Tech Over Tea - Godot Foundation Executive Director | Emilio Coppola

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

Recently Godot started receiving a lot more attention thanks to the Unity drama and today we have Emilio Coppola the Executive Director of the Godot foundation on the show to talk about Godot, what it's good for, what it's not good for and the general state of the project. ==========Guest Links========== Emilio Website: https://coppolaemilio.com/ Emilio Twitter: https://twitter.com/emi_cpl Emilio Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Emi Emilio YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@emi_cpl Godot Website: https://godotengine.org/ Godot Foundation: https://godot.foundation/ Godot Twitter: https://twitter.com/godotengine Godot Github: https://github.com/godotengine/godot ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brody Robertson. And today, I don't know if you guys remember the whole Unity thing that was happening like a week or so ago. The whole, you know, runtime fee stuff. Well, during that saga, a bunch of game engines started getting a lot of attention. One game engine in particular being Godot. And today, we have the executive director of the Godot Foundation on the show. Welcome.

How about you introduce yourself? Let people know who you are. Hello, I'm Emilio Coppola. Online, usually Emi. And yeah, as you said, I'm the executive director of the Godot Foundation. But I've also been part of the community for some time. I've been making videos. And you'll find me around in the Godot spaces online.

So I guess explain, we can start with what the foundation actually does. Like I know the foundation and the project are two separate entities, but what is the relationship between the two? So I wouldn't say they're different entities, but the foundation is the wouldn't say the different entities but the thing that the foundation is the legal entity of the project because once you make one of these like most of the open source uh projects like distros or programs and they have this sort of structure where you have some people working on it and if you want to donate to them there needs to be like a place where you have you know like a proper bank account that the money will go to the organization and also like somebody needs to hold

the licenses so it could be like the trademarks or like the the repositories or anything that belongs to a project so that's the foundation usually like you have popular foundations everywhere nowadays so this one in particular would be for Godot. So our goal is only to work for the Godot engine and everything that needs to be done in that area. So, yeah. So what in particular is your role in the foundation? Because I know you're the executive director,

but what exactly does that entail? Well, at the moment, since we're very little people, it's everything. Fair enough. So what I do the most is speaking with the different companies that want to be giving grants to the project, like managing the donations, paying the contractors and doing all those sorts of administrative tasks. But also we do a lot of work in terms of like releasing, like making the blog posts, like letting people know, like social media. So it's a little bit of everything. At the moment, you know, there isn't like a huge structure behind the engine because we're quite new.

like a huge structure behind the engine because we're quite new. And the organization was founded like one year ago before we were a project inside the software freedom conservancy, which provides this sort of administrative structure to a lot of projects like Inkscape or others like that. So like, since we grew so much, we needed to find a place that we could be a little bit more fast with the changes and taking a bit more ownership of everything. And that's what we did.

So the SSC was sort of like a convenient place to be whilst it was smaller. But as it became this project that exists sort of in its own right, it needed some sort of separate entity to sort of easily manage all that. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, you know, there's many things that you need to do that require a lot of like back and forth with different like contracts or things like that. And also, you know, this was out of necessity.

Like the project Godot Engine was started in a small studio in Argentina. And if they wanted to handle all this like by themselves from Argentina, it was impossible for them to make this sort of organization. So the software-free and conservancy was the solution for them to start getting donations and getting contractors paid from there to do all that? Once the project was big enough and there were more people involved, it was easier to also say, let's make our own thing. Some of the rules that maybe in one organization are not so popular. Let's say we want to sell some merch.

That could be a little bit problematic if we do it with another organization like the Software Freedom Conservancy. But now that we have our own organization, we can do that and we can handle those sorts of things. Our biggest reason was also the asset store that we want to make, which will involve, if you've been making games,

usually you can buy and sell assets from other game developers and artists. So that's something also that we needed to have our own organization to handle. Yeah, those were the main reasons, you know, to start looking into it. The asset store sort of links into the whole Unity stuff we will get into eventually. I tend to like to ramble on a bit

before we actually get to the main topic. But Godot right now has the asset marketplace. That's a thing that exists. But a lot of people are asking for an asset store more akin to what is offered by Unreal, what is offered by Unity. what exactly is the asset marketplace what is what is the asset marketplace and what would an asset store do differently that people are asking for so we have at the moment it's called asset library yep it's basically

see yeah it's a repository with a lot of projects that you can install directly from your editor. And those are all open source. Like, you know, they are free. You cannot buy, you cannot sell anything there. You just can download projects from there. And usually it's like an index of GitHub or GitLab or whatever where they hosted like projects so you can get

them from it um so it's effectively like a software repository yeah yeah it's it's very simple the functionality is very limited you don't have any sort of user reviews you don't have a lot of things but you know it's been working great for a long time it's just that some features that people want are not there yet. Right. And the asset store would be the whole experience with the assets that you can buy and sell and maybe some stuff that is not exactly free. One thing that our community has a lot of programmers because a lot of game developers are also programmers.

you know our community has a lot of programmers because a lot of game developers are also programmers and i think that the slr also will include more people in the community that are not from a programming background so if you make 3d models or stuff like that it's it's a great way to to get involved with the community we want to of course always incentivize open source licenses so that we're going to try to be always using defaults that are open source. So if you want to do it, like selling or other kind of licenses, you have to change from the drop down or things like that. But yeah, there's a lot of interest from a lot of people that are making tools that are very complicated

and they deserve to get some pay. So yeah, providing those would be ideal. That's a bit the difference between what we have now and where we want to be. Well, the way it looks like from the outside, if I look at like say the Unity store, for example, obviously there are people that make games with Unity, but there are a lot of people who their entire purpose

of using that engine is making tools that other people are going to use in their games and then selling them for you know whatever price they want to be selling them for so sort of acts as like a a new market that people can operate in making use of this tooling yeah yeah yeah yeah it has created a lot of people that sustain themselves entirely by selling assets. It's not our goal just to create that, but it's something that the community wants. And one thing that we do usually is that we are a community-driven project. So if the community is interested in having that, that's something that we work on.

And yeah, I think that for most projects at the moment the asset library is enough and it's quite good like it has updates and new stuff every day um but yeah some people they just want to be a bit more i don't know how to say professional let's say and they want to sell their own things i think also the reviews will be very handy and other features that we hopefully can include better with the with the engine um that would be like an upgrade to to the entire ecosystem because you know god is just the the editor and the engine that you use and all that but there's a lot of things that are around making a game which is not happening

in zygote and you know integrating those better would be ideal for the entire process of making a game do you have any examples of like what would be the case there because i've not used the engine myself yeah yeah so let's say there's some audio libraries that you have someone in your team that really likes a particular audio proprietary thing and you want to include it in Godot. Right now, you kind of have to go a little bit out of your way to find those integrations and install it and do it all that. So this would be a very easy way to use those. And mostly our users at the moment are mostly indie developers and small studios but recently like there has been a lot of people getting into that you know they want to use tools that are industry standards so you know getting them directly from the editor or like

things like that would be making it easier of course it's not something that we will ever include because we are never going to be shipping proprietary code but making making like an ecosystem that can live around the editor would be really nice for also making some of our users that are not selling games but are making tools you know make a living that would be ideal so it's about sort of providing the ability for people to do so if they would like to but not making that the main focus of the entire project yeah this this is you know of course the foundation will take a percentage of the sales we still haven't defined which is the number but it's not going to be the same as in the other platform it's going to be lower probably um that would be a way for us yeah yeah no no that's that's probably not 29.9 right

the thing is uh it's an hour way for us to to get more funding and to hire more people to work on the engine. That's also always a balancing act because doing an initiative like this requires to have some people working on it. That's why we don't want to grow it and make it the sole focus of this because we're a non-profit organization. Our goal is not to make money, it's to make the engine better. We are a non-profit organization. Our goal is not to make money, it's to make the engine better. And I think this is a feature that will make the engine better

