Godot is a game engine that is looking to build itself around a community of gamers no matter their experience, PC specs, or ability.
"Hi Game Reactor friends, we are in Bilbao for the BIG 2024 and I'm here joined by Emilio who's been talking about Godot Engine and Godot Foundation, so thank you so much for joining us. Your panel happened already today and you were talking about what goes behind the scenes with the Godot Engine and the Godot Foundation, so what's sort of the main takeaway you shared with the young developers gathered here? So the main takeaway is like you have to think about Godot in a different way that you do with the other engines and when most people knew about Godot they expected us to be this big company with millions of dollars and employees and that they could address to us like that but it's more like a community that's getting together to organize and do something and that's a different kind of switching in mentality because you can actually contribute to it and we're very open to take people in and participate in the process of making the engine and yeah I wanted to give you a little bit more of the insights of how things get from the idea to the version that you can download and yeah just showing the differences and the challenges we have but the advantages that we have of being a community. So you would say that you're sort of democratizing access for developers, for indie developers to game developing and to tools and in a way that perhaps didn't exist as of late? Yeah yeah there used to be a lot of open source engines but they didn't include the editor part which is very important which is where you can actually code and modify your level and all that usually you had to use many different tools to do one thing so Godot was the first popular editor and engine that includes all that and of course we want to make it easier for everybody that's why we have very strong requirements in terms of like the minimum requirements for your computer so it needs to run on almost everything and it's very lightweight so you can download it and you don't need to have an online connection to use it so it's very good for many places where you know you might not have very good stable internet or it might be very expensive for you to buy a license or regular software so we're trying to reach those sort of people and you know we do get a lot of users that are coming with those different backgrounds and they appreciate that so we plan on keeping it but it's mostly for people that are not super expert but not newcomers right so there's a little bit of challenge in using it you can do full scripting and all that but if you want to go deep since this is open source you can and you can extend it as much as you want but it's not as easy as something that you know scratch where you can drag and drop notes and do stuff it's a little bit more complicated but today since it's quite popular you have a lot of tutorials online that you can learn how to use the software I guess being open source means exactly that that you can get access to more more sort of insight and and articles and ways for you to learn so what can you tell me about the story of Godot so far being open source how you sustain the business as well but also about the popularity that you just mentioned yeah so it started as a very small thing that it was an in-house engine for a studio in Argentina and they were building games with that and you know like the game engine that they needed was exactly the features that you know for that game but when they got open source more people started using it and they needed different things so it continued to grow but always with this mentality of you know very pragmatic like is this something that you need so that's how the community got more and more involved and then it started being alternative to the software we have today and I think being open source is very important because it's not that it's a company owning it is everybody that's contributing to it so it's something that we want to actually you know make more common nowadays is very complicated to make an engine from scratch there's a lot of requirements a lot of platforms that you need to target a lot of things and more and more studios are gravitating towards leaving their in-house engines apart like on the side and using something more common because you will need more people to hire them you know that it goes like you need someone that's very on the tools that you're using so I think that bringing something like open source to the mix is very interesting because it will allow these studios to don't abandon their in-house tech but also have good approachable tools for everybody I don't know if I went too much you know how do you actually sustain your operation then going forward yeah so at the moment like all the foundation is funded with donations that could be donations from individuals or from companies at the moment we're half on half in volume so we do have as much as individuals and donations are very very important because they are non strings attached so there is no condition about what to do that with the money there are some direct donations that you can do like if you would like us to improve a particular area of the engine but it has to benefit everybody and it has to follow open standards and things like that so for instance there's companies like Meta who would like more people to make VR games so they can fund us to add those capabilities in the engine but our condition is that if we implement that that has to work on every headset it doesn't have to work only on the quest so that's how a way of you know financing some of the features the other side is games that maybe now are successful like for instance a case of the Golden Idol are very popular or like Domekeeper or games like potato who are starting to make more money and then they want to give back to us and they can donate back to our project so you sort of force companies to be open in the end by by requiring them to open it up okay okay so you just mentioned a couple of titles I was going to ask about you know examples or instances of of titles using your engine would you say it's more appropriate for specific genres or styles such as you know in the past we've seen engines being more you know built for 3d for 2d for adventures for yeah so the engine started being a 3d engine 2d was added afterwards but right now like 2d is more popular but I think that was because of the user base most of the users were making games alone at home a solo developer and of course the scope of making a 3d game you require a lot more but lately since the last year we started getting more and more people that are more in tune with the 3d tools and they have bigger teams so we've been seeing more and more 3d games one that's quite impressive that's being developed now is PVKK it's a very long German name but they are making an amazing 3d game and a lot of people didn't know that you could do something like that and usually it's not that you couldn't before is that there were not teams making things like that but now with more popularity there's more teams are capable of doing this sort of things so would you say you are the go-to engine for indie devs no matter the genre right now before we had several alternatives but now I keep hearing Godot more and more very recently we were having this interview about wax heads and and then Rocio had used Godot for her previous success so would you say that's the go for engine yeah yeah because we lower the barrier of entry so the download is like 54 megabytes so you can download it instantly and try it out it's very fast and you can let you iterate very quickly so you make a change and you see very fast so there's a lot of new people that are coming from other solutions where it takes a long time to use you know but of course the industry will take a longer time but since it's free it's very easy to download it runs almost everywhere and you can learn by yourself I think it's starting to be like a good option in one of the biggest game jams that happened in in each idea which is the GMTK game makers toolkit game jam the latest one like the 37% of the users were using Godot which is incredible because you know like it doubled the amount of people that was using it and we don't see that slowing down anytime soon and the more people there are the more donations we get the more people we can hire to improve the engine and the more contributions we get so it's you know it's kind of like a snowball effect of contributions and speaking about the entry barriers and and languages for example so recently I was talking with John Romero about the original Doom and how portable that code was it was mostly assembly and C and you could like uncomment parts of it to make it more portable etc and then some developers such as Jonathan Blow came up with J which is a brand new programming language so how do you deal with languages which would you say is the language you you have to speak in order to for Godot to understand you yeah so generally speaking you can do everything with a language called GDScript. GDScript is a Python like language interpreted kind of like it was Lua before but then like we created a new language for Godot specifically but you can also use C sharp or C++ if you want to I prefer like the GDScript most people who tried it even if they don't like it like Python or things like that they get used to it I monitor all social media and nobody complains about GDScript being hard to learn so definitely it's very intuitive and people pick it up very quickly but if you want to go deeper then yes maybe you want to do something in C++ for more performant parts of you know the code but also like the good thing about this is like you can also extend it with whatever language you want so there are some bindings that we expose and you can bring your own language there's some people who made bindings for Rust for instance so if you want to use Rust you could do that and probably when J gets released for everybody to use some people that are very passionate about J are gonna do that so you could use J in Godot but generally speaking with GDScript you have more than enough."
