Alan Thorn - Moving from Unity to Godot: An In-Depth Handbook to Godot for Unity Users

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5907-8 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Congratulations on joining me to take an exciting journey, one that moves from Unity to the Godot engine. Godot is a completely free, open source, and cross-platform engine thats making amazing strides and progress. Godot can make 2D and 3D games, and it can be used for other products like visualizations, Movie Previz, historical recreations, and more. In the competitive climate of game development, where new tools and technologies are continually reshaping the landscape, and challenging established norms, it can be difficult knowing which tools to learn or to trust in. Every software, it seems, has its rise and fall. Its difficult knowing which one represents the actual future and who is just a passing fad. But your decisions about which software to use are crucial for your business and your success. Your choice of engine influences your future. It influences how quickly and easily you can work, which platforms your end product can target, and which tools you can integrate with.

One reason so many people today are switching from Unity to Godot, or at least considering the switch, is because Godot represents a vision and a promise, a free engine thats open source and community driven, an engine thats easy to use and reliable, and an engine thats open about its development road map.

One of the historic fears surrounding the use of any game engine as opposed to making your own engine was its closed and proprietary nature, that it would keep you locked into specific ecosystems and to specific agendas led by companies and parties outside of your own business. And until recently, you never really had much choice if you wanted to make a professional-grade game. You had to lock yourself to a closed engine driven by people behind closed doors. But Godot changes that, and thats why its an especially important engine today. It represents an opportunity to make games on very different terms. And with the outstanding success of other open source tools, like Blender, we have every reason to feel excited for the future of Godot. Im truly glad youre going to join me on this journey.