and we won't be like dedicating all of our resources there. So it's just an add-on on top of what we are doing at the moment. No, that definitely makes sense. I've been seeing a lot of really cool stuff being done with the engine, but I'm sure that if you

provide the ability for people to, you know, just... Like, I... okay, so I get that the whole, like, doing everything open source, like, that's great, but there are some people out there who simply... that's just not, like, their intention. Like, they are trying to, like... they're not doing it for the good of the community they're doing it because they are trying obviously they're trying to make some people want to use but they want to like actually profit from it so i think yeah i think i think actually getting that set up is going to be incredibly powerful i i've heard people sort of i i did like a bit of like prior research on it. It seems like

people have been asking for a store for a really long time, like way before the foundation even existed. Like it seems like pretty much since, since Godot has had any sort of traction, any sort of community that's formed around it, it seems like at least a couple of people have mentioned the idea of having a, because obviously someone could always do like a third party store, but having something that is directly connected to the engine, like that's something people seem to have always wanted. Yeah, yeah, I think also it comes like if you use other engines, like say Unity, a lot of people are used to just buying three, four assets, like three, four like things from the asset store and put a game together real quick and, you know, get like hit the ground running with it. You buy three, four stuff, like one for terrain editor, like some models and, you know, some weather system.

And then you have just like a game already kind of. And that's something you don't have at the moment. The store also was requested for a long time but we didn't have the structure to being able to do it. We do now. That's the main difference. There are some things that are

a bit more tricky in terms of handling the payments and the fact that this is a non-profit organization, so why are you making a store that will pay users that are selling stuff and all that? So once we figure all that out and we know that, yeah, we can do it, we are just working on it. But yeah, I think it's the necessity from many devs to just not reinvent the wheel, I guess. There's this convenience of using blocks and pieces from other people that are already made solutions, you know, that speeds up a lot of the development.

Even if it's not keeping it in, like, the final product, at least using it during the prototyping phase uh prototyping phase and then replacing it as you go further along sort of quickly getting your idea up and running and then bring in your own style as you go yeah yeah yeah i mean that's just one of the things that i've seen you know being used a lot so there's a lot right like you need audio packs you know things like that having it you can go theoretically to a platform like each io buy it download it include it it's also like the convenience and you know also the trustworthiness of those stores there are some stores that are claiming to be like the godot store or stuff like that which are not handled by the the organization but they don't get a lot of traction because yeah the users want to see something coming from us

and yeah took us longer than we anticipated but you know we slowly but surely we're getting there i presume you don't want to mention when a possibility of it happening is. It's sort of like, because if you say a date or you say a rough estimate, someone's going to hold you to that. Yeah, yeah, no, no. It's, you know, as soon as possible. We would like it to have it like yesterday, right? But there are some things that just need to happen first.

We're going to do first a small program where we invite some hand-picked creators to test the platform, to be the first one to use it. We got in touch with some people that are also already successful in other platforms to see what they think about it. And once we have that small test program and all that, we're going to start opening slowly to different people to sign up and then

releasing it to everybody. So it's going to be a small role. It's not going to be from one day to the other that everything's open. But yeah. There's a lot of challenges that maybe are a bit out of scope. But yeah, I think the idea of an asset store is something that if you've been in programming, it's like, I could program that in a weekend, right?

But the legal part of the technical, the not technical parts are too complicated. People submitting assets that they don't have the rights to to to to publish yeah um ai content at the moment or spam like there's so many like too many weird stuff online as soon as you include money you know things get a little bit more complicated so we need to to make it good well just the whole the timeline just the whole issue of handling foreign money is just a problem. ignoring all the rest of it, just accepting, being able to accept payments

from all of these different regions, I'm sure that just is a nightmare by itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, refunds. Oh yeah, refunds as well, yeah. Also refunds. Oh yeah, refunds as well, yeah. There's many things that you have to consider

that, you know, the technology is very simple and again, our community is very like mostly programmers and we are also like on the team mostly programmers. So we think about the system that needs to be there, but we don't think about all those other areas of the project that are just like a headache to solve well i guess that's the other value of having the foundation because you know you could just have the developers that are working on the code base dealing with all the

legal stuff as well but you know they have programming to do and yeah separating that out and letting someone else handle the legal stuff is just go it it's for the best yeah yeah no no you need someone that knows what's what's really like going on to those sorts of things um that's also making some stuff slower right like again if it was just the technology we could just get together work on it like make a sprint do it really like as good as possible but you know we don't know some things the foundation is an organization in the netherlands and we have some people on the foundation who speak dutch and stuff that, but not all of us do. So maybe doing those sorts of legal stuff, it starts also to create language barriers as well.

So it requires some people that know. And we're getting there. We're very excited, actually. We announced it very long ago, but I don't know. We announced many things on our blog, and most of people do read it. But then if you go further and further away from our community, they are not so aware. So we recently had to re-announce it and people were like, oh, this is amazing. Once it's there and you can open it and use it, people will be happy.

It especially makes sense because a lot of people may not have heard of the engine until fairly recently. Like, you said you've been involved in Godot for a while now. Like, when did you first hear about the engine? When did you first get involved with it? I think it was like five years ago or six years ago and uh yeah i started using it for a bit and then i started a youtube channel where i made some tutorials and things like that what was the landscape of tutorials back then were there really any that existed at the time or was it still fairly bare it was it was very very like in some areas it

was really well covered like some areas were completely covered from top to bottom like great some other areas were not and that's where i kind of started making videos about those areas um yeah i think it was it still is a good opportunity because every time you have these sort of new projects that are getting popular and there's not a lot of content creators making stuff about it, you have your place, right? You can find your niche and you can grow.

There's a demand. There's a lot of people looking for specific materials. There are some big YouTubers at the moment in Godot, but they don't cover every area of the engine. And you will always find some areas that you can, you know, make some videos or tutorials or stuff like that. And you will find success quite easily. Like it's a good way to start a channel.

I'm seeing some, like I'm seeing people, like I see a video here from free code camp Wow, I see like there is definitely a lot of stuff here now, but and I hate I hate YouTube search. It's showing me my recommended stuff So, you know the thing with YouTube where you search for a specific term and then halfway down it starts showing you for you stuff Like no, I search for a term, show me that, stop that. Ignoring that stuff, yeah, there's clearly like actual content now, but from when you were doing those tutorials, what was your particular focus?

I started like, I had actually a moment very similar to what unity had at the moment which was i was making games uh game maker okay that's my brother and i were working on it like we had a few games from this it was really popular but then suddenly we did a crowd sourcing like a like a crowdfunding campaign it well, but we were in between versions. I'm just making it super short. I did a talk in the PenPod Fest, if you want to look at the entire story. It's online.

But we were in that moment where they changed the license, where you couldn't actually use the lifetime license that I had bought with my first money when I was 14. lifetime license that I had bought, you know, with my first money when I was like 14, like, and yeah, we had to choose about compromising the idea of the project or releasing with a new version. And, you know, it was very, very bad for us in general. We all, like in this small studio, we had, we all quit making games after that. And it felt really kind of similar to this. It wasn't as dramatic as the unity events but i also felt like once you base your your stuff in uh in proprietary software and you depend on the license you don't know when they can change the license and you know you're suddenly in in risk so that's when i started

to make videos about how to transition from game maker to godot so the first videos i did were for that like just the knowledge i had in game maker how you can do it the same in godot explain the basic stuff and from there i continue making more tutorials that i i check people asking online many times and then i said okay there's many people asking about this let's make a video about that and yeah many people asking about this let's make a video about that and yeah wow well i guess i didn't know you had um yeah i didn't know i hadn't actually seen you had an existing project before existing game before i i guess i didn't do that my research that deeply then um what was that uh that game you did uh it was adventure os that was the name it wasn't too successful we actually you know wanted to just release it because we did the promise on the campaign but that wasn't the game that we wanted

to make it was the game that we had to do let's say right um but yeah no like i i always been making games and i really like it that's why also i feel like when i found godot there was this spark again right like this spark of let's make more stuff because it's really easy to use it's very intuitive and honestly it's super tiny you don't have to log in to open it right like it's just one file that you just open and that's it and that was really really cool and my experience when i was trying you know being 100% Linux, everything open source, like I couldn't get any of the other engines to run properly. Like you had to do like a virtual machine, whatever.

