Trombonest VR: My First Godot App

I’m done developing the first version of Trombonest and hope to launch it soon.

In the meantime, I’m prototyping new features that I think will be cool in the near-future and coming up with a prototype of the the next instrument I’ll release.

Initially I had planned to release 1 app every month this year, but it looks like I finished Trombonest about 3 weeks into February so who knows if I’ll be able to keep to that.

I learned a couple of things on this project:

Cost of Platform Switching

There is a constant cost to switching platforms. Mastery happens when you choose one platform and stick to it.

I felt the same when I made McHoops as my first native Swift/RealityKit.

There’s like 2-6 weeks of banging your head at the wall because every platform has like 20-30 gotchas which are obvious for the people writing tutorials.

Like the Remote Debug button in quest looks like a screen so I manually installed my app via adb install for the first few days.

I don’t want to switch platforms anymore.

Readable Metadata is Invaluable

Unity has those .meta files which are completely unreadable. I just checked them in without knowing what’s going on.

Every .tscn file in Godot is just a text file because the Godot developers don’t have anything to hide.

I iterate faster with Godot than Unity. I get stuck less since I can tell what changes in a scene in each commit.

Godot Beats Unity

Unity often has N ways to do some common task. There’s two ways to implement UIs that I know of. Godot has one.

There may not be a rich addon ecosystem in Godot so I might end up writing some code from scratch, but it feels damn good to not have to worry about my engine going rogue.