Godot Game Engine

Godot is a cross platform free and open source game engine with MIT (a light license) licensing. It is written in C++ and C# and used to develop 2D and 3D games. The development environment runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux and develops games for platforms like windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, HTML5, WebAssembly and Xbox One.

The name of the engine was given after the name of the play “Waiting for Godot”. In this play, two characters do variety of debates and encounters waiting for Godot (who never comes). It symbolizes the developers’ wish of adding endless features to the engine, which is practically not possible.

Apart from C++ and C#, games can be written in Rust, Nim and D. In addition, the game engine has its own scripting language GDScript that is optimized for Godot Scene-based architecture. This language is similar to Python. The engine also supports Visual Programming and has its built-in Programming Language, VisualScript.

In 2007, Juan Liniesky and Ariel Manzur started working on the engine and its first stable version was released in 2014 that supported nevmesh, shadders and lightmapping. The later version 1.1 was released in 2015 that included 2D navigation polygon occluder, new shadders, materials and management for screen and windows. The version 2.0 was released in 2016, which introduced new features of file system browser, enhanced debugger and scene instancing and inheritance. The same year version 2.1 was released that included plugin API, profiler and asset database. The version 3.0 was released in 2018 that supported Bullet physics, FBR (Physically Based Rendering) Renderer and Virtual Reality.

Godot is easy to use GUI game engine. It is constantly updated even though it is free to use. It has quick downloading and usage. Godot has a good community support. Other than several YouTube videos, its official website introduces number of tutorials and demos for beginners.