Quake 1 era technology. This kind of pattern continued for years, major bugs with Github issues, but they said: “oh, it will be fixed in Godot 4.0” then 4.0 comes out and things are still broken, “it will be fixed in 4.1” well 4.1 did come out and tons of stuff is still broken (HDR images hang/crash the editor, major black screens and crashing on many Android devices, incorrect color space on HTML5, tons of features missing on mobile/OpenGL making it useless, etc.).

But it’s understandable that there are bugs, particularly with a large codebase and many contributers. The main issue I have is the broken promises and lies. For example, once on Twitter I asked Juan about why mixed mode shadows were not supported (this is when the level is baked but characters have real time lighting, a standard feature in Unity and Unreal). And he tells me that shadow mapping is faster. I don’t know if he misunderstood me, but real-time shadows are not going to be faster than baked lighting. There is a reason almost every AAA game in the last 20 years has used some form of pre-computation. Eventually I found someone with the same problem, and they looked in the code and it was actually a 1-line fix (I saw the image, it worked). But the PR was never merged, for whatever reason. I also had a problem where I loaded a DirectX normal map into Godot (which uses OpenGL coordinate space) and it was messed up. I mentioned I had the wrong normals, and he says there is only one normal format, despite like 20 years of history of differences between DirectX and OpenGL. Again, I thought there might have been a misunderstanding, but these little kinds of things were starting to add up.

Even that I was willing to work through, as the Godot project is not just Juan, there are many people that contribute. Sadly the interaction on Twitter today has made me realize this whole thing is a scam. I had suspicions before, but this confirms it. Juan earlier today made a post essentially saying that the Godot project is out of money, and that they are cash-flow negative. Remember that a few months ago, the company Juan started with some other Godot people raised $8.5 million dollars. So I made a joke asking if he spent all the money. I mean, it was a half joke, but also kind of a serious question. He’s on Twitter begging for money, with over $8 million in his pocket, something doesn’t add up. Some other people asked what would happen if they didn’t get enough donations, and he says that the development would slow down. This doesn’t make sense, the whole mission statement of W4 Games was to grow the Godot ecosystem, but now a few short months later, Godot has no money and development will slow down. This is suspicious, to say the least.

So, as you know, I’m a pretty straight forward guy. So I called him out on it. Though his response only confirmed to me that he’s not honest nor can he be trusted. Someone else asked the same question, what happened to the W4 $8.5M. He says, bold face, that W4 is unrelated to the Godot project. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The whole mission statement revolves around Godot, how could he say it’s unrelated. The W4 website also claims they will be supporting Godot financially. But now he says they are independent. It doesn’t add up. And look, I’m not against making money. I think some people think I’m just hating, and I’m not. I feel lied to and betrayed. He has lied to my face multiple times and I didn’t trust myself. But this is the end of the line.

You can read the mission statement on the W4 website first to see what was originally claimed. Then you can read the thread that Juan started, including some real questions from me and some other people. I’ll be honest, I was upset, and I’m still upset. I said some stuff that I feel was true, but I was also very blunt.

You don’t have to take my side, I understand. It was hard for me to believe. I noticed the strange things for years and I just couldn’t accept it. It was a grift. Maybe not the whole time. I think originally it was in earnest. Maybe something happened behind the scenes I don’t know about. But that fact that Juan is painting this picture that Godot is out of money and begging on social media, meanwhile with $8M in his wallet, doesn’t sit right with me. I can’t with good conscience support this project anymore. So I think I will close the forum. He blocked me and I blocked him. I don’t want to be associated with a liar. I invested so much into the engine only to realize it wasn’t what I thought. He lied and I’m done with it. I’m really sorry.

Lilly Byte Games

Source: Twitter

You know what.. people want to know why I resigned as a Godot mod and why I’ve “seemingly” turned on Godot after years of loving the engine? There are few things I am passionate about, but this is one of them… and I’m gonna flame it the fuck up here.

I am tired of getting shit on by “Godot bros” whose only experience with Godot is what they see/hear in their limited experience of being fresh and new to the Godot train, and not yet had the curtain pulled away from their eyes to Godot’s reality. Let me tell you the story of how I found Godot, and the journey of how I went from a bright eyed and bushy tailed Godot lover to the person who both loves and hates Godot with a seething passion… and let this story be a herald and warning before you invest your life.

