Why Build an Application in Godot, Much Less a SUITE of them?!

Greetings, fellow masoch– erm, I mean DEVS!

A question for you all: why build an app in Godot? Not “why pick it for games?” That part makes sense, but why pick it for creating a desktop application? Why not just use Electron, or Tauri, or React Native, or any of the actual app-dev frameworks that normal people use? The short answer, dear reader?

It wasn’t entirely planned.

The Accidental Framework

Back in 2025, I was trying to learn Godot. I had a background in development, specifically mobile application development, and I was then, as I am now, working in cybersecurity. But, *who cares, no big deal, I want mooooooooore….”

Yeah, it do be like that sometimes with gamedev, finding your feet like a newborn babe...

I wanted to build games. So I started checking things out. I was already familiar with Unity and Unreal from the games I was currently enjoying. I knew I wanted to focus on 2D development, so that left Unreal out. Unity was the standard, but this was around the time that the C-suite team at Unity was absolutely shitting the bed as far as licensing went, and I knew I wasn’t going to support a platform that could potentially try to screw me in the future. I did take a look at other platforms like Gamemaker and Gdevelop because I was learning to build tiny prototypes, wrapping my head around signals and the UI framework. And somewhere in that mess, I realized Godot was… perfect for me.

I was seeing tons of content showcasing other devs building incredible games and things in Godot because the UI was surprisingly robust. Container layouts, theme systems, built-in animation, input handling that’s relatively easy to configure? Not only was it open-source, which I absolutely loved, but was good enough that I didn’t need to struggle too hard to learn the system to build the things I was thinking of. And if you know anything about my brain, you know I was already all over the place.

Pictured: the thought process of the average ADHD brain

Built for Game Development, by a Game Developer

This is the thing, however, that mattered most to me: Godot is a game engine. And I realized I wanted tools to solve game development problems. Godot understands assets, you know, the actual things game developers work with? When I built Vault’s Animated Sprite preview, I didn’t have to write a completely custom preview solution. Godot’s AnimatedSprite2D node already had much of it covered. When I built the audio preview, AudioStreamPlayer awas similarly easy to setup and use. I didn’t import and manage libraries; I just used what was already there. It was like that white room scene in the Matrix: almost everything I needed right when I needed it.

Open Source Philosophy

The fact that Godot is open-source was another big part of it. Godot being MIT-licensed meant freedom, and that was one of the most appealing things about it to me. No corporate fuckery and the entirety of the game engine is available to change as you need to. If something breaks, you can read the source. If something’s missing, you can build it yourself or use a GDExtension. Ultimately, idea that Godot doesn’t own me and doesn’t want to became a crucial element in deciding to use it.

The Challenge

Lastly, to be perfectly honest, I wanted the challenge. Building an app in a game engine is harder than wrapping a web page in Electron. You have to think about so many details that you wouldn’t necessarily think of any other way. But it’s also more interesting. An Electron app is a browser with extra steps. I wanted to build something that felt like the kind of software I grew up with: real, local, powerful. I wanted to build something I could be proud of, something that would test my skills. Creating Vault, and ultimately the whole ARCANA Suite, became that challenge for me over time.

All this is pretty cool, right? I thought so, but what I WASN’T prepared for were the roadblocks I ran into doing this project. That led to a pretty substantial list of cons to choosing Godot as my application engine that I think are pretty handy, but we’ll split up for the purpose of this article. Next time, we’ll talk about the negative aspects of choosing Godot as the engine of choice and some ways I overcame them that might be useful to you.

More devlogs on ARCANA’s development, Vault, and the rest of the suite at arcanagds.com. Keep your heads on a swivel, your noses to the grindstone, and keep building!

— Plasmatix, Plasmatix Digital Game Studios