Match Up ported to Godot

With all the drama surrounding Unity lately it seemed like a good time to port some Noble Whale assets over to Godot.

The obvious place to start was with Match Up, since it is the simplest of our plugins. A great way to ease in to a new engine. When all was said and done the whole process only took a few days, including creating the example scene and documentation. Godot was a real pleasure to work in. I especially enjoyed the gdscript language and the tight integration between the code and editor.

It was a bit confusing at first figuring out the process of creating a plugin for Godot (there isn't much of one) coming from Unity where the expectation is a first-party asset store and publisher portal. Mostly though it was just a matter of getting used to the Godot editor and way of doing things.

I do sincerely wish that Godot had their own official Asset Store though. It would be much more ideal for us asset developers who would rather not be buried in all the other non-Godot stuff on itch.io, and it would be a great source of revenue for the Godot devs to use to push the engine forward. I know there's been some talk of it in the past, here's hoping that with the renewed interest in the engine we'll one day see a first-party asset store!

The loose typing and streamlined async in gdscript really helped to simplify the plugin code, with the end result being significantly less code than the Unity version of Match Up with no loss in functionality. You love to see it.

We didn't get to experience much of the deeper or more game-focused aspects of the engine yet, which is a shame, but from what I've seen so far I am impressed with usability, stability, and performance. We did get a small taste of the networking though which has got us excited to bring more of our multiplayer assets to Godot in the near future, including Smooth Sync and Noble Connect.

I hope bringing these assets to the Godot ecosystem will assist developers in the often harrowing task of creating multiplayer games. There's a lot to take on, and it helps to have an experienced hand to navigate the rough seas! Ahoy

-Sir Reginald Whalebottom