Thanks! It’s not easy being a dad and a developer. Often I just want to sit down and watch TV at the end of the day, or post nonsense on Blender Artists Forums, but I keep trying to drive myself forwards. 
Going off topic, but I do find making games (or even just overcoming a problem / creating a new feature) very refreshing as it keeps my brain sharp.
But time is precious! My one piece of advice is to have a pen and paper handy to jot down ideas and roughly sketch out concepts before even switching on the PC and Blender. As my old graphic design tutor would say ‘design on paper, create on computer’- its a great maxim and cuts out so much time wasted sat at the PC, especially on assets (or even Python to a lesser extent). You can also do this while looking after baby-I know with my second with those sleepless nights I would jot things down as she drifted back to sleep.
To mention, Godot is perhaps one of the only open source engines other than the BGE that offers a complete dev. environment with embedded world, shader, and script editing in one package (others like Jmonkey are actually multiple apps. and several others are just an API).
It’s pretty much the engine that the FOSS world has been waiting for, to be honest, the only real advantage that the BGE has left is that it’s embedded in Blender itself, but I don’t see why Godot can’t also have super-tight integration via an addon for the 3D part.
EDIT: I also just took a look at the new features page, it looks a LOT more professional now, all that’s missing is feature videos 
@Ace Dragon,
for me it is THE alternative! I really sold myself to godot. For me the bge is unused since february this year 
Of course there are some rough edges here and there… But all in all a great engine.
But I said this already
After hours and hours of trying to figure out how to get a functional scene, I finally did it.
It also took me a while to figure out why my test cube was not colliding with my instances, and I even did some node contortion by accident that corrupted the original test file, but now I have a rigid body cube colliding with another object 
(I was trying to figure out how the example files didn’t have spatial nodes everywhere for their object instances, but then I found the handy little tool to change one node type to another).
Godot scripting meanwhile has a few notable changes from Python, mainly that the types of the variables and values must be declared as they are initialized. You also need to have a main loop for all of your actual logic evaluation and have all your variables declared before that.
Once you figure that out, it’s much easier to get going with flexible logic driven by variables, this 8 way movement script with gravity for instance was not too hard to figure out once I got going.
Unlike the BGE’s character controller, the one that comes with Godot appears to just work as intended and with little to no bugs, in fact, I really can see the appeal in Godot now since it’s becoming likely that without development of the BGE, the only new things going in will be new bugs.
Something for Btolputt; I think you might find it interesting that the Godot people actually tried before to see how Lua would work as the scripting language
They also tried Squirrel and Python, but ultimately chose their own design because it would be more compact and tailor-made for the engine’s architecture.
That doesn’t mean the language is not extensive though, check the help file, tons of functions and methods in there, it also seems to borrow ideas from both Python and Lua as well so it shouldn’t be too foreign for people coming from those API’s.
I’m aware of their reasoning behind GDScript, I just don’t find it very compelling. I’ve been playing with, and talking to the developers of, Godot for a little while now. This isn’t an opinion coming from just a first glance 
Whilst I am fully sympathetic to their point regarding memory allocation & runtime performance characteristics of vectors & other mathematical variable types, the rest doesn’t strike me as having been looked into very hard. Lua (for example) can easily run snippets of code embedded in nodes, Lua can run in multiple threads without issue (I do it a lot), and the binding code for GDScript does not strike me as any simpler than toluac++.
I’m not saying GDScript is a bad language. It seems to do what it needs to quite well. I just don’t buy into the need for “yet another language” and have my doubts the memory/performance characteristics are going to even approach something like LuaJIT. For example, if GDScript can do something like this, I’ll be immensely surprised.
So after hours and hours you succeeded in getting two cubes to colide? I’m not exactly sold on the engine after hearing that.
The main reason I dropped unity so quick was because the interface was uncomfortable and at the time it seemed there was no easy way of customizing it (anyone know if that’s still the case?). It was very hard to do something which would take 5 minutes with blender.
I really love blender because of the rapid prototyping capabilities and the fact that anything I learn in python can be useful again in future. I’m not keen on spending time to learn a new language that can’t be used anywhere else, it’s like learning Welsh. A beautiful language and very elegant for talking to Welsh people but mostly useless elsewhere.
What is wrong with irrlicht?
Can someone just port over a UI for blender for it?
it looks to have almost everything we could want?
is it buggy? maintained?
codebase?
Can anything go back and forth between the engines?
ie logic sensor events, actuator data handles etc?
@ Ace Dragon
Once you get the design principles of godot you will notice how powerfull it is. I love the scene design. And that any nodes can be nested scenes within scenes! This can be very handy!
@ Smoking Mirror
I don’t what you are comparing here. Once you know the workflow of godot you can do this example within 5 minutes in godot too. I would like to know how fast you would have achieved this when you open blender for the first time But I don’t want to compare this here. Godot has a pipeline design which needs to be learned. Same goes for blender. And if starting this can take some time.
And the great plus of blender is, that it has its pipline all in one, no one argues that. Godot is a standalone 3d Engine which needs to use imported assets. But once you have them it is easy to work with them. And I think thats important. A better integration with blender would of course be nice though.
About scripting. I would say it is more important to learn scripting principles. And they are very similar to python. It has some different syntax here and there, but it is like learning to drive a car and then switch to another. Within a few days you are familiar to it 
Of course no one has to go with godot. I just can tell from my experience that it is worth a try
What I mean is that I’m used to the old Blender 2.4 controls, i.e. alt to rotate the view, shift-alt to pan, right click to select and left click to move. I can use ctrl c to center the view and my mouse wheel to zoom. I know all the keyboard shortcuts, but still find new functions even now, 7 years after I started using Blender;
You can recalculate roll, (Armature -> Bone Roll -> Recalculate Roll), or Ctrl+N
This can align bone roll to local or global space.
