(Originally posted on Mastodon)

I’m currently experimenting with the Godot game engine, and I find it very interesting. I vaguely remember trying it out a few month (years?) ago, and didn’t keep a good memory, but either it improved, or maybe I didn’t try hard enough back then 🤔

Anyway, I could stitch a few assets from various sources together and got this after a few hours of work.

Screen capture of a landcape textured with grass and rocks, with distant mountains fading in a light haze, under a blue sky with a few white clouds. The viewpoint is at ground level, behind a white cylinder that represents the player character.

This is a fully dynamic voxel terrain, it’s possible to dig or add matter anywhere at run-time, and it also handles LODs.

I’m impressed by the work made on the voxel library https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel, including the documentation!

There is still a lot of work to add foliage (but they have already a system for that), handle more varied textures, add water (rivers and lakes) and so on, but this is already a great starting point!

Most assets I use are not made by me and are usually placeholders, because I want to focus on gameplay, not art, but I still need to work with something that can be looked at.

Now about the rationale of switching from Unreal Engine to Godot (which I still haven’t really decided)… it’s mostly related to licenses. Godot is free software, Unreal is not. The other reason is that Unreal is much bigger and complex (which is an issue during development too). I’m at a point in the project where it’s still possible to switch, even if it already means a lot of additional work.