It started with me back in 2016/2017, when I was developing games on Twitch; I was using a framework that wasn’t quite cutting the muster. I found Godot, and it seemed like a good fit for my project. So, I switched and started tinkering away… so far, so good. I was streaming regularly on Twitch then, about 6+ hours/day building my game. I hadn’t yet joined the Godot community, and Godot’s 3D was seemingly fine for the initial stages of my project. Everything was going grand…

Then one day, as I was streaming on Twitch. The original admin of the Godot Discord found my Godot stream… and they did an at-everyone on the Godot server and my Twitch channel was flooded with hundreds of Godot users pouring in… This was my first interaction with the Godot community, or anyone else in the Godot community. Everyone seemed friendly enough, so I joined the Godot Discord server. I found a happy place, and a place that I could call home.

I started streaming less on Twitch, and spending much more time in the Godot Discord voice chat… where I spent much of my time streaming my own game dev there and helping other users find their way with Godot. In this era, I was in the honey moon phase with Godot. In this time period, I spent just as much time helping other people with their Godot projects as I did with mine. I was on the Godot Discord 8-12 hours/day, consistently… I pretty much stopped streaming to Twitch because of the time I was spending on Discord.

In the Godot Discord community, I found a very good circle of friends… who are still my closest dev circle of friends to this day. Then one day, the voice mod needed to be replaced, and well, they were looking for a diversity mod and I was there half a day anyway… So, I joined the Godot Discord mod team… and not to toot my own horn, but I was a goddamn good mod. I never abused my power, I was especially careful with personalities I disliked, and usually let other mods handle those.

At this point, I was spending more time helping other people with Godot than I was working on my own projects… but, I was still working on small games for fun, taking commission work here and there for 3D models, and occasionally working on my bigger projects.

As time went on, I started seeing cracks in Godot… while the fundamentals were broken, the more advanced tools that barely existed in Godot were really broken. This was not only a problem for me, but a problem for a lot of users I was trying to help. Myself, Duroxxigar, and others in voice chat would help people the best we could… but, in a lot of cases there were no work arounds in Godot except for “build it yourself”. So, I started being more vocal about Godot’s issues…

While I’m not technical enough to make engine PRs myself, many in voice chat were; and they would make PRs to Godot… and we would tell them how to do it, and look hopefully at the fixes that “would be coming in the future”…. Except those PRs never ever got merged… PRs sat for years, untouched. When people coming in wanting to add feature PRs to Godot asked us how long it takes for things to get merged… we were honest. It could be years, because it could be. We watched as PRs grew stale, ignored, untouched… I complained about this specifically, and I was told: There’s no guarantee PRs will ever get looked at or merged. This translated into: You could spend months or a year+ on a PR just to have it not even looked at. Or worse, outright rejected because Juan would often say, “No, I plan on doing this myself eventually…”

This is around the time when I started getting a little more aggressive with Godot’s problems. Okay… PR fixes are pretty much getting ignored unless you’re in Juan’s “Boy’s Club”… and if not, you are spending your time, effort, and life on a gamble. So, here we are now, about 2019ish with an engine that has fundamental broken problems… and people with solutions to those problems are being rejected for the dumbest fucking reasons… one of which is “their personality isn’t the right fit for Godot”. “Their personality isn’t a right fit for Godot?” What the fuck…. Bish, it’s code. I don’t give two shits what their personality is like if the code works. Let them fix the goddamn problems you are not fixing… or add the goddamn features you are not adding.

So, there we are… this is where I start to see the first true light of Godot. If you are not a part of the “Godot Cult Insiders” your time is wasted. We weren’t the only people to see this either… Over the years, we had AAA engineers; more than a couple, come into the voice chat and talk to us about Godot and their concerns. They were seeing what they were seeing… they wanted to invest their time in Godot, but them seeing PRs sit uselessly in the void put them off. This became a theme, not only with AAA engineers, but other skilled people who wanted to contribute to the engine. Also with people we wanted to help contribute to the engine. Rejection often came as “Not a right fit”, “I’ll do it later”, “Godot doesn’t need art tools.”

The “belief” I had in Godot being community driven was an absolute lie. The discovery that Godot is “community driven” is a lie. Okay, fine… Godot started hiring more devs… maybe things will be okay, maybe things will improve…. However, as happens with Godot… all good things turn to sadness. Most of the money they get in funding is attached to the condition that specific features be implemented… basically, “pay 2 win” contribution. I mean, in the end, it makes sense… Godot needs funding. But the degree to which this happened again and again and again, while capable and experienced engineers and their PRs or ideas were getting rejected over and over for the dumbest of fuckwit ideas was also getting common.

Juan’s “Godot philosophy” was killing Godot… and definitely killing my bright eyed and bushy tailed vision of where Godot could go. So, I got again more vocal about Juan’s constant “It’s my engine, I’ll do it my way” take while claiming it is “community driven”. Sure, if you have a small fix for something that exists… there’s a high likely hood that PR will get merged. But, a full on feature? Good… fucking… luck. Everyone skilled enough to want to contribute without sucking Godot Jesus’s dick shyed away from wanting to.