Yes, it did take some time to get used to Blender, just navigating around and adding objects and such, but after that I was quite comfortable with the way Blender operates. The controls seemed very intuitive and natural to me.
When I tried Unity It had a really uncomfortable arrangement of clicking and dragging, and the camera always seemed to be wrongly aligned. I couldn’t find any info on how to change the setup. There didn’t seem to be any concept of overlay scenes. It took me days and days to do nothing useful at all.
It’s like driving a modern automatic car and then trying to drive a model T-ford (which had a completely different pedal/throttle arrangement to modern cars).
Even moving from Blender 2.49b to Blender 2.69 was a headache for me to get used to because of little changes in the UI and the way meshes work (Delete edge loop doesn’t work like it ought to any more 
).
I know Ace dragon is an experienced Blender Artist (I remember when he was a cyborg ) and if it’s difficult for him, I doubt it’d be any easier for me. Is there any options in GODOT for custom world navigation and key bindings? how about overlay scenes?
If I was going to change engines I might go for something simple, still using Python, and more focused on 2D phone apps, which seems to be the most interesting area of games development at the moment.
I’ve had the following recommended to me in this regard:
[PYTHON]
Kivy(http://kivy.org/#home)
[LUA]
Moai (http://getmoai.com/)
Gideros (http://giderosmobile.com/)
Looking at example games in Kivy, it didn’t seem to be any more complex than what I’m already doing.
I’m not looking for a game engine that holds my hand all the time, with integrated particle systems or hard coded AI, or anything like that. On the other hand I’d like something that doesn’t seem to be kicking me in the teeth all the time either, like Unity was.
@Smoking_mirror
godot has the exact same rotate,pan and zoom shortcuts as blender.
middlemouse -> rotate
shift + middlemouse -> pan
ctrl + middlemouse -> zoom
About overlay scenes. Godot has a different approach about scenes. In godot you have so called nodes. Which are objects or whatever you like to call that entity. Alltogether this builds a scene. But every single node can be a subscene. This subscene can be imported as node and put into your outliner hierarchy.
So you can put as many scenes into your scene as you wish. Thats what I meant with nested scenes the post above. The tree hierarchy will set the draw order.
You can dynamically load new scenes. Or preload and then show them at certain times and create guis with that. Works great!
Currently I use godot for a mobile 2d Game. Exporting works like a charm. Once set up I have a one click deployment.
Godot may seem to be similar to unity. In some areas it may be, but all in all it has a different design approach which I like more.
I was just watching a basic tutorial using Godot and I have mixed feelings, it seems right now to be a slightly more refined version of Blender if I’m being honest, and I could not see (other than Godots faster development) any advantages over what Blender is now. My only envy of Godot as it stands is its text handling, it looks very easy and natural, and its common sense approach to organizing nodes/scenes.
In the end, it was all a matter of having not yet discovered a button in the UI (there’s not a whole lot of UI documentation yet). I needed the button to change the spatial node to a static body node, because spatial objects have no collision.
The documentation in general is not complete yet nor do they yet have a full walkthrough in creating a simple game, once they do then things should become a bit easier.
Anyway, I’m looking at Godot now since it seems like there’s more regressions coming into the BGE than new features and fixes nowadays (and the engine will continue to regress as long as development is at a virtual standstill). I know of BPR’s claims that he can workaround everything, but it’s possible that there will be one version where Wrectified just falls apart (or you go back to 2.69 indefinitely, which is arguably the best version since the 2.49 days in terms of both features and amount of things working).
Yes, BGE is Dead, theres no new features or fixes or stuff added to it. The BF decided to change it, but anyway. from the roadmap, Godot wood be feature ready in the next year, but you never know. Im also not a fan of its build-in script lang, but thats just an opinion.
Are you sure? I’m not a expert in game development at all and I’m quite new to this but even if there is not big new features, the BGE seems to be quite often updated if I see the release logs since last year : python API for joystick controllers and new character physics were added, level of detail, new actuators (mouse, track to), UI improvment and optimisations.
It doesn’t seems so bad, no? Like I said, I’m not an expert but the BGE, for me, is enough to make a game. The only limitation I see is time to spend on it. I still don’t understand why other engine are really better. Performance maybe? but what I saw with the BGE is good enough for most of the indie game I know.
Godot looks great too and the ability to export on more platforms is awesome. I hope that both engine will growth in the good way
Until recently, BGE users could expect a few new features or fixes on a monthly basis, but there’s been no commits since the Summer.
To put it into perspective, this may actually become the biggest commit drought since the BGE was becoming broken and buggy back in the early 2.4x days. It will take a paid developer (Ben2610 returning perhaps?), to give the BGE enough of a leap forward so as to see its userbase grow again, and the userbase in general has been declining amid consensus by would-be devs. that the code is too messy and hacked together to do much with (the architecture is already close to caving in wholesale when most new features and optimizations break something else).
Anyway, Godot is the best bet that the FOSS world has right now and enough Blender users might give a strong argument to tighten the bridge between it and Blender.
For what it’s worth, I believe they are intending to release a series of tutorials on how to put together a 2D adventure game in Godot as part of the Kickstarter deliverables. As they didn’t really reach far beyond their basic target, it remains to be seen whether they’ll have the time/resources to do that AND finish their game on budget, but it was mentioned in the campaign.