I don’t have that much experience, but I’ve been playing with different engines for some time. I’ve mostly been using Game Maker for 2D games(they are much easier to make!), but recently switched to Godot completely. For me, Godot is the best choice - it is fast, clean, and simple. It’s so easy to make a simple game after you put some time into learning it! The nodes system might look a bit confusing at first but it is actually quite simple and efficient. And GDscript!.. I’ve always loved Python for how simple and clean it is and GDscript is almost the same! And one of my personal favorites is how much easier it is to create UI in Godot than Game Maker! A few clicks, a few lines of code and it is done! So yeah, you should at least try Godot - you won’t regret it!

I recently made the move to Godot 4 from Unity, due to the latter slowing down and becoming just too frustrating to use. Overall I like it a lot, you’ll probably get on well with GDScript and the engine is very snappy and fast which is a huge advantage over some competitors. Some negatives though in no particular order:

• The UI isn’t great when it comes to scripting. I believe the new version is allowing an undockable scripting tab which solves one problem, but I’m reserving judgement since there are plenty of other annoyances. That said you can always hook up an external IDE I’ve just not looked into that yet.
• No visibility into your scene when it’s actually running. This is the big thing for me coming from Unity, it’s incredibly awkward sometimes to just try and see what your game is actually doing when you hit play.
• A lot of stuff changed from Godot 3 to 4, rendering a lot of information you’ll find outdated. But also even within 4 itself it seems like things have changed a lot from early tutorials, so I’ve had to do a fair bit of good old trial and error problem solving (occasionally of the “just press all the buttons and see what happens” variety)
• The UI creation tools manage to somehow be even more frustrating to use than the ones in Unity, which is really saying something. Although these are the only two engines I’ve used and I hear it’s a fairly widespread problem, so can’t entirely blame Godot there.

Edit: I just finished writing this post and went on Mastodon, immediately saw a discussion about how Godot’s support for browser-based games is apparently not good. So idk what you’re planning but that could potentially be an issue.

I’m not saying don’t use it, of course. Every engine has its pros and cons. Overall it was quick enough to get up and running that tbh you might as well just give it a whirl and see what you think! Good luck with your game :)

I’ve used Godot a lot for 2D games and it’s a great engine. I found it much easier to grasp than Unity or Unreal. It’s lightweight, fast, and runs great on Linux. I can’t think of many reasons to not use Godot, especially as an indie dev, except maybe that the 3D side is not as refined as other engines right now, but it’s still very workable and being constantly improved upon. I recommend giving it a shot for sure if you’re interested in getting into game dev.

I’ve used Godot for over a year now, and it’s been really great. The engine works well, load times are quick and the Godot devs are close to the users. Very open communication.

The engine itself is very fun to get into. All these different nodes to test and try out. You can easily create tools (your own nodes) within the Engine, install tools made by others without leaving the engine and even edit objects on runtime within the editor, while the game is running. You can literally write code, while the game is running and change how it behaves. It’s a programmers heaven in my opinion.

Any counterarguments?

None from me. I’ve tried a lot of engines before sticking with Godot and it’s definitely the most polished and feature-rich open source game engine so far. Another one that’s also very far into development is Defold, it’s worth a look if you want to focus on web or mobile games.