But still… I had hope for the engine, despite ALL the shenigans and bullshittery I saw, heard, and experience. I continued to help people with Godot, to work around the problems, to explain what can and cannot be done with Godot. The difference between me and someone else: I was honest with people about the engine’s capabilities… what was missing, what was working, what could be realistically done with the engine without a professional team of engineers to build parts of the engine for you. Again, I’m not a technical person… so I wanted to somehow get artists involved in the development process of Godot to help refine the tools… to make them more artist friendly and give artists functional tools. There are PRs/suggestions where I teamed up with devs to do it.

Once again, good improvements on existing tools rejected because of Juan’s stupid philosophies or that he just didn’t “understand why a gamedev would need that tool.” It got repeatitive… it got tiring. So, at this point what I am I supposed to do to help improve this engine? I tried being nice… I tried teaming up with developers to bring meaningful improvements to the existing tools… I tried bridging between artist and programmer…. Every meaningful avenue I tried to take to improve Godot was shot down by Juan’s philsophy of “I don’t understand why this is needed” or “I’ll do it myself later” or “This will come in a later version”… and it never fucking did, ever.

So, let’s go even further down the line to the other cracks that started to appear in my love for Godot… these super huge crevices not withstanding…. The next biggest crack I saw was on the mod team. There was a contributor who was on the Godot Discord spewing heavy anti-LGBTQ non-sense. The admins of the server were besides themselves in what to do… for anyone else, they would have banned outright…. For this situation, because this person was a contributor, they were just refusing to deal with the situation. So, you know who had to step up do the right goddamn thing? Yours truly… because nobody else would do it. So, yup… hello new crack in my love for Godot. You can’t stand up and do what’s right when the right needs to be done… even if/when it’s hard… that’s a problem, and that’s not my only experience with that… because hold onto your hats until later.

Not long after, I think I was finally at my wits end with Godot… I had spent years and thousands of hours helping people in the Godot community… developing shit with Godot, sacrificing my life, my time… to the betterment of Godot for fucking nothing. So, 4.x alpha drops… like, about 4-5 years after it was initially supposed to, mostly, because Juan kept adding or changing stupid features nobody wanted or needing because he felt like it that day…. And surprise surprise… the renderer, while faster than OpenGLES3 still has significant issues. 2017… 2018… 2019… 2020… 2021… 2022… for… this? What… the… fuck… All the Godot philosophy preachiness… for this?

So, anyway… an argument ensues in the Godot mod chat channel; and it’s a bit of a doozey, we’re all a bit passionate in the there sometimes; we all love Godot in our ways, so it got heated because I wanted Godot to be more… and then… well, all hell breaks loose. pycbouh goes into full fucking gaslight mode because his fee-fees got hurt, starts swearing and cursing on people and making arguments nobody is making and arguing against imaginary arguments [a constant thing for him really]… Remi goes on a rant about how Godot is Juan’s engine and want the community wants/need isn’t important… and that, that alone is was a sword in itself. The community I spent fucking years helping, years building, isn’t important? what… the… fuck… At this point… that’s when Xan comes in and tells me, “You’re being low and dishonest”; and to Xan’s credit, I don’t think he understood what was happening at the moment, so I don’t blame him… So, here I am… in the midst of this firestorm… pycbouh trying to gaslight the fuck out of me, while Dazz is trying to calm him down and getting cursed out by pycbouh too… Remi is telling me the community don’t mean shit… and I just say FUCK IT….

I resign as Godot mod, I’m done. I’m just fucking done. I spent years promoting Godot, trying to help Godot, and being a literally fucking crusader for the engine… hell, on Twitch I was literally called “the Priestess of Godot”…. Years of my life fucking wasted to come to this kind of goddamn end, and all I wanted was to do MORE with Godot. To improve the tools it had… and not a person would listen to what I had to say. So, to say I became more aggressive recently, you better believe I have.

There is much more to this story, but I will keep it to myself for now; such as how pycbouh repeated his behaviours with other people… yet, still is mod. If I had pulled the shit pyc pulled, I would have been kicked from the mod team… but you know, contributor favortism. And the sweet fuckin’ blessing on this shit was… I was “offered” mod position back IF I would recant the shit I had accused pycbouh of. No. Fucking. Way. I experienced what I experienced, and he did the same shit to someone else… glad I refused that.

