I liked the experience with Godot, considering that before I have never made a game with a game engine, mostly used raylib.
- It is pretty easy to create a 2D game with Godot, but in this game I wanted to try implementing custom collision resolution, which was pretty rough (but I think it’s possible, Godot gives you all you need with
move_and_collide(motion, false), but I couldn’t getget_depthto work properly). - TileMap in Godot is dynamically scaleable, has multiple layers and just flexible in general. It is replaced in 4.3 with TileMapLayer, but I couldn’t get it to work with BetterTerrain (an addon, that is absolutely necessary, because autotiling rules in Godot out of the box are a nightmare to setup). - Speaking of addons, they are very easy to install, and a lot of them are available in the builtin browser. Everything is free and opensource. Another useful addon is GodotAsepriteWizard, a beautiful Aseprite importer.
- GUIs are pretty easy with Godot, and there are A LOT of GUI nodes, everything you would want out of the box (the reason being, Godot itself is written using Godot)
- GDScript is simple, similar to python. There’s a guide on the official wiki, there are some type hints (but they are still rough). There are ways to use C# with Godot, but from version 4, it doesn’t work in web builds. And I couldn’t run Godot with C# support on NixOS.
- The pipes in this game are rendered with shaders, which are written in GDShader language. I see almost no differences from GLSL used in OpenGL ES (OpenGL 2 or something). Godot itself is using Vulcan. Shaders are pretty simple, they even work in the editor
With all that said, I still can’t believe that every game shipped with Godot contains a GDScript interpreter in it. I am just used to compiled languages.