1w ago

What game engine is the best for my laptop? and good for a total beginner?

Not sure if this goes her because im new to lemmy, but i have a snapdragon plus laptop, 16 ram, no gpu, i got this laptop recently when it was on sale for portability and because chromebooks are bad.

I want to get into gamedev and explore both 2d and 3d but im unsure what to try with my laptop as a newcomer not knowing much?

What would you suggest and why so? i need the simplest of the simple.

36 comments

Pay attention to Godot: very low entry requirements to the user, but still it is a universal engine that does not limit you in what you're writing.
- I’ll second godot.
  One of the hard things when getting started is trying to cobble together all the tools you need, and godot packages good enough solutions for everything you need to get started.
  It’s very approachable and the docs are pretty incredible. The docs cover a huge range of information, there are step by step tutorials and all the reference information you need. The thing I was surprised by was how much else they had, there’s an entire section of vector and matrix math and it’s all from the point of view of game dev so it’s just what you need to know.
  You don’t have to read it all upfront, but it’s really nice to have a resource you can go back to when you start wanting to dig a bit deeper and have this amazing resource freely available and written specifically for the engine you are using.
- This. It runs great on most hardware, I was using it on my 2018 laptop with integrated graphics + 8gb of ram until a few months ago (when I upgraded to 16gb)
- If one doesn't like Godot, there's always Redot, which is a well-known Godot fork that adds some of the things the Godot devs took out.
  
  And it has added nothing the devs put in since the last 3 months hahahhaha.
  Don't use Redot. It's an abandoned rage fork.
  
  Isn't that the fork where their selling point was "non-woke Godot" that has been mostly just a laughing stock for the community? Or am I mistaking it for something else? Not implying that it's still the case, it has been a long time since I saw it.
  Last time I checked, (which was probably a year ago or so), they were mostly just pulling upstream changes without much development, aside from replacing some keywords. I'm curious, do you know what did they change or add? Honest question, haven't followed any of their development.
  
  Redot is the non developed fork of Godot, with now... less features than Godot.
  It was also created by basically queer hating fascists, whose angle is how Redot is not political actually, which they explain in a like 10 minute video about how nonpolitical it is, going over all the politics they don't like.
  ... They also do not even know how to pronounce Godot, thus they are basically pronouncing Redot wrong.
  God-oh, Goh-doh, thats how you say Godot. Its name comes from a famous Beckett play, 'Waiting for Godot'.
  Sorta like Django, the t is silent.
  But of course, these people are literally uncultured, and think its Go-dot, thus Re-dot.
  
  Things such as? I went searching and only found the drama, that they're trying to make their own engine, and that somebody made a fork of Redot as well.
  If they don't like Godot (and if add-ons etc don't help) a fork probably won't address that. I'd sooner believe some web engine (less setup, perhaps easier systems) or framework (if they don't mind lacking an editor, also easier to work with bindings) might be a better direction at least for starting out.
  Some options might also make sense if they're interested in a particular language, or even a particular type of game.

Godot.
Totally opensource, totally free, 2D and 3D, being actively further developed and refined all the time.
I can develop on Godot on a Steam Deck... theoretically, you should be able to run Godot on another ... non standard pc hardware configuration? Both a Deck and a Snapdragon laptop use shared LPDDR5 RAM, as ... well Valve calls it an APU, Snapdragon calls it an NPU, basically, the CPU and GPU just literally are the same physical chip.
Only downside I can think of is that Godot might not be 'the simplest of simple'.
If you want... even more simple...
... maybe consider LÖVE / LÖVR.
Balatro was made in the 2D only LÖVE, and LÖVR is basically the 3D version of it.
Its all buuilt off of LuaJIT, which means its basically all coded in Lua, a bit simpler and easier to understand than the python-like GDScript of Godot, and that Lua basically just gets automagically converted into C(++?), via the built in LuaJIT compiler.
Uh, tl:dr; LÖVE / LÖVR are probably? the simplest and easiest way to do 2D and 3D as a beginner, Godot is a bit more fleshed out, but also more complicated, both are totally open source and free to use.

+1 on Godot as it provides builds for your CPU (you will have headaches with that)
Other option is pico-8 or some JavaScript library to run in a browser.

Gotod will definitely be a better choice all-together, but I'd also recommend looking into some of the smaller fantasy consoles like TIC-80 (or PICO-8, but that one's not free), if that's something that'd interest you.
It's fun to work with, and it's as lightweight as it can get. It does lock you into a particular style, and you probably don't want to do 3D with it (not that it's impossible, just needlessly hard).
It does have some limitations in place, which might not be for everyone, but the point is to experiment with smaller projects and have fun, with a small set of features. It will definitely teach you a lot, but it might be a little bit harder to get into, compared to other full-featured modern editors like Godot. If that's something you're interested in, I highly recommend it, it's my favorite engine for side projects and game-jams.
Here's how it looks in action:
)
- ... I am going to call it 'Gotod' now, lol.
  Makes me think of some kind of rejected DBZ character.

Do you know how to program, or are you trying to learn? That's a big factor in what I would suggest.