So, yeah, Godot leadership can go fuck itself. It wasted my life, it told me that the community I held dearly wasn’t important, it told me our issues weren’t important, and it tried to coerse me into recanting something that happened. And the whole “community driven” thing is one big goddamn lie. Godot is driven by Juan’s whims of the day and purely Juan’s whims of the day. So, good luck to those who want to contribute anything major to Godot. You gotta suck the Godot Jesus dick or dump a load of money. That’s what Godot is REALLY about. I still love the Godot community, and I still think fondly of the engine for what it does well, and what it COULD be… but not with Juan in charge.

And Godot bros, go fuck yourself. I’ve been in the trenches for years, you haven’t.

Now, let’s add something else on top of this. We have Juan’s indecision of what the fuck he wants Godot to be… one moment he says “Godot features will make you want for nothing”, the next he’s saying, “Why would a gamedev need that?”… then it’s “Godot isn’t for AAA dev” Then it’s “Godot is a professional engine”, then it’s “Godot needs more technical barriers so people can learn proper game dev” then it’s “Godot needs to be easier for beginners.” Like, make up your fucking mind… figure it out…

So, on top of the Inner Godot Cult of PRs… the leader of said cult has no idea what or where Godot stands, or where it should be going. If you don’t know where you are, and don’t know where you are going… that’s called being lost. And that’s where Godot is… it’s lost because it’s leadership is drifting in the wind with no sails/direction. No idea what it wants the engine to be, no idea where it wants the engine to go… and no willingness to heed experts in their fields because “personality”.

And by the gods… I loved the Godot community, and I loved the dream of what Godot could have been. Yet, I woke up to the hard reality of being told how the Inner Godot Cult sees the community; and now, I can’t unsee that truth.

Oh yea… and all that time, effort, and energy I put into actually using Godot, promoting Godot, and helping people worm their way through it’s quirks? Didn’t fuckin’ matter one bit… as far as Juan and the other dickheads were concerned “I wasn’t a contributor”, so meh. Yup, not a contributor. Despite all the community building I did, the amazing voice community I had spent years building up in the Godot Discord, the countless hours I put into helping people… yeah, not a contributor to the engine at all, not one little fucking bit, nope. So, when they say on the website “contributing code is not the only way you can contribute to Godot”… it’s just goddamn lie; something else they say that they do not believe.

So, am I upset and angry with Godot? You better fucking believe I am. Juan is a walking/talking ego writing checks his coding skills can’t cash. The leadership is a Godot Jesus dick sucking cult that approves PRs based on how much they know/like you or not. And “fuck you” if you try to explain your experience as an artist using Godot. Even Remi told me not to listen to Juan because half the stuff he says is bullshit. Like, seriously, we’re not supposed to listen to or heed the LEAD DEVELOPER of the engine we use? It’s a clown show… and Juan is center fucking stage to the act. And thus concludes my Tales of Godot.

If you like the engine, please, use it. It’s got some nice features for some games… but temper your expectations, don’t invest your life… and definitely don’t listen to the clown show that is trying to sell you a broken dream.

Winter Pixel Games

Source: Twitter

There’s some massive pros to the project (FOSS being the largest). The Open 3D Engine announcement is definitely a welcome addition to the FOSS community, but a few of the Godot Engine core devs seem kinda bewildered that Amazon would invest time and money here rather than sponsoring or helping Godot Engine in some fashion.

But to me, it’s pretty clear. The fact is, it’s somewhat tough for seasoned and experienced game/C++ developers to work with the Godot Engine source. The codebase and lead dev are very opinionated (which is USUALLY a good thing). And I’m not talking about necessarily contributing, this is about working in the codebase itself. For example: I can’t use Godot Strings in any other modern C++ template collection because String doesn’t implement move operator 😞. This leads to workaround after workaround in our codebase itself. (A simple example true, but one of many).

And there are just some very unergonomic things about the Godot source right now. Stuff that would just never fly with experienced teams or devs. And from what I’ve seen it seems to put off experienced devs and more established teams. Recently I’ve come to discover this old Godot issue (as I understand this issue has somewhat become a sore spot in the Godot Engine community) - Using the slowest data structure almost every time. Regardless of the presentation of the aforementioned issue (probably not the best), the technical criticisms in the issue are sound. And that aside, a lot of criticisms of Godot source code come in the form of “Why does Godot source do things like this”. And the general answer from the core team is, “Godot does A this way because of X,Y and Z”. And I have no problem with this reasoning. But the reasoning has to be sound. What I’m starting to see more and more of is that X, Y and Z tend to be false premises, which end up resulting in bad decisions.