It was very, very troublesome. And then you have other stuff that honestly for talented people, it's fine. Like you can code directly. But for me, like for me, coding was always like the means to an end and uh i couldn't just wrap my head around just doing everything via code so godot has all these you know visual tools that you can just do stuff with it you can do everything via code but you know you don't have to if you don't want and that's what i liked um yeah um with kado i with a lot of the people suddenly sort of finding out about the engine in many ways like at a surface level it looks kind of similar to unity but that's at a surface level like my understanding is when you start looking into

how it actually works the way it functions is very different and a lot of people are sort of now trying to like wrap their head around like what the differences actually are so from your perspective like firstly what is similar like what what do they do in a similar way and then what do people need to like really change the way they approach it with this engine so i have to say i've never used unity like properly so i cannot give you too much unity advice in terms of that okay how does How does Kendo approach things then? Yeah, for similarities, I feel like there's some design language already that we've been developing,

like all of us in many programs that looks very similar, right? Like we have an inspector, we have a toolbar, we have a viewport, we have the command at the bottom, right, like with the errors. So all those things are going to find,

you're going to find familiar in many programs. But I think that the best thing and how Godot works in particular is that everything is a node, and a node can be like a group of nodes. So it's kind of like this composition that you make between nodes that can also be scenes. You can make a few nodes being a scene, but also put that scene inside of another scene with another node. So it's very modular in this structure.

And I think that there's some equivalences in Unity that people think, oh, yeah, this is like that in Unity, but it's not exactly like that. There is a talk by Andy Touch, who was a developer in Unity, but it's not exactly like that. There is a talk by Andy Touch, who was a developer at Unity, and it's from the Nordic Game Jam from this year, and it's how to transition your knowledge from Unity

to Godot, which I recommend. It's quite good. It helped me understand a little bit how the Unity users think, but yeah, I never used it myself, so I cannot go deeper. no that that's fair enough um yeah i i wasn't sure if you had any experience with that because you did say you obviously had used game maker before but i wasn't sure if you'd uh played around with unity or not if you had any

sort of i guess any sort of understanding about the similarities there. But I'm sure you've at least seen, like, some of the people who have been kind of confused about the differences, like, posting about it on Reddit or Twitter or whatever, trying to wrap their head around, like, how they sort of need to approach it in a different way. Like, because, especially from someone who's outside of, like, I at least have a programming background, I understand that, like, different tooling works differently, but someone who's outside of that, I've seen a lot of people who are like, oh, especially, like,

at the start, like, oh, just leave Unity, go to another, just go to Godot, go to Unreal, just put your game in it as if it's like just a drag and drop and it just works, especially with Unreal because Unreal is C++, like that's not even remotely close to a drag and drop there, you're rewriting everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At least, at least Godot has the C sharp stuff. Yeah, yeah. Obviously different APIs and stuff, but like the language is the same. Yeah, yeah, I think it's a very common gamer take, right? Like when Starfield was released, like, oh, this game should have been Unity. It's like, no comment. But yeah, I feel like there's also some expectations from people that are not met.

And that's one of the things we're finding here so i told you i i wasn't using unity before many other people never used unity before and we were always making godot being better at being godot right like yuri one of our team members said on twitter like we cannot make a better unity we can make a better Godot. So that's what you're going to get here. And that's one thing that maybe like some people understand when they jump into it and they say, this is a new thing. Let's learn this new thing. And a lot of concepts are going to be the same, right? Like it's not like you're going to forget everything about game development.

You're going to have all those things there, but maybe you do them in a different way. But some other people really wanted to be working as Unity. And that's a bit unfortunate because they're going to be frustrated if they try to do it like that. With C Sharp, yes, you can use C Sharp, but also like you can also be using Python in two different projects and you will feel different. Like it's not the same making a website in flask than making making our website in django you know you're gonna find like yeah

you're using the same syntax congratulations right but then everything else is kind of different um so yeah of course i guess there'll be similar underlying concept you're still going to work with sockets and all that but like the actual actual Lang the the api's you're dealing with are all entirely different like the library is entirely different Exactly so you know those things are and then they're never gonna be the same But we want to improve the experience for those users like we have even before the unity stuff like a 20% of our users Are using C sharp to make games because we also have another language in Godot which is GDScript which is very simple very integrated to the engine very it's kind of like it has like python syntax but it's very straightforward for making games

and yeah like we want to improve the C sharp experience in Godot so that's something that you know there are some conversations online that get quite heated sometimes because people want to really do stuff in a certain way and you know the reason why maybe you don't do it like that in godot is because like nobody needed to do it at the moment and you know as i told you before we work mostly like following the demand of our users so if our users want something then you know we're gonna improve it so now we find all those new users that are really into working only with c-sharp and we're gonna try to improve the experience with that but of course it

will take time it's not something we can do instantly well i did want to ask you about the whole gd script and c-Sharp thing like what actually is the difference like in the engine like what sort of integrations does GDScript have that C-Sharp doesn't have like from a developer's perspective like what are they missing out on if they go with the C-Sharp route as it currently stands obviously you said that it's trying to be improved as it goes on but as it stands right now? So at the moment, you can download two versions of Godot. One version includes only GDScript.

The other version includes the possibility of using C Sharp and GDScript. You can use them at the same time. You can have some nodes using GDScript, some others using C Sharp, as you prefer. So that's one of the barriers that we want to merge them together so in the future you can have only one file that you can download and now you have that choice. And also, currently in Godot 4, you cannot export the C Sharp games to iOS and Android and web because we moved from using Mono to using.NET.

And unfortunately, it's not there yet. Yeah. And the version 4.2 is probably going to be able to export to Android for sure. That's something like it's already kind of working ios it's always a mystery but you know it's our goal as well but yeah those are like the differences in terms of like why some also some people were kind of asking for better support in those areas if you're making a desktop game you usually don't have any issues. But if you want to make a web game or a mobile game, then you find those limitations with the current version.

And that's also like a big portion of users from Unity made mobile games. So for them, it's really important to be able to export to mobile. So yeah. I completely forgotten who you mentioned,.NET, that.NET used to be a separate thing from.NET Core and then they got rid of.NET and now.NET Core is.NET

yeah yeah it's Microsoft naming things hey at least.NET's open source now so hey that's look yeah they just deleted it with a proprietary one but whatever it's open source so it's fine yeah so you're saying GDScript is kind of like Python it looks similar it's it's not entirely one-to-one sure yeah no i didn't expect to be

one-to-one but yeah having a look at it is it is yeah that is really pythony wow huh like obviously there's like enums which python doesn't have and a bunch of other things but like from a basic syntactic level like i yeah i this would be like very simple to oh and it does well hey one thing you didn't copy of python is the way it does uh object origins and stuff oh my god have you have you ever tried go and python it's not uh a little bit but not so much yeah yeah I usually prefer functional programming but yeah um oh and python is the most disgusting thing you'll ever see we try every time we implement something in gd script we try to make it like we see what's out there in python right like we added like the the static typing like you know like you can specify types and stuff like that like we try to be as similar as possible there but in some other areas

it just doesn't make sense. Right. So then there's, like, at the moment, we're very lucky that we have, like, quite a good GDScript team, like a group of people quite active, and they have been making amazing progress in it. And, you know, there's also this, yeah, this compromise of let's make it easy but also like you know not too different

to what people expect so you know i really like it that you don't have to be maybe specifying a lot of stuff that you know the engine is quite good integrated so it kind of knows what you want to do with it and you don't have to be like if if you want to do python bindings which is something you can do actually like i'm not sure if the godot 4 has a version of it but you can use different languages in godot like if you integrate them like some bindings for rust for instance but if you try to do it with with python you see how much more you have to do for doing the basic stuff compared to gd script so that's what i i really like it. I probably won't be able to find it now, but there was this cool demo I saw

of someone messing around with GDScript where they were, like, live editing, like, the code, and it was updating what was, like, in the, like, the preview or whatever. Somewhere on Twitter. Like, I didn't realize it was that integrated into it. You just change it and it's just automatically just doing the new thing.

