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The original was posted on /r/godot by /u/raikori on 2024-10-16 02:29:03+00:00.
Hi everyone! We wanted to share our experience working on a commercial 3D game with Godot. The game is called Take Cover Now and will be shipping later this year after some brief production delays! (grr, hurricanes)
The majority of our team members are artists, first and foremost. I’m the most experienced programmer on the team, clocking in at about 12 years of experience in everything from Java to Lua to C++ to the lovely C#, which is what we’re using for this project.
Take Cover Now was originally prototyped between 2021 and 2022 as a small game meant to take place in a single room - the guts were there, but ultimately I lost interest in the concept. Around that time, Unity began looking like less and less of an appealing option to build a studio on: it was always my goal to go commercial and build my own company, rather than making myself enticing to recruiters. With that in mind, I decided to go all-in on learning Godot, and I’m so glad I did!
I see quite a few posts bashing on Godot’s ability to create compelling commercial and - especially - 3D projects. We wanted to make this post to show that yes, Godot can do 3D, and yes, it is capable of outputting an acceptable result in a commercial context.
These are screenshots from the original demo of Take Cover Now, built in Unity, circa late 2021 to early 2022.
As you can see, it looks quite alright: the hallmarks of our visual style today are there. I was a less skilled 3D artist at the time, so some things are worse, but you get the idea!
These are screenshots from the current build of Take Cover Now, built in Godot 4.3, throughout 2024.
This looks a lot better! I’m a more skilled 3D artist now, but more important is that I took the time to learn the tools and how to get the best results out of them.
Performance is stellar! The game runs with an acceptable framerate on even the weakest hardware I can find with integrated graphics and low memory. The performance cost to achieve the result we have is negligible - and no, the lighting is not baked. It’s all in real time using built in technologies like SDFGI!
As for other issues mentioned in some other posts, I can happily say we haven’t found anything of the sort at all. Our game uses Godot’s native save and resource system, and while they do have something of a learning curve, they are very powerful once you grasp them!
For version control, we use Git + LFS, which integrates cleanly into a Godot workflow.
All told, Godot has been a wonderful engine for us to work with in 3D and in a commercial context. Would love to hear any more positive stories in the comments, as we think Godot gets a bad rap for 3D that it doesn’t deserve!