And I don’t believe it’s intentional, I think it’s just due to the lack of actually using the engine by the core team to ship real products. This is really why dogfooding is SO important, and why Epic/Unreal have such an unbelievably great advantage with their engine development practices. I was told in IRC back when Godot dev team used IRC for communication, that Godot source is very NIH (Not Invented Here) by design. I wasn’t familiar with this term but boy am I now. (NIH is the tendency to avoid using any third party code other than your own). Need a STL? Godot has their own implementation. Need a physics engine? Godot has their own implementation. Need an http stack? Godot has their own implementation. Need a scripting language? Godot has their own implementation. etc, etc, etc. There are obviously pros and cons to this, but IMO it’s currently balanced on the wrong side here. It leads to slower development velocity, because when you do everything you have to maintain AND fix everything. An absolute massive amount of work!

There’s a very real reason Unity just uses Box2D as it’s 2D physics engine… And ya, when you implement everything yourself, you’re going to have to implement range iterators (as well as a whole bunch of other things but don’t get me started). For example, our project was just absolutely HAMMERED with malloc/free overhead per frame. Literally TENS of THOUSANDS of calls. The reason? Godot’s ‘STL’ doesn’t do map iterators (just due to lack of resources)… I encourage the Godot core source team do some introspection here and not just wonder why the project doesn’t seem to attract certain types of resources, sponsors, or developers. It might be gut check time.

Camille “pouleyKetchoupp” Mohr-Daurat

Source: GitHub (read all comments)

Just to be clear, I’ve been bullied two times by different people on this project and every time project management reacted by siding with the bully, so I’ve left and I’m never going to contribute again.

I wasn’t going to get into more details, but since you are, let me make the story straight.

Here are my concerns:

The first time, I was bullied for months by an individual while contracting for the project. He was also bullying other contributors. I did report issues multiple times to project management to no avail. What you call meditation was a meeting with the project manager and the bully, during which I was asked to apologize to the bully, while he was yelling at me. For the next 6 months, absolutely nothing was done. When I tried to raise the issue to the head of the project, he told me it was a sad situation but we can’t reject anybody from the project. What it took to get the toxic person removed from project responsibilities was for me to gather all evidence and present them to the PLC, after he had started to bully yet another person. He was never completely banned from the project.

The second time, a similar situation started to happen with a different bully. It was at W4 games, so the project CoC wasn’t involved, but the same project managers handled the situation in the same dismissive way. That’s why I left.

I hope things can one day get better on this project so other people don’t go through the same experience I did. For that project managers need to take situations like those seriously, which in my experience wasn’t the case even after the CoC team was created.

💡 For more context, read my comment on the Waiting for Blue Robot subreddit.

Endri Lauson

Source: YouTube

For them, it doesn’t matter if Godot needs money, because they know any random will eventually implement what needs implementing in the engine, so the engine, in theory, never needs money to exist and be improved upon. You should never underestimate the power and the significance of the contributor-developers (the people who actually implement the features requested and used by the community), who are starting to see right through this bullshit, and soon there will be no talent left to improve the engine.

I implemented the new lighting/tone mapper used in Godot 4 and I also back-ported it to Godot 3 which, we all agree, is a fairly significant contribution. The previous tone mapper used in Godot was the subject of ridicule whenever a discussion about engines was brought up online, and the community was clamoring for a replacement for years. I’m a game industry veteran and I brought it upon myself to go on and implement a next-gen one to give it parity to Unreal Engine 5.

The change was lauded by the community, and to this day, this is still one of the PRs with the most reactions of Godot’s GitHub. And yet, they did not even have the decency of adding my name to the list of contributors. I understand that they cannot possibly add every single contributor to the list, but according to the rule set, allegedly, they only add contributions that they deem “significant”. I reached Rèmi in order to clarify that maybe that was just a mistake and they just forgot, and I was shocked to learn that my message was left on read. I guess that for the board, a brand new, next-gen-looking tone mapper is not a significant enough contribution.

Which gets me to the next point: they only add to the list of contributor-members who are close friends with the core board… well, unless you consider just changing the name of a few variables to “min”/“max” a “significant” contribution… Because of this behavior which is antagonistic to the spirit of open-source software development and so egregious that it would make the RedHat project team blush, I just “silently removed” myself from the project to not steer up any drama. I have not contributed since and I won’t be contributing to the upstream project anymore. Imagine donating your spare time to work on someone else’s project and receiving nothing in return, not even an small acknowledgment in the footnotes of a large list.

Now, imagine that the couple of people running said project are receiving MILLIONS, while I donate my time to receive nothing in return. This is why many talents are leaving. They seriously have not implemented per-pixel motion blur yet? My personal, private branch of Godot has that since 2021!

Alexander “nicholatian” Nicholi

Source: Twitter

Godot’s entire existence is measured in Unity copium. They’ve been doing this since before 3.0 was even announced. This “race” has been going on for years, and will never end, because Godot survives solely via online guerrilla marketing.