That's really cool. It has hot reload. You can boot the project, but you can also do that from the editor itself. You can tweak the values in the inspector and you will see it there. It's quite good.

It shouldn't be like the only way of doing stuff because sometimes with this sort of interpreted languages, you have performance issues, so you have options to do it. Some people have done it like, let's do the performance stuff in c sharp or even in c plus plus but you can use it as a scripting language and it should be perfectly fine like it's not as slow as people say it is that's a little frustrating sometimes because if you do some of those synthetic benchmarks where you do crazy stuff that you would never do in a game and oh yeah this is very slow it's kind of like yeah but when are you gonna be doing that right so it's quite fast enough but whenever you need something else you can do some other

stuff that's the cool thing well yeah i i'm sure you've heard a lot of sort of let's say uninformed takes, especially of late. Like, not just from people who may be... I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. The people who have just sort of just trying it out, they've not really learned that much about how it works, or maybe, like, their entire intention in life, their entire goal in life is to just attack Godot at every second of the day. I, there are, there, I've seen some accounts out there that pretty much everything they post about is why the engine is bad, why everything about it is bad. Like, I don't, I don't understand people

like that. Like, I get, I get being, like, like critical of it of things that are legitimately a problem and trying to help it improve because i'm sure that is helpful like hey if there's actually some performance issue here with something that is you know a reasonable thing that some would do like that's something that would need to be addressed but when it's just going at it for the sake of attacking it like that's yeah i mean the community is not only in ours i guess like the developers are usually like that right like this sort of discussions about like what's best in like theoretically or stuff like that but there's also yeah there's some misconceptions that i've seen like throughout the. They were maybe true two or three years ago,

but they are not true anymore, but people keep repeating them. That is a really common trend in consoles. Yeah, eventually it will go away. There's a lot of people saying it's impossible to get your games on consoles, and it's kind of like, why am i playing godot games in my switch right it's kind of like if this is impossible why can i do this right and i think that with time those sort of things are gonna like just go away but you know we we appreciate a lot of the criticism and most of it i believe in the community it's been quite welcoming to

to of course there's i know that people are going to be like oh yeah i was critical about it and I believe in the community it's been quite welcoming to, of course, I know that people are going to be like, oh yeah, I was critical about it and I'm not a part of it anymore because they were really rude to me or whatever. But it's not usually like the dynamic of the project. And that's something that attracted me at the beginning because I actually could get in there. I could talk with the people who were working on it

and they changed their minds when we were talking or i changed my mind and it was very welcoming to see the sort of like you know the reality of making a game is that it might be super different from my to your experience like our needs can be very different and this is a general purpose language as general purpose engine so that's also another thing like you see takes from people that are on the triple a industry that are for making games that are very specific or very like it's like a call of duty sort of game and yeah maybe for those sort of games those things make sense but for a general purpose that you need to make like a racing game, a first person shooter, like a strategy top down, a 2D,

like you need to make some compromises in some areas. But the good thing about it, which this is not usually the case, is that Godot is open source. So you can go in and you can make your own fork and you can modify those areas that you don't like. And that's some flexibility that nobody else offers you. And, you know, when I see people complaining about some aspects of the project now, I feel like they are complaining to us as if we were a company.

like an institution that will be deciding what will be and what won't, instead of just being part of the community and making those changes. You don't have to be a programmer to propose those sort of changes because you can make the proposal and somebody else can implement it if it makes sense. And, you know, just the fact that you can do that, I think it's amazing and it's something that differentiates open source with closed source, right? And, yeah, I think there's also this shift in people. And maybe I'm going a little bit on a rant, but it's, you know, the game industry, if you compare it to the other industries, is a bit behind in terms of open source awareness.

If you do websites or if you do anything like that everything is open source the library using the front end in the back end and the server like the everything this full stack is open source even if it's from a huge company or whatever if you do that in video games it's the opposite like everything is proprietary everything is like very close so i think people are not used to it yet and hopefully with godot it will be like a reintroduction of the concepts and you know like the benefits that we can get of collaborating in something together because you know you can modify parts of the engine and you know we are starting to include parts from other open source

projects that are really good that are better than our own implementations. I can see in the future that this will be the editor that you use and people plug their own stuff on it. That's something you cannot do with Unity. You can do it with Unreal, I guess, but everybody I spoke with didn't want to really mess with the c++ in it so that's another topic i guess but yeah yeah i went a little bit on a tangent but yeah no i i get what you're saying there um like i've i've worked some web dev jobs before and it's it's kind of interesting because

in that space nobody touches anything unless it's open source. Like, you might get away with, like, a proprietary database, but that's pretty much the only thing that someone's going to accept. Like, the rest of your stack, you know, like, you build everything, all your libraries come from NPM. You've got all these, like, open source python libraries and all these other libraries and then like in in game dev pretty much the only things that are open source are like i guess if you use blender for your modeling yeah like blender that's pretty much it yeah i mean yeah blender is is quite uh popular, but it's still not the industry standard, you know? It will be, because you cannot compete with open source.

It might be slower, but at the end of the day, it will be. But yeah, no, like these people, I spoke with many CTOs from startups and companies about like, why are you using or why do you prefer open source? And they told me about like, why are you using or why do you prefer open source? And they told me also like, when I leave this job and I find a new one, I don't want to have to relearn or use a completely different stack. If we release everything we do in open source, we can keep using it in any other company or anything like that.

There's also like this community that builds around those tools and things like that, you know, always amplifies the possibilities of a single team working on it. But if you are now in a game studio, you don't have those sorts of things. I guess Unity was the standard for smaller studios. You know, like everyone knows that. You learn that on the university. But you can see what happens when you depend everything on a proprietary like engine right like at any time anything can change um and also like i feel like we're in a moment in video games where we we always try to compare it with the past but we never been here games are

bigger than ever they require more and more people they are very complicated and that's why we were seeing a lot of studios that had their own in-house engine going to solutions like unreal because also you can get more like hire more talent that already knows the engine and you can get stuff like that because it right now is starting to be a bit impossible to even develop your own technologies like of course if you're making a small game yes that makes sense might make sense for your studio but the the advantages of general purpose percentages is this right like a lot of people can know it and then you can tweak it um but yeah i think i think godot will will play a role in that being the open source platform.

I think a lot of these especially smaller studios are starting to notice that they're kind of building their career on a castle with a like they're building their career Man, what why do I think they're building their career on a mountain of sand. There we go. Something like that. You know what I'm trying to say. The base is not stable. You know where I'm going with this.

