A Trip From Unity to Godot in Enterprise

By Dinesh Kumar

As anyone who knows the Lumanorth team will know, we began our software careers in gaming.

We had the pleasure of working on some amazing games titles with stand-out graphics and gameplay including Forza Horizon, Ferrari Challenge and NASCAR.

During that time, most of the programming was done using a custom game engine - public game engines weren't widely available, but Unity changed that. 

When we later moved on to more diverse projects, which included the development of our first games series for enterprise - we chose Unity for its flexibility and low barrier to entry.

Gaming for Enterprise

Game engines make for an ideal platform for creating realistic scenarios, making it an obvious choice for delivering employee training programs.

We had the privilege to develop a series of simulated workplace environments and play-throughs for a prominent fast-food restaurant chain - one that had golden arches in the logo. 

We also developed a number of projected table top games for the same client - keeping children entertained while in the restaurant.

We used Unity almost exclusively for these projects.

Godot in Enterprise

At the time, the Godot was getting more and more mature. It had grown into a stable platform, and had a developed robust governance structure reminiscent of large successful open source platforms.

This gave us the confidence we needed to try Godot in one project to evaluate it. We picked one of our table games as it was a small self-contained project that we could evaluate with little risk.

In our use case, we found we could build what we needed with less add-ons and extensions that Unity. Our table games were fairly simple, and having less dependencies on external code meant we were future proofing. The engine being tiny as well, meant we could check it in with source control - try doing that with Unity or Unreal!

We were really pleased with our experience, and plan to use Godot in this particular use case a lot more.

The right tool for the job

I can't stress the importance of using the right tool for the job - we strongly believe this in Lumanorth. We don't make idealistic decisions here, everything is balanced with the development experience, commercial outcomes, and longevity of the project.

Godot isn't something we'd use for a very large scale CAD -> VR project - it just isn't the right tool for the job (yet!) but it for our smaller, more self contained projects - its a no brainer!

For more information contact helo@lumanorth.com