Comment by tosmatos
9 months ago
I really liked this post. I've recently been learning OpenGL and C++, and the libraries surrounding it, like ImGui, which I like using a lot !
But for my projects I think I'll keep using Godot. I really want to make a game, and not the tooling required to make a game. That said, I've dabbled in GDExtension, and if I really need to have something performant, I'll use that.
I've got huge amounts of respect for people doing it this way though. They have a level of control over their work that a Unity or even Godot developer cannot hope to have. It has, like any game dev approach, it's pros and cons
The one thing that perplexes me is that there are some annoying warts of Godot that make developing a game in it different than making a game yourself and nobody thinks "hey wouldn't it be easier to make Godot work in this way, than to do everything from scratch?"
The key difference is the code driven development workflow that makes it easy to keep different concerns like visual assets, collision boxes, navigation, etc separate.
If you do this in Godot, the standard editor features become meaningless, because they are optimized for throwaway workflows with extremely tight coupling (e.g. a player character IS a node containing subnodes, rather than the player character being a high level concept, whose nodes merely represent the player character).
I mean, you can do Godot this way - just make your player a scene with Node2D or 3D as the root instead of a PlayerCharacter and have it respond to input