On paper, Godot is a game engine. The reality is much more Soviet: it’s an online clout farming operation for a couple of random Argentinians. Godot may not have a physics engine worth a flying hoot, but you can be sure that they’re getting paid like they do! It’s a very successful grift, I must say. a lot of faithfuls in their replies, churning mindshare and making it real by fiat. Well done.

One of the things that really drove home my conclusion that it’s more of a LARP than an actual endeavour is the Discord’s running joke about “when is 3.0 coming out”. Being a popular game engine, they got the question a lot. Speaks volumes that they created a channel to mock it. It’s an unfortunate defect of open source: you cannot make the developers care about your legitimate issues. You are not a stakeholder.

They have every legal right to blow all the money you donate on hookers and blow. And if their engine is missing something, add it yourself. Of course, they should care! And ordinarily, with all else equal, they probably do! But they don’t always, and if something is important to the health of their game engine and they disagree with the public, their word is final, and there is no practical recourse.

Ostensibly, they are creating a game engine. The truth is subtly different: they are here to get paid to create a game engine via donations. As long as everyone believes in them, nothing else matters. They can have a broken game engine as long as people want to pay them for it.

Pawel Jarosz

Source: Twitter

In 2020 I realistically was considering making Witchcrafter in Godot. It was (and is) very promoted, all around was bragging about it, I was envy of some glossy features and as a budding indiedev I thought it’s an easy way. But why I didn’t moved to #Godot in the end?

Godot is presented to us almost anywhere I can imagine, so it’s not strange I bumped into it at some point. It is also promoted as a perfect tool for indiedevs with a lot of tutorials and examples and ngl - it’s impressive (the same with Unity, I also considered moving to it). Envy of the glossy features, out of the box solutions, I started making a simple platformer base with all the stuff I want. But, oh boy, was I misguided by the easy learning curve.

Having using Unity, Defold, Blitz 3D and some other smaller engines I though it would be natural. I couldn’t make simple stuff, because Godot’s core/workflow is way different than others. I imagine now also how hard it is to switch from Godot to other 😅

But this is only my impression, my experience. I started asking others about their experience. And even back in 2020 I came into opinions that Godot is overhyped and is for them a pain you know where. I finally came upon the opinions highlighting Godot’s strong points too, but also realistic for what it is good.

Some of the gamedevs opened my eyes then: “I think it’s a great example of the failure of “Open Source®”—a big buggy mess with hundreds of contributors and no quality standards, terrible, half-finished documentation, and a cultish community with thousands of rabid fans (most of whom have never even used it).” This is from a person with a vast experience and who used UE, Unity, Godot, Defold, Love2D. This person said too: “We ended up having to scrap it because the performance was just too bad. The per-pixel rendering was at least 5x as slow as Defold, and GDScript was very slow too.” There are also bad and good points for the other engines, so I was then very thankful for the whole comparison and some really practical advices.

What was a shock for me back then was this: “You probably noticed on Twitter, Remi (the unofficial vice-leader behind Godot) was the first and most vocal person harassing the Defold guys about the licensing nonsense, “it’s sad to not be opensource”, and bragging about his number of contributors, and Juan (the great cult leader) was bashing them from his personal account too. They are not good people. Ugh, they even got a $20k grant from the Mozilla foundation specifically to improve Godot’s use of web technology. Juan said that he used it to pay for his living expenses and… a year or so later, Godot still didn’t even have functioning web builds. How that wasn’t considered fraud, I don’t know.”

And it was, again, in 2020. This year you might started seeing #CancelGodotEngine posts by one of the banned contributors @Xrayez. The narrative is so weirdly same. I’m reading all those tweets and the worst thing for me is that Godot spreads hate to other engines, instead of love. Community and open source foundations are totally OK with some of the behaviors and movements, but when other makes mistakes. Oh boy, Defold licensing thing was nothing when you compare it to how the Godot community was triggered after Unity stuff this year… I got into that bubble myself 😔 I then digged deeper into Unity’s case and while some things are still 🚩 to me, I formulated broader opinion. Indie community is amazing, because there are people realizing their dreams, living the passion ❤️

No matter what tool we are using. And while I myself am promoting Defold mainly, I never claim it’s the best engine for everything, because I was misguided by Unity and Godot’s bubbles, they’re best for everything. In fact Defold is focusing on a very narrow audience and tries to please them at first. So, I am also not very experience, so my opinions are still not so mature, but another gamedev with a vast experience (and talent), who’s advice I took to my heart ❤️, when I naively asked about which is the best: “Actually Defold or Unity or Whatever - is not important. Choosing correct tools for the right kind of game is the most important thing in game development. It is all about the experience. That is it. People should be aware of this. Other than that this is a pointless popular bubble.” It wasn’t then so clear to me, but - how wiser those words sound when you actually experienced such bubbles.