"Okay of course the other major engines out there are Unreal and Unity every single you know indie developers you talk with they talk about these engines as well so how do you say how would you say Godot is taking a space from what Unity was before and how did you guys dealt or deal with with the controversy last year with the policies that Unity introduced and then removed that perhaps got developers a little bit mad? Yeah so that was really interesting for us because we got suddenly a lot of attention that we didn't have before and it brought also a lot of expectations like people are expecting us to be making Unity like a better version of Unity but we cannot make that we can only make a better version of Godot so it's kind of managing the expectations of what when you're getting into Godot like this is the way we do things and might be some differences in some areas but might be fine in others but also since it's an open project people now that they were missing some of the features in Unity are implementing them in Godot and some of them are getting now included in the next 4.4 release we're gonna have a live editing mode which is something that a lot of Unity users were requesting since it's now able to do it thanks to our contribution then you know you will have those but you have to understand that it's different software even if the concepts of making games is the same across the board it has some peculiarities that you need to learn and yeah once you know those especially the nodes which is the most important part then everything else kind of comes easily. The nodes. Yeah nodes is the main unit of things in Godot and they are very flexible and I think when you ask programmers that have been using Godot everybody doesn't that's their favorite thing and it is now my favorite thing as well like with everybody else very simple very modular you can mix and match them and there's already probably a node for everything that you need and if not you can create one and you can also share it with the community yeah it's I think it's quite good design it's you know a lot of people complain about classes or object-oriented programming I think this is the right way of doing it because it works but if you don't like it you can also use other engines that have other paradigms right like cool thing about open source is like we are not actually selling licenses so I'm not gonna be losing money if you're using other things so if you want to do something different you have for instance baby which is made in Rust and I think they're doing the ECS which is also kind of like very popular right now but yeah in Godot once you learn the Godot way of doing things it's very fast very easy okay you partly answered my next question which was about features with 4.4 that you guys haven't released yet so what else can you tell me about those those features and also you mentioned a very specific very interesting example which was how for example Meta could approach you and then make Godot more specific for for example VR and then you guys create these new features so what can you tell me about both things new features coming with 4.4 and also more specific features and sort of support that you guys have developed with the community as of late yeah so one of the biggest ones that's gonna come in 4.4 it's the new physics engine which we have like a very manageable but you know not ideal physics engine in Godot 4 and a lot of the community we started using one that's called Jolt. Jolt is an open source physics engine I think it was used in the Horizon Zero Dawn game so it was developed by people who know their stuff and yeah people did an extension to use that physics engine in Godot and it was very very popular and since it got really popular to the point that you know it didn't make sense for us to also spend more resources on our own physics engine we're gonna ship it with the engine and that is completely open source as well it is also MIT licensed so it's the same license that we have and that was actually really good you know because that's the good thing like we're trying to get this sort of collaboration across the industry because it wasn't so common up until now to have open source tools in gaming yeah so in the next version hopefully we'll have also Jolt on new projects or if you want to enable it on your current project you have to do it yourself like enable it because otherwise we would break all the physics games out there but yeah that's one of the features that I'm looking forward to yeah another example same as you mentioned with VR and be more specific to a certain space which other example can you give me well for instance at the beginning like the implementation of C sharp in the engine was funded by Microsoft and right now we are going to be including it in the same binary so at the moment you have to download a different one if you want to use C sharp or not but since we're thinking about releasing an asset store quite soon a lot of people who are making plugins that you know they might be developed in C sharp or they might be developing GD script it would be weird that you have to download a different version of Godot so bundling all together you're gonna be able to use C sharp and GD script in the same executable and then you know that's hopefully gonna use a lot of the existing code bases that exist around for other software that's developing in C sharp with minimal changes so they also work in Godot because the industry standard at the moment because of unity C sharp for most of these tools there's a lot of companies that are very interested in selling their products to Godot users but those products that they have are very integrated with C sharp or with unity in particular so it will make that switch much easier for a lot of them we wanted to have it in 4.4 but it will probably come in 4.5 or in the future okay closing one any Godot based project that you would recommend we took a look at perhaps here at the Indie Showcase or available or soon to be available on Steam or whatever yeah so I'm really looking forward to PVKK it's gonna come in Steam I think there's one game here I think it's called Space Divas it's built in Godot but I haven't been able to look at you know other games at the beginning was very easy to know all the Godot games but now we only know is when they release and we see on SteamDB like this was made with Godot so yeah I'm not sure if there's more games but I have to check it out probably growing by the day thank you so much for your time Emilio enjoy the show thank you thank you so much gracias"