Moving from Godot to Unreal, without the holy war
When I first opened Unreal Engine, I expected it to be hard. I expected to suffer and learn C++. That wasn't part of my plan.
After several months in Godot, switching engines felt almost insane. New interface, new principles, new tools.
But what happened wasn't what I expected.
On the very first day I put together a scene that finally looked like the game I'd been picturing in my head for months. Crooked, a bit ugly in places — but alive. And that feeling turned out to matter a lot.
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I don't want to turn this into another engine comparison.
Godot is a great tool. In fact, I still think it's perfect for an enormous number of projects. If I were making a small 2D game or a compact indie project, I'd probably pick it again. I'm actually still using it for a couple of smaller things that are growing out of game jam leftovers into real little games.
But Windfall turned out to be a different kind of game.
It's built around atmosphere, open space, light, fog, nature, the feeling of travelling. And that's where I kept catching myself spending more effort fighting the tools than building the world. Making a landscape that felt alive would tank the framerate. It was disheartening — if I was already wrestling with performance at this early stage, what would happen once the game actually started to find its voice and weight? Would I burn out and abandon it? That thought gave me chills.
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When I opened Unreal, something strange happened. Instead of spending weeks setting up the basics, I almost immediately started doing the thing I'd wanted to make this game for in the first place.
I built the landscape and placed trees. Set up light that made the world look right at sunset. Made bog fog, a wide lake framed with reeds and birches. Got the donkey and cart moving.
And for the first time in a long while, I didn't want to close the editor after a couple of hours. I wanted to keep experimenting.
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The easiest mistake to make here would be concluding that one engine is better than the other.
I think the takeaway is different.
Sometimes the problem isn't that you're bad at this. It isn't that you're not trying hard enough. Sometimes you just picked a tool that doesn't fit the particular problem you're trying to solve.
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Looking back, I don't regret the time I spent with Godot. Quite the opposite.
That's where I learned to see game development as a system rather than a set of pretty pictures. I built my first prototypes, made plenty of mistakes, and came to understand what Windfall should actually be. A lot of the ideas that are now central to the game took shape in that Godot project. Sadly, many of them were born out of frustration rather than joy — I had to cut my ambitions down just to get something working at all, even in a stripped-down form.
And maybe the most important decision in all this wasn't which engine to use.
It was being willing to admit that my original choice had stopped helping me move forward. Not being afraid to make a mistake, and giving myself permission to try again.
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There's still an enormous amount of work ahead.
The world is only starting to take shape. Characters, animation, systems, sound, optimisation, and a few hundred tasks I don't even know about yet.
But for the first time in a long while, I have a very simple feeling.
I want to open the project tomorrow.
And that, I think, is the clearest sign I've finally found the right tool.
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P.S. I really do love Godot. Nothing extra, everything in its place. I'm just saving it for my other projects — no less interesting, no less dear to me.