Yeah, they're realizing that at any point in time, the tools that they rely on can just be taken out from under them, and there's not really anything they can do about it. Now, Unity, the Unity case is really interesting. Now, Unreal has come out and said that, you know, if we update our TOS, you don't have to accept it, and you can just stick on that version. I don't know. The thing is they haven't done anything like

Unity. So I don't know if in the future they try to pull something in a similar way, whether that would actually be the case. They certainly are using it right now to like, obviously like do free marketing, but in the end, you know, it's unclear what would actually happen until something in a similar vein sort of happens on the Unreal side as well but at least on the Unity side people you know they realize like yeah at any point in time the deal can change

and you just basically have to accept it yeah yeah yeah because they say you can stay in the old version of it which is true you can but then when ios requires new stuff for your sdk and you need to update that just you have to upgrade to a new version same i believe is with the consoles if you want to export to console you cannot use like the old versions or like it will run out of time. So eventually you'll have to upgrade to the latest license that they have.

And the case with Unreal, I think it's different also because the company is privately owned. So they don't have shareholders that want them to do whatever. That's an upgrade, but still it's still something that right now they are very lucky to have Fortnite printing money for them. But when that money runs out, you don't know what can happen. And the cost of developing an editor and an engine is very, very high.

So if they really need to base their business model around the editor itself, they might need to make some adjustments which are fine right like it's not that you shouldn't be paying for software or anything like that but it's a bit for me nerve wracking because when you're making a game it's probably like gonna be like the next two three

or four years of your life and it's hard to predict what's gonna happen and if the licenses change midway, then everything can be in the air for a while. So that's the advantages of using something that you know is going to be free and open source. You don't have to think about that.

There's other things that you have to think about, but generally speaking, the license is not going to change. You're not going to have to suddenly pay royalties or a revenue fee or an install fee or anything like that. What license is Gdawanda, by the way? It's MIT. Okay. So someone could decide that they want to

take like a proprietary version of the engine in like a whole nother direction if they wanted to then yeah yeah you can rename it and sell it and say this is like uh i don't know like yeah my engine and yeah they can do that the license is permissive that's something that sir going no that's something that you know you don't get out of licenses like gpl which they have their advantages but you know like i think it makes sense for godot because you don't have that like concern of like like extending it and not being able to also keep part of it for yourself if you want to, if your studio needs to

or anything like that even if, I was going to say even if at some point the foundation was like hey, we are just going to have like we're going to have future versions of Godot be developed like as a proprietary thing, there's always still going to be that be that like there's still gonna be that MIT version that someone

Could decide to take over and continue developing even even if the main focus of Godot becomes like a proprietary version Like that's still going to be there that anyone else can get involved with Yeah, but it's not even in our mission statements, right? There are some companies that form around Godot. For instance, there's one called Ram Attack who offers something like that. They have a specialized version of Godot for exporting to mobile version, like Android and iOS. And if it works for them, that's okay.

They also contribute part of that to the engine and they are sponsoring the engine. But for us, it's not like a goal at any time. And yeah, theoretically, we could do a dual license kind of thing. But also, I don't think that any of us in the community are even interested about it. I just... All the people that are working at the moment were passionate about it. And I think that if we would do something like that, they would just not work with us anymore.

Even myself, I wouldn't be interested. And I don't know what can be offered on top of it and uh yeah it seems like a very weird idea like i've seen the conversation like oh yeah god can do this in the future they can change the license or anything like that but it doesn't really make any sense like it would be really hard to try to make a business out of that but if there are some things that we can implement legally

to prevent it and you have some ideas I'm happy to implement any safeguards or anything like that have good people running the project have good people running the project have good people on the foundation yeah I mean

yeah that's you know like also the fact that all the people that got here are also passionate about open source it's what makes the difference right like it's not our motivation and you know this is sometimes a problem because

monetarily we are not that, you know, we were very lucky lately. We announced the Godot Development Fund where you can send money to the project kind of like in a patron way. And, you know, we have the platform, so we have to pay a lot of fees. So that's great. And with the recent Unity news, a lot of people jumped in and started donating so that's great for us to be more sustainable and being able to pay the contractors and you know be be more sustainable in general and um we don't have the means to offer really really good salaries so people who are working at corot at the moment is because they want to but as soon as they get an offer from a triple a studio it's impossible for us to compete with those salaries right if you have a person that's a pro doing like

let's say physics or something like that there's not too many of them in the world even to to have them so it's it's hard for an open source project to compete with that in terms of they can come they can say okay you we can hire you we can give you 300k a year you know and that's it but the people who stayed at the project are the ones who are passionate about it myself included you know and it's it's i think an ideological also like uh endeavor it's not only like a monetary thing right like working for a project that is open source or anything like that and we don't want to have that structure that some other open source probably have where there's the private company like you know you have like kind of like canonical and then you have like we don't want to do anything like that so the people who are now working on Godot are just working on Godot and we don't want to do anything like that. So the people who are now working on Godot

are just working on Godot and we don't plan to start a business. Some people that are on the Godot Foundation have started their own businesses to provide services for Godot, but there will never be like a Godot company, let's say. Yeah, and I'm noticing that with console support, one of the things listed in the

documentation is uh lone wolf technology uh started by one of the co-founders of godot yeah lone wolf is by one of the co-founders then there's w4 games which another like of the co-founders also did ram Ram Attack is also like by one of the persons who've been on the project for a long time. Then you have Pineapple Works who did a lot of porting for many of the popular games in Godot for consoles. So you have a lot of companies that are around the ecosystem and they have their own business model and everything like that.

And they deal with the stuff that we don't want to deal because as soon as you get into those things you need to start dealing with proprietary code like libraries that are like just not you know the mobile city the mobile situation you have all these sdks like for ads for tracking for all those things we don't want to spend even a single hour of development time on anything like that. We understand that for some people that's very important for their games. And some people have developed libraries to include Google ads or ads from Facebook or whatever. But we are not going to be providing those because that's not part of our mission. So that's where those companies come

in. And it's great that they exist because that also makes the of our mission so that's where those companies come in and it's great that they exist because that also makes the people who are making games like being able to use those services but we don't have to deal with that it's not what we want to do right so one thing you mentioned a while back was the console support situation so you can do So you can get a game working on a console that is made in Godot, but the engine itself doesn't, from my understanding, natively support that. Yeah, it's, you know... Like you don't have direct support for the SDKs in there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's also two parts of it which one part is the fact that you might need to make adjustments to your game that's a big part of porting that nobody considers sure which needs to happen the other part is the the having the sdk access and all that and we tried many times with different ways of trying to talk with the consoles, like people like, can you please give us that opportunity to publish this? But they are not really happy about you publishing those sorts of code in a way that people can access to it and it's open source and things like that.

So it's kind of conflicting with our way of working. I think things are going to change in the future, but I think that now with the interest that there is now in Godot and a lot of people working on it, we're going to see some changes in making it easier. But there's also the fact that Godot is open source. You can technically, if you're skilled enough,

you could do the port yourself. I know this is like just a pipe dream for a solo developer right but it can be done if you have a small kind of game you can make the adjustments you need to the engine and do it so i think it's it's more like a a complaint or like a request from people that are not that experienced and they just want to have a button that says export to xbox and even if we could have that button, it would not be that easy because of the first part I told you, right? Like you need to make sure that you comply with all the requirements

that they ask you, that the controls work properly, that you display the inputs as they should, everything like that. So I think it's a request from people that are not that experienced. But I also understand that it should be easier to just get your games there. Because, you know, it's a big market. And it's also like the goal for many people. Like grew up playing Nintendo games. And they want to see their game in the Switch because it's a Nintendo console.

