Godot

One of the biggest advantages Godot offered me was that there is "barely" any bullshit to get started. Download the engine, start it and you have everything ready to go. Included script editor, API documentation and no huge downloads or user accounts you have to create. And when you want to give your game someone else you can easily export and be done with it. It's that "batteries included" feel that I think is really powerful. And that is also why I chose it for my projects. I can get a simple idea for an android app running in half an our without fighting with android studio. I can deploy applications to windows, linux and web without the headaches that python deployment brings.

Unity made me feel disrespected as a user. Constantly depreciating features and then promising big things and then quitting half way through. Calling devs idiots for not wanting to have ads plastered all over their games. It also was a pain I'm the ass for me to set up Andorid export at the time (the export stuff was broken for a while)

Godot is super quick and easy to prototype, I jive with the way its structured, it's not super bloated, GDScript is easy to read and learn and it allowed me to use C#. Android export took all of five minutes to set up

Unreal is a bitch. I find the code to be less than readable at a glance, never really liked blueprints either, it's heavy as fuck and chugged every system I ever tried to run it on. I don't think poorly of the engine, but I'm a hobbyist, and Unreal didn't really sit too well with my goals.

Overall, it came down to seeing Unity as a sinking ship long term. Notice how a lot of ads for mobile, even for stuff that's not games, have the Unity logo? That should tell you everything you need to know about their long term priorities, which is no long engine development.

1. It's FOSS (Free Open-Source Software)
2. It has a great community
3. Clean interface, documentation and language
4. Weighs 100MB

That being said, I never released a full Godot game in my life nor I did with Unity or Unreal Engine.

Quite difficult to say, for me it is a combination of it being open source and feeling a lot less cluttered compared to Unity for example.

• It's light. Compared to Unity which spends ages creating projects, compiling scripts, building, etc. Godot feels very snappy. Unity also generates about 350mb of placeholders every time you create a project, something I always held a grudge against because my drive isn't very big (500gb)

• It's open-source. Obviously a big reason for a lot of people, it feels good not to have to worry about any licenses or a business suit CEO saying devs are idiots

• It's more cohesive. It increasingly feels like you need a lot of extensions to get work done on Unity, and there are like 3 different systems to do one thing. In Godot everything feels more straightforward, and it's batteries-included so you have support for things like Tweens out of the box compared to Unity. Things are generally easier too like Autoloads compared to having to manually make singletons.

• I love signals. Probably the most subjective thing, but for me, I think signals are great and a way better alternative than blindly calling functions on another object. Other engines may have it but usually they don't work very well.

Caveat: I'm just a hobbiest. I've never shipped anything, though I have built several projects of low-moderate complexity in Godot.

• Open source: I'm a fan of being able to fix or modify the software I use. Or just read it to understand.
• Free - Godot is insanely polished for a free engine. It's frankly astonishingly good.
• GD Script is great for quickly prototyping ideas
• Broad language support for when you need things to be fast
• Great documentation and tutorials
• Easy things are easy - When I first sat down with Unity it took days to get my first project working. Godot took a few hours. I don't do this full-time. Being able to build something playable on a nights-and-weekends schedule is so great.

I've been in this industry for 10 years and I'm frankly using Godot because I'm getting a head of the curve for when a lot of small studios start using it and need some awesome freelance engineer to come in and help ship their project.

For me it's a different reason from other people.

I've had this idea of an overlay like rainmeter that works like a mini game for my twitch stream but the software didn't exist yet.

I just wanted pet slimes moving on my screen while I streamed, and I knew the technology was possible.

So I started with Python, pymunk (chipmunk physics), and pygame, realized that pygame couldn't do transparent windows, neither does TKinter, then Pyglet failed me hard with their messed up documentation and community so I ended up finally accepting I would have to use PyQt5 and it just worked until...

Using PyQt opengl widget I could achieve per pixel transparency and capture on OBS , I did click through and used a mouse library to track clicks outside the QT window, but then my new bottleneck became the pymunk library.

Handling physics was a nightmare because doing anything took way too much effort and that library loves to just crash stop and burn the runtime anytime it doesn't like something, for example anytime I removed shapes bodies or constraints that were already removed (multiple instances remembering each other and trying to detach separate) it would crash. Or trying to figure out which slime collision, because you can't easily put our take info from pymunk physics space, so I had to just iterate==everything to check which slime is touching what every frame and that is O^n which is not good.

Once I gave up on the increasing complexity and difficulty of these simple base systems I slowly troubleshooted my way into trying Godot. Video tutorials showed me that you can do transparent click through windows (unity and unreal cannot), you can do soft body easier with a much easier physics engine handling (probably the biggest reason at this point), and I never even tried the twitch integration but I already know it's gonna be easier too.

My actual game idea will require unreal as I love blueprints and specific features, but I also fell in love with Godot for anything else. ❤️

I can't wait to have 2D pet slimes in Godot, (if you think about it, slimes are actually just fantasy snails 🦠🐌👀)

Pretty much echoing what everyone else has said, but it really is the perfect hobbyist engine! GDScript for those familiar with python or just plain new to programming, with C# available to those migrating from unity (like me); open-source & free; the fact that it's all self-contained is nice; extremely lightweight, both on storage and memory; and, for me, the fact that it's got the foundation behind it, pushing out new features at a really quick pace.

The biggest reasons for me were the size of the executable, the fact that they didn't have any stipulations for how much revenue they were going to take from you if you became successful, and there was a really nice top-down RPG tutorial akin to Legend of Zelda:A Link to the past that kind of got me into the basics quickly.

There was a lot of commentary about it on HackerNews as well, regarding the size of the executable. As it stands, if I wanted to create an Android app for something, I might as well just pick up Godot and do it through there than trying to spin up a 'normal' android development environment.

Additionally, I wanted cross-platform compatibility. It gave me desktop, mobile, and web all in one package...truly an impressive feat for something that's only like, what...20mb? I've got people taking pictures larger than this and somehow Godot manages to be really focused on keeping that executable small.

Oh, and Godot programming language is so close to Python that I felt like I didn't even have to pick anything up...everything was intuitive and well documented as well. Truly amazed at Godot...

I like godot because it loads fast, it has a built in code editor and i like gdscript

The main thing that fascinates me about Godot is how much functionality comes straight out of the box! Nearly every typical utility function is implemented, you have a ton of specific utility nodes like the VisibilityNotifier or TabContainer, and it's just really fast to create prototypes and test stuff out. My absolute favorite part is how smooth and robust the UI system is! It takes a little while to get used to, but I love how I can theme certain reusable components and easily hook up functionality to controls.