Godot Versus Maui

Help
1

Hello everyone,

I’m a product development manager working for an education company.

We hired a few .Net Maui developers to help us create an early learning app. The app is fairly basic and involves some simple games which are really more like learning activities (puzzles, item sorts, and other activities involving dragging and dropping).

The app is about 80% complete. Progress has been slow, and results have been less than impressive. It may be the developers, .Net Maui, or a combination of both.

Examples of issues:

  1. The app is sluggish and unresponsive. Loading times are long, and some animated elements (json files) either don’t work, or don’t work well (they’re jerky).

  2. It has a very poor drag and drop experience (users must tap and hold on an item and wait a second before it becomes movable which is a terrible experience for little kids).

  3. We’re often told that our seemingly simple requests are going to require a good deal of development time, or that they’re just not possible. Two examples: A. - We asked that our puzzle pieces have rounded edges like real puzzle pieces and were told it was going to take a significant amount of development time to make that happen. B. - We wanted cards that were part of a memory match game to flip over when tapped. We were told that might not be possible with Maui. Eventually, flipping cards were achieved, but it took months.

I recognize that the devs we hired are part of the problem, but I’ve also learned that Maui may not have been the best choice. Our company chose it because Maui could produce apps for Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire tablets from one codebase. Also, our own infrastructure supported it (not sure what that means, though).

Anyway, we’re going to be creating another app in the coming months for kids in grades 2nd through 5th. This app will need to be an upgraded experience since, as older kids, the users will have higher expectations. Part of my job has been to look into other coding languages that may be a better choice than Maui. Godot is one of those languages I’ve been looking into.

My question is this:

We want to develop an app that’s on par with Homer, and ABC Mouse and we wonder if more skillful Maui devs could create apps of that caliber or if we should really be looking at another coding language like Godot. A few have mentioned looking into Unity, which we’re willing to explore, but that seems like using a shotgun when you need a fly swatter, though I’m not a dev, so I’m not sure.

Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

2

The requirements you’ve described are trivial to solve in Godot. Without experience in Maui, I cannot judge your developers, but they seem relatively trivial presentation requirements.

Puzzle Pieces were recently discussed on the forums, with a simple solution.

I have personally programmed drag and drop solutions, and it is highly responsive and relatively easy to set up in Godot, could probably be done in a day, if not a week for a robust system.

Animated elements - like cards flipping - are easily achievable in a variety of fashions, though your particular use-case needs may vary - there’s a degree of difference between using pre-rendered animations or animating the cards on the fly, either in 2D or 3D.

If your devs are in-house, I would recommend running a code jam in a week - that’s how companies like Mega Crit - creators of the highly successful card video-game Slay The Spire come to choose Godot.

If Godot is good enough for their requirements, I do not see why it can’t be good enough for yours.

1 Like
3

To be brief and to the point, Godot is more than capable of easily creating such games.

4

Thank you! I appreciate your input. If we do end up steering toward Godot, are the forums here an appropriate place to post a job offer?

5

Wonderful. Thank you! If you are familiar with games of a similar caliber that were developed with Godot, I’d be eager to see them. Thank you for passing any along you may know of.