Godot is a lot of fun to use and, in my opinion, may be the best platform available for teaching people how to program. Godot is very lightweight (~50mb) with no dependencies, it is completely open source under the MIT License, it supports both 2d and 3d game development, and its scripting language is python-esque.

I think all of those things are excellent reasons for beginners to use Godot. However, that isn’t to say Godot doesn’t suit advanced programmers. Godot supports several programming languages including C, C++, and C#, you can crack into the engine and make changes yourself if you run into any problems, and there are a ton of open source projects using Godot that you can look at to get a feel for the engine.

The biggest benefit for me, personally, is performance. Godot can run on very low end machines. Unity and Unreal take a lot of system resources which is not very helpful when I’m doing a lot of my work on a laptop with a duo core from a few years ago.

You can download Godot here for free.

Once Godot is downloaded unzip it wherever you’d like. It should just be a single executable. Double click the executable to launch the engine. From this point you can just start making games. I love the simplicity.

I will be working on a simple metroidvania tutorial here on my blog over time. I kind of hope to release the whole thing all at once so it might be a bit before it goes live.