And, you know, the feeling that you get from that is different than exporting it to Steam let's say but yeah I think it's gonna change with time and it's gonna get easier. We're even just doing stuff like on PC like exporting it to Windows and exporting to Linux like there are some game devs out there for some reason will put a linux version of the game on steam and then never maintain it and within two updates it is completely unplayable yeah yeah yeah yeah well one cool thing about godot is that most of the developers are using linux themselves so like the linux support is very very good and right now, with all the Steam Deck players, you're going to see that's a great advantage. You can just export it to Linux, and it works on Steam Decks

with no problem. So that's quite good. Maybe if in the future, more of the platforms are sort of like the Steam Deck, that will happen. I'm not sure that will happen but one can dream right so i guess we can start getting more into the unity stuff one thing i did notice like very quickly is there were a lot of big names that I noticed that was like a big big donation from was it it was Relogic the Terraria guys. Relogic? Yeah um like that sort of came out of nowhere like I I didn't

see I did not expect that to happen um what uh like besides that one like did you notice any other um like big names show up anyone like anything notable after like that whole unity situation we are in conversations with many people i will not want to just throw them under the bus and say their names just in case they decide not to support the price but yeah like i mean that's already like gone through like obviously if there are talks can't say that but like anything that's like publicly happened already everything that's public already is there in the website it was mostly like what you've seen like relogic or stuff like that i don't think there was any other like big studio like relogicic that did any sort of donation like that. But I think with this kind of wake up call,

a lot of people that heard about Godot and they had it in the back of their minds as this open source engine, it's kind of like they finally gave it a try and they saw that it was actually something they could use. So I wish I could tell you more names of people that are just talking with us at the moment, but a lot of people, they really consider it,

they tried it, and they thought it was going to be like the idea, like the popular idea that people have like two, three years ago sort of mental picture of what Godot is. But it's not that, right? Like it's completely like new in terms of like what you have in the version four and um yeah a lot of people just tried it for for that week like two weeks that all the drama was going on and they started sharing stuff on

twitter which like incentivized more people to try it and give it a go. Because one thing, we are very scrappy in terms of we don't have super nice looking demos because everything is kind of like with a bit of programmer art. Some studios were able to make some demos that we use a lot, like the GDQuest demos that we show a lot. But now that you get people that are, you know, pros, and they have their own, like, nice quality assets and stuff like that, they give the engine a go, and everything looks amazing.

And it's kind of like, yeah, it could always look like that. We just didn't have the skill sets to make demos for you to understand it. But, yeah, that's also like motivating other people. And yeah, I think for most games that are out there that are, you know, indie games, it's a viable option. And when they try it, they see why. And it's a bit scary to jump from your engine to another one. As we said before, with the the asset store stuff and all that,

you already invested thousands of dollars on assets. You already spent years of your life working on it. You developed tools for it. You did a lot of things that it's not something that you would say on a weekend. Let's swap engines, right? It's kind of like you don't do that. But now that you have that kind of wake you don't do that but now that you have that kind of wake-up call a lot of people tried it and yeah it's i think it's it's the

moment that's something a lot of people don't consider as well like there's a lot of stuff when when you're doing like when obviously if you're just like messing around you know you never actually made like a project that you're selling for money, like, you know, it's fine, you can jump engine to engine, but when you're an established studio, you're gonna have, like, developer pipelines, you're gonna have your own internal tooling you've made to make the, whatever workflow you're

trying to do, actually work well with that engine. And you might be able to get it to work in a similar way, maybe better, with Godot. But it's not going to be just like, hey guys, I'm a Godot expert now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, like it's going to be like a learning curve. And, you know, also as there's so many people using it for so different things, we're going gonna find those areas where maybe things were not as polished as we would like and maybe none of the big like studios like are using Godot were using those areas but the new ones will and they will say like what's this and then we're gonna have to work on that um but yeah no it's it's a whole different beast every time you go to a different engine but i think having these um having these cool demos like the one i'm i've

got up right now uh it's one of the ones you shared uh it's this like fps game it's like really stylized um that skull game is now made in Godot. If you remember reposting that one. Like this is a super cool looking demo. And like, you know, it shows off like, you know, the different, a lot of people have this weird, especially with Unreal. Like there are so many people who think that because a game is made in a certain engine, it has to look a certain way.

Like, yes, if you're doing everything with the default. Like, Unreal especially, because it has so many powerful, like, you know, it's powerful lighting, all of the, like, the store it has. Like, you can make, there's a lot of AAA games that look exactly the same. But, like, that's not because of the engine. that look exactly the same But like that's not Because of the engine it's because They have no artistic vision Like you can do super cool things

With any engine Yeah yeah that school game That you mentioned like that was Being done like I think over the course Of eight days on stream Oh wow You can go into the stream and see how He did it and I was just like Looking at it like I was just wow and you know you can go into the stream and see how how he did it and i was

just like looking at it like i was just amazed at you know the game looks very similar to this uh devil daggers i think it's the name of the other one where you should skulls anyway um but yeah the style of that game like is much like uh polish like the one that that i shared i think it's more unique i guess but um well there was like lighting demos and stuff you showed as well that people were um yeah talking about yeah yeah like you know having like nice things to show it always helps for adoption like you can see you can get those sorts of results hopefully in the future we'll have some more people in the team that will be able to

make nice demos for people to use and then explore but you know this is also like a call for action like everything is open source all of our demos are open source and you can contribute to them so if you want to make them pretty, that's something you can do.

You don't have to just make a new one. You can make one of the ugly ones look better. Yeah, look, I'm sure there are some programmers out there that have great artistic skills as well. But I've seen some user interfaces that were designed where there is no user interface design guidelines and you just let programmers do whatever they want and sometimes it works but a lot of the time it doesn't ui guidelines are very important yeah yeah yeah that's also the same you know we got out as well like at the beginning i think things were smaller and easier to manage

in terms of you could pretty much know all the dialogues all the pop-ups menus or everything and kind of you know how things are done so So when you implement something new, you just do it in the same way as it was done before. But now it's so big that I'm starting to find inconsistencies here and there. And that's, you know, I started a design team. So if you join our developer chat, which is on our website, you can find it. There's a design channel where we are trying to find those inconsistencies make a proper design language for everything and trying to to improve like the general look of it which is very important but you know there's so many moving pieces different people working in

different areas that sometimes is a bit harder but that's you know godot has a very nice ui system which is the same that you can use for your games so the editor is built with the same nodes that you would use then in your games if you want to that's cool so every time we improve the the control nodes which are their names like the ui elements we also are improving the the ui nodes in in godot itself so like you can build nice stuff and if we can improve that i think it will be a very nice uh fresh paint uh right on the project i am annoyed myself as some of the dialogues that are different and it's kind of like we show the error under the input field and in others we show them in other areas so it would be super nice to just do like a pass

on all those and see where those inconsistencies are and improve them but yeah you know for the demos for the game demos it's just the important thing is the technology and then you know we have talented people that have made amazing

stuff but I don't think it makes a lot of sense for them to just spend a lot of time on making it look nice if there's so many things to do as well no no that that's totally fair um that's actually really cool i didn't i didn't know that i guess the godot ui was made in Godot. Like that's super cool. I guess it acts as like a demo of what can be done with it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. You can also extend it. So if you make a plugin,

you can extend the editor with GDScript and nodes and all that. You can add your own stuff there at the editor. I built a plugin that's for making visual novels, so you know, you have all these sort of like dialogues and characters and all that. There's also like many, many plugins that just extend the editor a little bit, and that's one of the advantages, right, of having the same sort of system there. Well, I guess that's, yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense, and I guess that's why you said you said before, it would be cool if it was this sort of centralized thing that people plugged into as they needed to build additional functionality.

You sort of have a natural plug-in system in Godot because of the fact that it's built in the thing that it is. You don't have to... A lot of projects really struggle to bring in some sort of plugin system. Like, um, GIMP right now is in the process of rewriting their entire plugin system. So it actually functions, um, and it exists, but like here you don't have that issue. Like, like that's, yeah, that's, that's super cool.

