Don Aguinaldo
As of lately, I've been obsessed with Godot and the game development space. I'm naturally attunded to gaming since I was kid and I loved the idea of building games. But what I didn't realize was how much I was going to like it. Here's everything that I have experienced in the past few months with the little blue robot.
I have been playing games since I was first introduced to Pokemon when I was around 6 or 7 years old. Ever since then I have been immersed in several RPGs over the years. Like many I looked up to my older brother who also enjoyed games as we played with all of our cousins. Around highschool was when I really started to branch out and look for other genres. I would rush to finish my homework so I could spend most of my evenings after school playing Halo and Call of Duty to a point where it was definitely unhealthy.
My brother and I were always into modding our games, and back then Halo Forge was a great in-game tool to edit your own maps. I would spend countless hours planning and building out levels that my friends could enjoy. It was a little embarassing, but I was known as the "Forge" kid back in the day. I didn't even care if my maps sucked. I just liked building and creating my own maps. That was the first spark I had where I knew I wanted to do something like this in the future.
College was a struggle for me. I was completely lost for my first couple of years in community college. I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be. I grew up being told games and anime are for children so by this time I was thinking that it wouldn't be anything worth pursuing because that would be childish. I still loved games, but my mindset was completely different now.
I switched around majors a lot. I intially wanted to be an architect because it seemed like a real world application of my Forge skills and I thought it could give me that creative expression I deeply desired. That fell through and I ended trying out nursing because all my peers were doing it. After one semester I quickly knew I hated it.
I was stuck and under a lot of pressure. I was working 2 jobs at the time just to make ends meet. It was then I saw some programming courses that were being offered. I thought that could be my ticket as I was naturally drawn to technology. In the back of mind I thought maybe it could open up the opportunity for creating games in the future.
As I entered University I had abandoned my dreams of game development in favor of more practical programming jobs. I was told that game development is "harder" to get in. There are more jobs in web development. I knew I had made the practical decision to move into web development, but deep down I knew that I had different desire for my life.
Now after 4 years in my first programming job in NASA, I'm stuck in a cubicle for 8 hours a day watching the clock tick, just waiting for 5 o'clock to come by. I felt lost again. I lost that creative expression that I had as a kid for a life of fixing bugs and working on applications that I absolutely didn't care about.
It felt like my life had ended right there, but one day I stumbled across a game development YouTube channel that was recommended to me. You might know him. His name is Thomas Brush. In his video he talked about how he achieved his dreams about becoming a full-time indie game developer and working from home on his own time, being his own boss. It was immediately then I knew that I wanted that life also. There was just one problem.
I had looked into game development in the past before and even tried out Unity, but that all went out the other year as I became a web developer. As I researched more resources on YouTube I found that the landscape had evolved over the years.
I was completely lost in all the resources and I didn't know where to start. I had initially thought maybe it would be better to leverage my web skills and learn a JavaScript game framework, but as I took a deeper look into it, I just didn't feel that excitement. Unity was going through a lot of issues at the time so I ruled it out despite previous experience.
The other engine I took a look at was Unreal Engine because of the announcement earlier in the year about Unreal Engine 5. I was blown away, but as I took some lessons and courses in UE5, I just didn't feel inspired with what I was working with. On top of that, my laptop was crap and couldn't even load it so working on Unreal games during lunch breaks was out of the question.
I was stuck again, but I came across a video about tierlisting game engines and thought maybe I could take a look at some of the other options out there. And lo and behold the answer to all my prayers arrived. I immediately liked what I heard about this little game engine called Godot.
It's a free open-source game engine. If that isn't enough of a reason already then how about how lightweight it is? Or how developer focused and growing the community is? After the Unity debacle a lot of Unity devs were taking a look at Godot and the support for it became crazy.
Godot YouTube started to blow up and several resources were becoming available left and right. This was the oppotunity I was looking for and after I downloaded the engine and started my first tutorial the rest was history.
So the past few months I spent time learning the ins-and-outs of the engine and it just blows my mind how simple the interface is and how fast everything is. From what I learned, Godot still lacks some features that engines like Unity and Unreal offer, but the passionate community is slowly closing the gap. Also with all the support Godot is getting lately with donations, the engine is really becoming a contender for the indie game space. I personally encourage all developers to try it out even it is just hobby. I promise you won't be disappointed.
With my recent revelation to change the trajectory of my career I've decided to change my website from it's web-focus to game development. Expect more Godot blogs and projects in the near future!
Godot is an open-source game engine that has all the necessary tools to create 2D and 3D games. It has an active community that are passionate about game development and I'm glad that I found such a tool that helps invoke my creative desires. I have been testing out this engine for weeks now and I thoroughly enjoy it.
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