I'm in the middle of moving my whole pipeline over to Godot 4, starting with SASS. This isn't really a SASS post, it's a studio one. Every game I build from here on, the character systems, the tools, the way I structure a project on day one, all of it is shifting onto this foundation. I've been meaning to write about why for a while, so here it is.
The practical stuff
I'm one person and I feel like Godot is built for that. GDScript is simple enough that I can open code I wrote ages ago and still understand it right away. The editor opens fast. There's no license to think about, no revenue number I have to track in the back of my head. For a one person studio, all of that adds up more than people expect.
Why independence matters to me
I don't want my studio's foundation tied to one company's roadmap. Godot is built and maintained by an open community. That means the direction of the engine is shaped by the people actually using it to make games, a lot of them solo devs and small teams just like me. There's something steadying about that. I'm not waiting to see what a company decides next. I get to decide what I build next.
It also means I'm part of something bigger than my own project. Every bug report, every plugin I contribute back, every tutorial I write, it feeds a tool the whole indie community shares and improves together. That's a different relationship than being a customer of an engine. It's closer to being a citizen of one.
The style actually fits
I'm not chasing AAA fidelity. The games I make look a lot closer to what Nintendo does than what a big budget studio does, stylized, hand crafted, character over horsepower. SASS leans on a painted look specifically, and Godot's shader workflow made it easier to get that texture quality without fighting the engine's defaults the whole way there. I don't need an engine built for photorealism. I need one built for making something feel handmade, and that's exactly where Godot is strongest.
Owning what I build
This is the quieter one, but honestly the one that stuck with me longest. I build worlds I want to hand to my kids someday, not assets that live partway inside someone else's platform or economy. With Godot, what I make is mine, full stop. Just my code, my art, my project.
Where that leaves me
None of this makes Godot the objectively correct choice for everyone. It's a smaller community, fewer of the AAA scale features are battle tested, and there's real stuff you have to build yourself that a bigger engine hands you for free. I've hit walls a bigger engine would've solved in an afternoon. But it's a foundation I control, built by an open community instead of a single company's roadmap, and for a studio that's just me and a very long list of stories I want to tell, that trade has been worth it.
- Mikey