Like I, I didn't know about that. That's yeah that that's that's super cool like i i didn't know about that that's yeah yeah and there's several ways like this like extending the editor is quite simple everybody can do it and if you want to extend the engine there's also like some other ways like with the gd extensions which is what it's called which you can you know we had like to rewrite the physics system for World 4, and unfortunately it's not as good as we would have wanted it to be. But there's another physics engine, which is called Jolt, which was developed by somebody that I believe they worked in Guerrilla Games.

And, you know, I think it's the physics engine that they use in Horizon, in one of those Horizon games. And it's also MIT. So a user through GD extension was able to just merge it, like create the extension for Godot so you can use Jolt in Godot, like the physics extension. And that's, we are thinking that it will probably be like in future versions, it's going to be the default physics engine because it's much better than ours. But that would be another way of extending the editor with new capabilities.

You can make a new physics for your game in particular if it's a very physics-based game, or some other people have done it for making a lot of visual taxing effects. If you want to make a vampire survivors kind of game, you really need every little performance you can get to show as many stuff on the screen as possible, you can do it with an extension. So you say that, but the original game engine was an HTML game engine. Yes. I don't know how that game functioned, let alone ran relatively well. Yeah, I thought it was game maker honestly when i played it it had that game maker feel but then it was like html what javascript what yeah yeah yeah it was it was uh i believe recently he released the um the c c++ engine update so like most of the performance issues

should be gone now because there's no like yes there's a lot of particle effects and all that but like it's still a pixel art game like the only reason it ran so badly is because it was in a terrible engine like i'm sure it's it's it's cool that an engine like that exists but like i think we can all agree that a javascript engine is not the most optimal thing to be riding your game sick no but maybe that's the thing right like it might not be the most optimal thing for those sort of games but for 80 of the other games that you're gonna play like that yes it's like a web based bajewel clone or something like yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah that's the thing you have to use the right tools for for the job and in this case yeah like it's not a hundred thousand i think

i think they rewrote everything in unity like that Like, that's the thing for them. That's one of the things... I think, yeah, they ported it to Unity. That's one of the things that you find, right? Like, it's kind of like... What is Unity? Now they changed the license. Why do I think it was C++? I don't know, maybe I misread something.

It, yeah, this... Previously, it was in an engine called Phaser yeah it's quite good i i'm sure it's a great tool i look don't go wrong i i don't i don't hate like that this exists it's just it's just not suitable for a game that has as much going on as Vampire Survivors has. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible to have those sort of games. There's one Vampire Survivors-like game, which was very, very successful for a long time now. Brotato,

which is made in Godot. Oh, yes. What is it? Yeah, it's made in Godot. Huh. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's also like yeah it's made in godot huh i didn't know that yeah it's very popular on steam deck it's always on the top of the charts that they release like it's always right there um but yeah yeah no that that game also like the developer was using game maker before and i met him during the GDC because we had a Buddha GDC

with some games that he could play and he told me that he used my tutorials to do the transition to God so that's quite nice to hear That's awesome It's awesome to see that those are still useful all this time later

Yeah I mean a lot of people were like me stuck in the old version of of game maker because of the license and you know it's a great engine for for artists specifically that's why i liked it and i didn't get into the other ones because yeah like you have a lot of tools to just make the game and you will see that game maker games are usually very pretty in terms of 2D stuff and all that. But yeah, like I think, yeah, I don't want to comment too much on GameMaker itself.

Like I think they're making a lot of efforts also to start doing more open source stuff. And hopefully we find a way to collaborate in the future in terms of, you know, making some of the things that we do, like just open source for everybody and we can share them but you know like it's it's complicated when they are operating under a company like a private company or things like that they have to make sure that they have a business to to you know to run and um yeah that's the cool thing i I believe, for us. Like, we don't have those sorts of things in our mind, right?

Like, of course, donations, that's always on my mind, at least. Like, how are we going to get money to pay the contractors to keep the things going? But it's not that we need to find new ways to get money from people. And, you know, that's, I think, gives you a lot of peace of mind in terms of you can really be as ethical as you want without compromising the ideas to just maybe charge per install or things like that. Trying to capitalize on games like Vampire Survivors. Those are the games who were going to be affected the most. Cool things about installations family is like super

super cheap how much is it yeah yeah I you those were the games that were yeah that I I love them I'm so happy the dev like he's like he's set for a while with how much was made of, even with how little he was charging for the game. Like, that has kind of set him for, like, a long, long time. He just wants to chill and not do anything. Like, I think every indie game dev sort of wishes that their game becomes like a vampire survivors, a Hades, a Hollow Knight

Terraria, Minecraft like obviously those are like extreme exceptions, but like just one of these Like even just Halls of Torment like that capped out I think it like 30,000 players or something like and that's that's a lot of people like that's a lot of people that bought your game House of Torment is also God of War wait is it? yes

it's in our showcase as well like in our website but yeah we're getting there it wasn't that common to see so many God of games lately but like before but now like if you get in there you have many high profile games that are Godot games and

I had no idea okay what else it's nice that you mentioned that because I forgot one mentioning Potato because it was like okay I'm gonna go to the showcase. I'm going to see if...

Is there anything else I notice in here? Let's... Case of the Golden Idol, maybe? I don't know that one. Okay. Let's see. Okay, I'm not seeing anything else that I notice here. But...

Cassette Beasts, maybe? Yeah, I don't recognize it. I'm sure someone is going to say they've played at least one of these games. I had no idea. Okay, that's really cool. I love Halls of Torment.

It's a great game. Well, yeah, I guess there are... I tried. I made efforts to not play as much as the other ones because i didn't want to spend so many hours i played a few hours and i said like yes i can play this for another hundred hours let's just not open it again that's probably the safest thing to do yeah yeah yeah it's one of those games right like? Like Factorio, you look into the abyss and it's like the abyss look at you and it's kind of like, no, I don't have time for this.

I can't do Factorio. There's too... Factorio is too complex for me. I can't. So the problem with Factorio is I need to have like the wiki open as long as I'm playing it. That's not what I'm looking for for a game.

I just want to turn my brain off and kill things. I'm playing a lot of Armored Core 6 right now. Armored Core 6, I don't need to think. Just dodge the exploding thing. Shoot the big mech. They die. That's all it needs to matter yeah yeah but sometimes yeah those games are great yeah like just ghost you get into this

meditation state while playing that you know it's just out of playing and that that's great yeah i mean yeah have you played uh also maybe domeomekeeper? Domekeeper? No, I haven't. That's also quite popular. That can also get you into meditation state in terms of like your artist mining and just going... Oh, that looks pretty cool actually. Very nice. I think I might have heard of this one, but I've not played it.

It's got a neat art style. Yeah, I recommend it it it's quite nice yeah right now if i want to think when i'm playing a game i at boulders gate is boulders gates got too much of my attention right now yeah it's such a good game like i got to the to the third act recently and uh i'm there it's just like just too big also right like i had so many plans for the past two weeks that i couldn't actually do um but yeah like uh baldur's gate is it's amazing yeah like i like narrative games that's why i also like focus on making a plugin for making narrative games and stuff like that called dialogic is. And I enjoy this, right?

