There is a chance that you do not intend to use games to tell your stories, to convey your messages or to help with training and simulations in your company. But you should keep an eye on what is happening with Godot, currently the best Free Open-Source game engine available, appearing in more and more published games and game jams around.

This new iteration took +3 years of hard work, they added a myriad of technical features: improved performance and multithreading, better shading and lighting, bringing Godot closer to the big engines. You can check the novelties here: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-0-sets-sail/

Video FOG

But I think the most important features are the ones that make it easier for you to get your game going. There are many improvements to the editor allowing you to find the things you need faster, organizing better your workspace, a new 3D importing tool giving you more control over your cool Blender designs, better support to use Git version control and more options to start your project.

One of my favourite changes is the new 2D Level Editor built from the ground up. It makes your workflow a lot easier, and I think it deserves its own article (I am also curious to see if it works well if I import from LDTK).

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If you have a project going on with Godot 3.5, and you need features from Godot 4, keep in mind that a lot has changed, and the waters are uncharted. I tried to convert the 10 minutes game we did here in the past, and I will need to tweak some things for the game to be playable. I also experienced a few crashes.

But if you want to get your feet wet, currently, you can download it from their page. Or on Steam, by changing the properties to switch to the beta on 4.0. Probably at the time you read this it will reach the main branch on Steam, and hit Flatpak and Distro repositories.

Other popular engines usually ship their new versions with a demo project highlighting new features, this time I am thrilled that GDQuest made this showcase project where you can test all the new features at once! Found here: https://github.com/gdquest-demos/godot-4.0-new-features - you just need to download it and import it as a new project in Godot.

Video Demo

The only feature I still miss that is quite common in other engines are simple starting points to your project, with ready to use assets. For example, being able to start the project with a 3D third person game template. A basic scene with a camera and a controllable character over some 3D terrain would be set.

There are still ways to get a quick start, like we did in the 10 minutes game. And it fills my heart with joy to see how much Godot has improved since I first used it. Please let me know in the comments what Godot feature you would like us to deep dive!