Others, whom I asked back then was saying simply the same thing: “In the end I am an advocate for “Using the right tool for the Job”. If you are trying to build a GUI heavy app and not a game then use Flutter or React Native, if you want to do a beautiful 3D game then Unity or UE is probably the way to go.” “But if you want to make small 2D games then I do think Defold is currently the way to go.”

I am making small 2D games with a priority for easiness of use/ prototype and simple multiplatform builds. This is WHY I chosen Defold. Plus it’s free 😅 Godot has its advantages, is definitely something phenomenonal and the support from community for this is (in most cases) very pleasant and broad ❤️

I believe some things might have been better, but that’s the case with everything. Nothing’s perfect. I know myself a lot of talented devs using or switching to Godot and making successful games. Don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely not about claiming Godot itself is bad. It’s not perfect, but it’s not useless either It’s about consideration of your choices always. Focus on choosing the right tools for your game. And don’t spread hate. We are an amazing community, we don’t need toxicity. Support each other, because that’s our strength! 💪❤️

Tynan Sylvester

Source: Reddit

My main concern with Godot at this point is that it seems to be trying to be all things to all people. It’s trying to appeal to the “my first game” student market, via visual scripting and GDScript and so on. But it’s also trying to hit AAA features like advanced rendering and a built-in particle engine.

This lack of decided focus manifests as IMO mis-spent effort on things that almost no serious indie should be using (advanced rendering features which look pretty in demo videos, visual scripting), while deprioritizing things that absolutely every indie should be using (C#).

From what I’ve read the C# support still quite rough. Good first-class C# support is a must. We need a language that’s very productive, quite fast, bug-resistant (e.g. statically typed, no globals), mature, portable, has libraries, and handles very large codebases. Only C# fits.

GDScript looks nice for really really tiny games, but it’s obviously never going to scale close to anything like RimWorld; its performance is way too low and the code isn’t nearly safe enough. Most indies beyond the “my first game” level should not be using this.

C++ is good if you’re making a hyper-optimized engine code. But productivity is really low for C++ since it’s so unbelievably arcane. Very few indies should be touching C++ IMO.

C# covers the needs of 90% of indie work for serious projects:

  • For “my first game” level coders, learning C# is ideal; the language has great error messages, tons of documentation, and is very productive.
  • For mid-indie developers like me, C# is ideal because of the excellent balance of productivity, speed, libraries, and scalability.
  • For AAA developers, you need C++, but these people are irrelevant for Godot because they’ll be writing their own engine or using something Unreal-tier anyway.

I don’t think, at the indie level, that it’s a good idea to be trying to compete with big companies in terms of graphics. So from my point of view all the whiz-band shader and particle features are NOPs at best. Making use of such features really requires a big team of artists; the Venn diagram of studios who might use Godot and studios with big artists is very close to zero.

I really hope the Godot team doesn’t get sidetracked in working on advanced AAA rendering features, nor on “my first game”-level ease of use stuff.

This engine will blow up when small-but-professional indies start using the engine to make really popular games - Games on the tier of Factorio, Don’t Starve, RimWorld, Hotline Miami, Stardew, Terraria.

I really want to do that (if indeed I am capable and lucky enough to succeed) but the engine needs to cover the bases to make that possible. Currently it’s close but not quite there.

We don’t need animations or particles or PBR or visual scripting or networking. We just need the fundamentals right. We need really solid C# support, with debugging and all, and we need the engine to be generally bug-free. I hope to use it one day!

Mariusz ‘koder’ Chwalba

Source: GitHub

  • I released an Early Access title ΔV: Rings of Saturn using Godot 3.1.1-stable.
  • I am getting frequent crash reports, which I traced back to Revert “Fix AudioStreams::stop possibly causing a small noise” #28469 (or other audio-related issues). The fix is not in current published stable build of the engine.

Look at it from my perspective. I have released a title. There is engine-related bug, that’s fixed in current master, that causes my game to crash every couple of hours. I did some workarounds, but there are some areas that I just can’t reach with game code. I’m releasing cross-platform, so compiling my own version of the engine is not really feasible.

It’s bad with Early Access release and would be a catastrophe in a full one. You just can’t have a (stable marked!) engine that crashes a game.

Ideally, the bugfix should get into 3.1.2 and be published days after it was fixed.

I took a leap of faith by developing my game using Godot 3 - when I started it was in early beta stage. Now I feel like your focus is on Godot 4, but the 3.1.1 you are publishing currently on your site is not stable as advertised. I would implore you to revise the release cycle to favor stability of published project over development of next feature or major version. Having an “unstable stable” engine is not doing anyone any favors.

