As most of you will know, if you’ve been following along with the Reflex development logs, I’ve been developing using GameMaker for a fair few years. Back when I started I bought a lifetime licence and never looked back. GM is a great game engine but about a year ago they switched to a subscription based service, and although they honoured (and still do) the lifetime licences I began to wonder if they would attempt to force lifers on to a subscription.
This process seems to have started. There are new filter features that are only available to certain subscription tiers, and so not available to lifetime users. This is not something I like and so I wanted to see what else was available.
I have tried Unity in the past and didn’t get on with it. For my small games it would be like breaking a nut with a planet sized boulder.
So, I decided to give Godot a try.
At first glance it is extremely different to GM. The coding language is Python based which fills me with dread because of the lack of ‘end if’ and ‘end function’, relying instead on indentation based logic. But I wanted to give it a darn good go.
I opted to sign up for the GDQuest Zero to Hero GDScript course so that I would get a good foundation of the basics before trying something myself. The course is designed for Godot v3.x but they are creating an updated version to cover the new features of v4.
It took about 3 weeks to complete the course and I feel quite confident with Godot now. I have put together a very quick project that replicates the core mechanic from Reflex, and that went very nicely.