I don't know if this is the sort of answer you're looking for (or if even all that pleasantly viable with no GPU), ~ almost certainly not what you set out looking for, in fact, but, it's the only answer springing to mind [Edit: Except also flare]:
Pioneer Space Sim
It's open source, actively developed, and lots of opportunity to poke around in. Although not just a game dev engine, still may be a fun educational and productive experience.
An oddball answer for consideration on the side at least. ;)

My vote also goes for Godot. Godot is the "new Unity" and it has a lot of resources to help beginners get started. It is free so you can try it with no worries and take some other option if you don't like it. But if you are just starting game development there is "no wrong answer". You should just select one engine and try to finish a game with it.

Raylib. Great amount of examples. Many bindings so you are not tied to a programming language.
- This is an actual good suggestion that deserves more visibility.
  The whole family of RayLib stuff is pretty dang impressive.

The engine doesn't matter too much.
The problems and how you solve them are usually sort of the same, in terms of 2d and 3d. Meaning:
If you're doing a 2d platformer or a 3d platformer, you will still need to thing about colliding with the floor and the solution will be similar too. For art, it's the same. if you start from scratch, learning 2d art and learning 3d art is both new to you. But you will have animations in both and engines usually just use some "playanimation" function. So 2d vs. 3d is completely up to you and what you want to make.
I can recommend pygame and panda3d if you like python. They're not new engines and they're "code only". Other engines give you an editor, but I prefer the "code only" approach, because there are no hidden settings that you have to search for in the GUI, it's just code.
But the other engines like godot and unity have a ton of learning material too, so that's probably easier to get started with.

The OS will be your limiting factor here. Chromebooks I think lack support from most game engines for development. The industry standard is x64 with Windows.
That said if you can install Windows or preferably Linux you’ll have more options. From a search though. Game maker, and Unity don’t support Arm and Linux, while Unreal Engine 5 and ~~GoDot~~ Godot appear to support it.
Maybe in Windows you can get Gamemaker or Unity to work through compatibility. But honestly ~~GoDot~~ Godot seems to be the safest bet to get it to work.
- I think its just Godot, not GoDot
  
  God Ot

The "simplest of the simple" for your case might be developing in Javascript with something like Phaser, ImpactJS, PixiJS or MelonJS; BabylonJS if you want to try 3D. But these are frameworks, not proper engines, so you'll be doing a lot of coding, but at least what you make should run on any browser. One interesting thing to note is that older JS libraries like Impact^[The creator of Impact went on to make Q1K3, a "demake" of Quake in 13kb of javascript, which includes textures. Reading the "post-mortem" is an amazing look into size optimization] or KiwiJS aren't necessarily "worse", their main problem will be lack of support and learning material.
If you don't know programming, or if your skill is too low, take this opportunity to get better at it, learn to transform your idea into logical sequences that the computer understands. Learn programming, rely the least you can on external libraries and frameworks, and the engine and language become the least of your concerns, because you'll have a solid base to use any.

Pico 8 is pretty fun if you like pixel art. Plus lots of examples.

I would not recommend Godot for a beginner. Not only is it complex to use, it does things very differently from most other game engines, even using its own custom programming language. I don't see a beginner succeeding with Godot. The ideal user for Godot is a realtively experienced Unity or Unreal user who is fed up with their bullshit.
I would recommend Game Maker, Construct, GDevelop, RPG Maker.
Game development involves a lot of different skillsets, and you don't necessarily need to learn everything yourself. That hard part is figuring out which role you want to play in the industry.
- even using its own custom programming language
  Just want to point out that you can use C# in Godot as well.
  
  Or C++ like the engine itself!
- GDScript is pretty much python with a few extra things and I disagree that the ideal user for Godot is "a realtively experienced Unity or Unreal user who is fed up with their bullshit." - it has a significantly smaller footprint on the dev's computer and also makes smaller executables
  RPG Maker is a trap to sell plugins that may or may not conflict with one another and may or may not make your game run like ass.

Never ever get into godot.
It's extremely complex for a beginner and extremely amateur for an advanced game designer.
Honestly it's a failed attempt to make a foss engine to compete with bigger non-foss game engines. Any sane game developer knows godot can't really compete with them actually.
Many people (those who never actually attempted to work beside tutorial projects) will disagree with me cause "open source = good".
- That sounds a little extreme
- You mention Raylib in another comment. I can definitely see that for anyone who wants a tilemap/pixel project or small-scope 3D... but even then it's likely to involve making boilerplate stuff, unless you can lean on libraries (which makes more sense if you know exactly what you're trying to make).
  I've really only tinkered with Godot TBH, but lots of things are easy to do in the editor that would be something manual in Raylib. Considering both have bindings capability, Godot makes a lot of sense for the systems it has.
  Even with my difficulty I'm not sure what's "complex" about Godot, I would agree some systems need more work (nobody stepping up, some requests rejected for being 'too niche') but that is something else entirely. Is the "complex" part that you want a framework rather than an engine?
  Also "competing" is odd when one is free (and easy to run) while the other is trying to screw over its users. I would say it competes as much as it needs to. Any sane game developer probably isn't attempting to make a questionably-large-scope game. Especially if they can't even run the questionably-big engine on their hardware.

36 comments