Godot vs GDevApp

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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.

Prebuilt behaviors can be added to objects. This is a very efficient way to add a physics engine or make a platformer game.

Lots of behaviors are included, from the most advanced (Physics, platformer, top-down movement) to really simple ones (like the behavior to destroy objects when outside the screen or the one to drag objects with mouse or touch).

No need for coding using this system which is clear and powerful: events are composed of conditions and actions.

Actions are launched when conditions are fulfilled. This is a very beginner-friendly way of making games and is still efficient for advanced usage, contrary to most other "block"/"drag'n'drop" systems.

The entire webapp is based on GDevelop, an open source native game development software available for Windows & Linux, so it benefits from its advanced development.

Even though the tool depends on having a server up and running, you can download a copy of your game to run locally, or host somewhere else.

Sleek and user-friendly UI.

Games can be packaged for Android without relying on any third party tool. You can also export your game and download it to host it on your server or let it be hosted on GDevApp.com.