Favkis Nexerade

Source: Godot Forums

I’m 3 years into developing games on Godot and some of them are almost finished, however, when I started back then, encountering countless broken features and bugs, I thought they’ll get fixed with time, so I either did bad workarounds around bugs in engine or simply ignore some, waiting for them to get fixed. However now I hear that G3 wont be continued, why? I spent 3 years working on my games and this engine still has broken graphics, broken animations, broken file system, broken physics, broken importer, broken resource instancer and dozens of other broken “features”.

What’s my next move? I am not moving to G4 because I see no point in doing so, if they can’t finish G3 they wont finish G4 and I do not wish to start making my games from scratch, because no matter what I tried, moving any of my G3 projects to G4 doesn’t work at all.

I feel cheated, I spent so much of my creative energy into this engine and now met with “we wont continue making G3”. Here are game I’m made so far:

Ross Grams

Source: Defold Forums

Godot has some nice core ideas (the scene/node system), plenty of features, and is fairly easy to learn, but it’s also bug-ridden, slow, has very incomplete documentation, and a cultish community.

Bugs: Hopefully it’s gotten better as the community has grown, but when I was using it 90% of the engine development was done by Juan (reduz). He pumps out code amazingly fast, but he also doesn’t pause to test it or document it, and he rarely goes back to fix old code. There’s a strong focus on adding new features, very little on fixing things. His most common response to serious bug reports was “oh yeah, there’s no point fixing this, I’ll be rewriting it for 3.1”. So there are lots of broken or unfinished features lying around. There’s really no such thing as a stable release of Godot.

People think the open source thing is awesome, but to be honest I’m not sure if it is more positive than negative. They routinely use it as an excuse for terrible documentation and sometimes bugs. Several times I (or other people) asked for help on how a feature worked and the answer was: “I don’t know, go read the source code and let us know what you figure out”, or “if it’s broken, feel free to fix it!”. Also, there is no great review process or testing for code to get added to the engine. Random people write stuff, add a pull request, and chances are, it is added to the engine a day or two later. I was in a discussion once about how modifier keys were handled. Some guy decided he knew the solution, wrote some code, and the next day or so it got pulled into the engine. But all it did was move the problem from one place to another! As far as I know there’s nothing in place to stop this from happening constantly. It looks like they don’t use unit tests 28 or any other kind of code testing (at least not with any consistency).

Slowness: (scripts) GDScript is slow. I haven’t done any tests in ages, but I am confident if you test the same code between GDScript with Godot and Lua with Defold, Godot will be 10x slower or more. This won’t be noticeable when you start working on a new project, but as things get more complicated and you add more and more scripts, you will see the framerate slowly get lower and lower. I think someone did a test when they started adding support for other languages and the others were significantly faster, but I don’t know the specifics. This has been tested and reported multiple times over the years, but the Godot devs have simply denied that the tests were valid and haven’t shown any interest in trying to find bottlenecks and optimize.

Slowness: (rendering) Godot also seems very slow about rendering. As far as I can tell, it still doesn’t do draw-call batching at all… You can kind of get away with this on desktop, but mobile devices can’t handle it. See here 28, here 16, and here 16. Some quotes from Juan regarding 1000 draw calls: “This number of draw calls is not much of a problem in OpenGL. Batching is not really necesary.” and “…might be better to eventually wait for phones to get better than fixing this.” For comparison, with Defold it’s pretty easy to stay below 50 draw calls for everything in your game. Also it has overdraw issues. I was working on a platformer and wanted some parallax backgrounds, but I simply couldn’t draw more than two layers over large parts of the screen before the framerate dropped below 60 (with everything else going on of course). I recently tried something similar with Defold and it had no problem drawing a dozen or so overlapping screen-sized images. It’s quite possible that Godot doesn’t do any depth sorting either, which could be the problem.

Documentation: Godot has a pretty sizeable community to ask for help, but its documentation is very bad. To start with, a lot of it doesn’t exist. When I was using it, they announced 7 that 60% of the class documentation was missing. 60%!!! And that’s just the stuff that doesn’t exist at all. The stuff that does exist is far from being good documentation. Most of it just reiterates what the name of the function already tells you. It doesn’t necessarily tell you what units all the arguments use, what each argument does, what the corner cases are, and almost never has examples of use. This is just the API documentation, never mind actual manuals that tell you how to use things in a pleasantly readable way.

The community has made some valiant efforts, but I don’t see how the situation will change much. New features are added without proper documentation. Unless that changes (either by not adding any new features or only adding them after they are fully documented), it is a losing battle. No one should have to delve into the C++ source code to figure out how a feature works.