Why Godot 4 Is the Best Engine for Your First Game

You want to make a game. You've watched the trailers, played the indie hits, maybe even sketched out an idea on paper. Now comes the question every beginner faces: which engine do I pick?

Unity, Unreal, Godot, GameMaker — the options are overwhelming. After teaching hundreds of students, here's my honest take: Godot 4 is the best place to start. Not because it's perfect for every project, but because it gets you building real things faster than anything else.

This matters more than you think. Unity's pricing changes in 2023 shook the entire indie community. Unreal takes a royalty cut once you earn enough. Godot? MIT license. Forever free. No revenue share, no subscription, no sudden policy changes.

You own every line of code you write, and the engine itself is open-source. That's not just a nice philosophy — it means thousands of developers are fixing bugs and adding features without a corporate roadmap getting in the way.

Most engines organize your game with entities, components, prefabs, or actors. Godot uses scenes and nodes — and it clicks immediately.

A scene is just a tree of nodes. A Player scene might look like this:

CharacterBody3D (Player)
├── CollisionShape3D
├── MeshInstance3D (Model)
├── AnimationPlayer
└── Camera3D

That Player scene can then be instanced inside your World scene, your Arena scene, or anywhere else. Scenes are both the building blocks and the final product. Once you get this, you get Godot.

GDScript looks like Python but it's purpose-built for games. No boilerplate, no header files, no semicolons to forget. Here's a complete movement script:

extends CharacterBody3D

@export var speed := 5.0
@export var jump_force := 8.0

func _physics_process(delta: float) -> void:
    var input := Input.get_vector("left", "right", "forward", "back")
    velocity.x = input.x * speed
    velocity.z = input.y * speed

    if not is_on_floor():
        velocity.y -= 20.0 * delta
    elif Input.is_action_just_pressed("jump"):
        velocity.y = jump_force

    move_and_slide()

That's it. Twelve lines and you have 3D movement with gravity and jumping. Try doing that in Unreal's C++ — you'd still be setting up the project.

Unreal Engine needs 50+ GB of disk space and a beefy GPU to run the editor smoothly. Godot's editor is under 100 MB. It runs on a five-year-old laptop. It starts up in seconds.

This isn't a minor point. When you're learning, friction kills momentum. If your engine takes two minutes to launch and chugs at 15 FPS in the editor, you'll stop opening it. Godot stays out of your way so you can focus on actually making the game.

Communication between nodes is one of the hardest things for beginners to learn in game development. Godot solves it with signals — a built-in observer pattern.

# In your HealthComponent
signal health_changed(new_health: int)
signal died

func take_damage(amount: int) -> void:
    health -= amount
    health_changed.emit(health)
    if health <= 0:
        died.emit()

Other nodes connect to these signals, and everything stays decoupled. No spaghetti references, no global managers — just clean communication.

Game dev communities can be intimidating. Godot's is genuinely helpful. The official Discord is active, the subreddit is supportive, and the documentation gets better every month.

Because the engine is open-source, the community has a real stake in making it succeed. People contribute tutorials, plugins, and fixes because they care about the project — not because they're selling you something.

Being honest here — Godot isn't the right choice for everything:

• AAA 3D graphics: Unreal still dominates for photorealistic rendering
• Console ports: The export pipeline for Switch/PlayStation is still maturing
• Massive open worlds: Streaming and LOD systems are improving but not best-in-class
• Job market: Most studios use Unity or Unreal, so if you're targeting employment at a large studio, factor that in

But for indie games, game jams, prototypes, and learning? Godot 4 is hard to beat.

Here's what I recommend:

1. Download Godot 4 from godotengine.org — grab the standard version, not .NET unless you specifically want C#
2. Make something small — a player that moves, shoots, and collects items. Not your dream game. A tiny project you can finish in a weekend
3. Follow a structured path — jumping between random YouTube tutorials leads to scattered knowledge. Pick a course that builds one complete project from start to finish
4. Read the docs — Godot's official docs are genuinely good. Keep them bookmarked

If you want a structured, gamified path through Godot 4, that's exactly what we built here at Coding Quests. Every course builds a real system — inventory, combat, AI, save/load — and you level up your character while you learn.

The best engine is the one that gets you making games. For most beginners, that's Godot 4. Stop researching, start building.