Godot vs Unity

Godot has a mature 2D engine with many features used by modern 2D games.

The executable is portable and less than 40 MB in size.

This engine barely released one year ago has more than 1000 forks on github and about 100 developers. Not only that just a bit of browsing trough issues you will quickly find out the dev community loves new esp free technology and does not shy away from completely rewriting parts of the engine. The audio engine is being completely rewritten to use threads and so forth.

Non-programmers (musicians, artists, etc) can join the development easily.

You can run Godot on all 3 major operating systems (Windows/Mac/Linux) and build your game to all available platforms from each without any platform-specific work needed. All platforms including Linux are supported first class.

Godot is licensed under MIT license. Anyone can grab the source from here, and compile the engine themselves.

Officially, Godot supported languages for now will be GDScript, C#(Mono), VisualScript and C++.

Deploy games to desktops (Windows/OS X/Linux), smartphones (iOS/Android/BlackBerry), and the web (HTML5 via Emscripten).

Many parts of the editor allow you to drag & drop, which makes working with assets and scene trees a joy.

Every property can be animated.

Add physics to 2D and 3D scenes, through rigid and static bodies, characters, raycasts, vehicles and more.

All the game development work is done inside one program: the engine editor. The scripting is done in the same program. No need for Eclipse or other front-end editors.

The node and the instancing concept work very well and helps developers to structure content efficiently.

An important aspect that can't be grasped without using the engine for a few days. The Interface is evolving nicely and making games is just fun.

You can change the language shown in menus. Godot translations can be found here.

Godot has their own scripting language called GDScript. The scripting language is easy to learn with Python-like syntax, but it is not Python. It's very powerful, easy to learn, and it's free of unnecessary things because it was custom built for optimized integration with the Godot Engine.

It can be used to add custom behaviors to any object by extending it with scripting, using the built-in editor with syntax highlighting and code completion.

A built-in debugger with breakpoints and stepping can be used and graphs for possible bottlenecks can be checked.

The community is great and really cares about the engine. It is easy to get help and to be part of Godot's future.

Godot Engine is itself a Godot game. By adding the "tool" keyword to the top of a script, you can design extensions for the editor itself INSIDE the editor. Integrating these editor scripts into a bundled plugin for sharing is extremely easy to do.

The engine is build not only to support version control but to really use it. Scene files for example which usually get compiled into some sort of unreadable data stay in a text format - that way you can actually see your changes in a version control system like Git.

Godot is very portable, you can download the file from a website then put it on a USB and run it on your other computer without any troublesome errors.

With 3.0's addition of NativeScript and PluginScript via GDNative, developers can easily define bindings for new scripting languages. In addition to the primarily supported C++, GDScript, VisualScript, and C# languages, the community has contributed D, Nim, and Python as well with more on the way.

The documentation used to be weak, but now we have nathen with his help the documentation is the strongest advantage.

Godot gives you the ability to create scenes to make your life easier, with reusable objects and things you want to incorporate in your games. This makes the game making processvery streamlined and organized.

The editor has a fully searchable index of class API documentation for everything the engine offers (NOT just a web interface). You can easily open the documentation for any class by Ctrl-clicking the class's name in the in-engine text editor for scripts.

The engine's source code is easy to read and understand with a self-documenting approach to code design. You don't have to wait months or years for other people to fix an engine bug that is important to your game. Often times, you can spend an hour or two of your own time to fix whatever problems you encounter yourself.

No need to learn anything with node, you can build a game without typing a line of code + has visual scripting.

There is no royalty and the game you made + engine itself is yours.

You can easily install Godot via the Steam store.

In addition to the scene editor and the script editor (with debugger), the engine also provides a tile map editor, an animation editor (not just for rigs), a performance monitor, a network profiler, and an audio bus console.

It has a great visual scripting tool. It's a great choice if you don't like to code. This was however removed in Godot 4, so you will need to use the (still supported) Godot 3 branch for visual scripting.

Unity is bolstered by a huge, helpful community via its official forums, wiki, Unity Answers, and Unity Asset Store; plus the most-subscribed subreddit of any game engine.

Unity offers over 20 platforms for publishing including mobile, console, web, VR, and more.

Not tailored for specific types of games (like Unreal...), so it won't get in your way if you want to make something unique.

Overall, a coherent engine with a rational approach. People who complain a lot about being forced to hack around it usually do not read the docs, like the one that describes orders of execution, or specific functions hooks and such. Some like to say it lacks raw power where people who are used to standard optimizations have no problem. For example It is not uncommon to encounter users who complain about low FPS but forgot to activate occlusion, flag static elements, activate animations culling, and so on. As for complaints about C#, people who are transitioning from C++ were already bad at C++ before being bad at C#. They often come from the PC world where the sheer power of today's machines is very forgiving compared to the platforms we had to develop for in the 80s~90s. One of their errors is for example to never read this doc.

Unity runs very smoothly even on systems that are considered "weak" by today's standards.

For those developers who can't afford an artist, or aren't skilled enough to create their own art, Unity features an Asset Store full of a wide variety of free and paid assets that can be easily added to a game. The Asset Store has more than just music and art. It also has code and modules that can be added to games including unique lighting or GUI systems. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.

You can use any C# IDE for it, but the ones tested which have Unity integration are:

• Microsoft Visual Studio
• MonoDevelop
• Visual Studio Code (much faster than VS, but a bit harder to set up for Unity development)
• JetBrains Rider (very fast, has lots of functionality and best Unity integration, but it is not free)

Unity provides a great state machine animation system called Mechanim allowing to separate animation from the model and assign the same animoations to different models.

The built in standard shader in Unity 5 is incredibly optimized and supports PBS/PBR.

Unity's modular system and usability allows for quickly developing a prototype of an idea. It has features like drag & drop editing, shaders, animation and other systems already in place to allow diving right into developing a game.

The way the editor is structured, by setting scripts on objects, and the use of a high-level language, C#, makes it easy to learn.

Unity is a proven game engine. It is used by a wide range of developers - from small indies to triple-A companies such as Microsoft, Paradox, Square Enix and Sega.

Unity3D provides an exhaustive documentation where everything is given a full description supplied by a number of examples as well as video and text tutorials and live training sessions to understand the ins and outs of the engine. In addition there's an ever-growing community that can offer advice to help resolve any situations that may arise.

Along with the official Unity resources, there are many high quality (and often free) third party tutorials available.

The editor GUI is very powerful and intuitive. It allows pausing gameplay and manipulating the scene at any time as well as progress gameplay frame by frame. It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.

This allows it to be more powerful than other, simpler drag-and-drop engines such as Game Maker Studio, although it can take a bit more experience to learn the workflow.

As long as the company makes $100k or less, Unity's free version can be used to release games without purchasing the pro version.

With Unity knowledge of just one engine is needed to be able to create both 2D and 3D games.

Great Community support through Forums and Unity Answers.

There's an Asset Store, providing free and paid assets (including components). It also has powerful asset management and attribute inspection.