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I’m making my game using the Godot game engine. I have used Unity pretty extensively in the past, and recently I have been using Unreal for some other work, but I’ll be sticking with Godot for my personal project.
One of the main reasons is that Godot is open source and free to use. Of course, that means that the tools and engine features aren’t as well developed as some of the other engines out there, but it also means that I should be able to keep using this particular version of Godot for as long as I want. My ability to keep working on my game isn’t subject to corporate whims.
Now, there is no guarantee that everyone currently working on Godot won’t suddenly quit, or that they won’t change the license terms to make it unpalatable or impossible to upgrade to a new version of the engine, but the current versions are under pretty permissive licenses. Nothing is 100%, but using Godot is, currently, a pretty safe bet.
The other reason I’m sticking with it, is that I can sort of bend it to do what I need. I am making a retro-looking 2D game that is actually nothing of the sort. It is a set of fairly complex shaders layered over 3D polygons and dynamic lighting systems. This is probably not the way most people would go about creating an arcade style pixel art game, but that’s what I wanted to do. Godot lets me create that.
Just this past week I had a technical issue with malfunctioning positioning, but, because you can sort of bend the engine to do what you need, I changed some scripts, wrote a couple new ones, and fixed the issue. Of course it wasn’t as easy as that sounds, and it took hours of very annoying testing and bug fixes, but it works now. I’m sure I could do similar things in Unity and Unreal, but not without difficulty. Some of the ways they work can be shockingly inflexible.
Work on the game is still progressing slowly, but it is progressing. In the last little while I made some pretty major updates to the way everything is rendered, that is not only faster and more memory efficient, but it looks better too.
One day I will get enough of it pieced together to put a demo on Itch, but that day isn’t today. Today, I’m making 3D tiles, gantries, and door frames.