Like the interactions between characters is something I really enjoy. And it's something reserved more for like the not safe for work community. They have been developing a lot more in that area. And I liked seeing these sorts of things coming into more like the mainstream AAA because it's so common to just decapitate people,

kill people in so many different ways. And then it's so common to just decapitate people kill people in so many different ways and then it's kind of like oh no but two characters like uh fucking each other is just too much for the audience right i i love the way they showed off like when they first showed off the romance it's like bare sex like of all the scenes you could show like that's the one you go with they knew they knew they knew they're just brilliant but i wish we see more of those sort of things um those topics at least you know it doesn't have to be like uh just a not safe for work kind of game just had to have some elements and i like the interaction between characters in many games which is usually like the nice part and then it's interrupted by like a 30 or 40 minutes of

killing people non-stop and then you get the nice part again so yeah baldur's gate is great i think one of the more recent games that kind of changed that trend was witch 3. Like, there's just a scene where, like, Geralt's naked. It's like, okay. Like, it's not like making a big deal of it. It's just like, yeah, sometimes people don't wear clothes. Yeah, I think, I mean, I wish that that's, you know, something that comes more, like, often in the future because I think it's more like a European sort of lens

for making the games we are so subject to the like american view of what's acceptable or not in media that i really like getting more input from other studios from other places that we really need right like this is not something that's too scandalous for people in other cultures, but for Americans, it might be, so that's okay. But, you know, if we get more studios like CD Projekt Red or Larian or things that are making games

with a different sort of lens, that would be ideal. Well, I think just, honestly, one trend that I'm really enjoying is let's not have american voice actors for every single game like yes i know you like there's a lot of them but like there are other people as well like one i've been playing final fantasy 16 not a single american character it's nice, it's a nice change

of pace yeah we're getting a lot of voice acting lately that is high quality in different languages, like I'm originally from Argentina, I lived a long time in Spain but then in the rest of Europe, so sometimes I

enjoy seeing nice Spanish voiceover and you know, like the industry wasn't that good so long ago. But now it's kind of more like a standard that you're not only going to add the subtitles, but also like the voiceover. And I think it's quite nice when they pay attention to details. And, you know, they they also pick people from different areas to use different dialects or different accents. I think that's great of the new globalized world, right?

It comes with a lot of bad things, but the good things as well. I like a lot of American media, but I agree with the terms of when it's everything Americanized and everything gets a bit tiring. I appreciate it, but in Cyberpunk it makes sense. And maybe in other places,

maybe you can do it with something else, right? Well, also not just having, like you often see like, hey, there's an Australian character in this game or hey, there's like a Russian character in this game or like any other culture. And it's just like that one character that's there as just like, they're there to be like the joke character, the trope character, whatever you want to call it, but like, when it's something that's entirely set around like in a different culture, with a different style of approaching a game, like, there is a lot of

interesting concepts out there, which I'm sure, like, there's a recent trend, um there is a lot of interesting concepts out there, which I'm sure, like, there's a recent trend, um, of a lot of, uh, like, Chinese RPGs we're seeing actually making it to the West, and it's a very different, like, culture being brought to the game, like, we see a lot of, like, when we see a lot of, games usually it's like the South Korean perspective or it's the Japanese perspective but there is a lot of mythology that's not really touched on in many video games from the Chinese aspect and like we're seeing some really cool things like what's is it black myth I think is the game that hasn't there Yeah, I think that was one of them.

But, like, there's a lot of cool stuff that can be explored there that just hasn't really been touched on. Yeah, yeah, no, no. I agree. And, you know, I think also... Yeah, Black Myth was amazing enough. To plug Godot in, you know,

like, having the tools to do proper localization, it's very important. I really like the tools in Godot, to plug Godot in, you know, like having the tools to do proper localization, it's very important. I really like the tools in Godot. You can check them out. That's the plug. But yeah, like lately, I think that it's been important to see it also, like, as I said before, like just having people that cares do those sort of work it's very important there has been a lot of things going on in terms of like the translators a lot of controversies

which i really liked to not see again like in some of the translators like they are never added to the credits because they use like a translation company and they don't allow it and things i hope the industry changes for the better in that area but yeah getting like different sort of games that's why i also believe that some indie games found a lot of success because they they don't have to go through all these filters from publishers and from all that to really show you like an aspect of like a culture of of a of a different place that you are not familiar with. And yeah, if you go to the mainstream, everything is kind of like you expect it to be in a certain way.

And we build a lot of mental models for understanding these sort of games, like Japanese games or even anime. You have all these anime glasses that you accept certain things because you already know the culture a little bit, but then you find something that's different. It's kind of blows, blows your mind because you've never been into those sort of concepts,

but yeah, it's great. I really like playing games from, from everywhere. No, I, I, I absolutely agree.

Um, I guess we should probably tie it back into godot somehow yeah it's a gaming podcast now look i i half the time i don't even address the main topic for the first hour of the show people expect this at this point if i just go on some random tangent that's just that's just what happens here so i guess for anyone who hasn't been following the unity stuff they did actually post like a update to the situation from my understanding it's 2.5 percent of your revenue or let's see what was it somewhere in here 3.5 percent revenue share or the runtime fee which are now self-reported i think i think the big concern a lot of people had is how were they

going to do the data collection because it wasn't self-reported initially like that's that's where it got really weird like and they said you know we will have measures to counteract people maliciously you know reinst like that's a whole weird concept that would have been brought like maliciously installing a game to cause damage to a company like that's a doesn't even make any sense. But... Yeah. I think they could have avoided a lot of the controversy if they just said it was self-reported. Like, yeah, people weren't going to be happy from the start, but automatically collecting the data, I think, was the big weird part.

Yeah, yeah. That's always a concern right like the the telemetry that we are very used to have in everything and you know that's something i also maybe don't see people complaining a lot they complain oh i don't want this to track me we're very used to having social media oh social media is tracking you all that no that's bad but then you're using software that is tracking every movement you do and every install you do and you never complain, which I think is something we should care a little bit more about.

But yeah, how are they going to make sure that you are installing a game and it's like a unique computer or anything like that? I think they brought the concepts from mobile, which usually works sort of like by fingerprinting users and, you know, like kind of tying that up with a single person. I think they were thinking about mobile, I guess, first in those, you know, proposals of new money.

Which makes sense because it is like the biggest part of the gaming market at this point like by far it is yeah and it's it's kind of like their own you know expertise because since they merged with uh this other company iron source what's the name sounds right yeah yeah so i mean that that's you know what they know the most the problem is you have all these so-called premium games that are not like mobile games you know like games that you usually install on a console or on a desktop computer and they have a different model of operating of selling like they are not most of them are not like free to play or things like that. You pay once and that's it. And, you know, as I said before, like it's one of the gumbles that you have when you go with one of those solutions, proprietary solutions, right? Like they can change those terms at any time and you have to abide by them.

And yeah, maybe they are not even even legal but it's really hard to make to face them like legally right like to to pay lawyers or stuff like that is not something that anyone can can do and the conditions that they announced recently are better for most users and i really like that a lot of games that you know they were very close to getting finished they will be able to be finished and you know they're not gonna be in risk of any of this so that's a great thing right to hear like we don't like the fact that you know people are now struggling or like seeing all these sorts of issues coming at them like it really really sucks we have a lot of friends in the industry that you know are

just working really really hard on a game in unity and you know it's really really bad to see something like this but even if the terms are better now nothing really prevents them to change them in the future right now it could be this in a few years it could be five percent and then maybe ten percent because at the end of the day they are a public traded company they need to make a profit and you know they will do everything they can to to make a profit and that's their goal i think that's the the worst part that the worst thing that happened here right like you can clearly see that there's no interest in the game making part there's interest in the money making part from their side which makes sense as a publicly traded company but as

a user or as a consumer of their product it's really really bad like you're at the the whims of whatever you know they need to get on their reports so i mean it really sucks like of course it was a very positive thing for us to get the extra attention the extra funding and all that but it's not something that we want to see like in the industry in general right because a lot of people also follow the sort of models that make sense in this business. So if they see that this makes sense, you might see other engines or other services implementing similar things to this.

And this is going to be worse for everybody. You can start to see that maybe if this works, the installation fees and everything like that, you could see it going to maybe Twitch. If you have this many amount of users, you're costing us more, so you're going to have to pay, we are going to pay you less. You don't know the ramifications, but generally speaking, if you're just removing rights from people, it's really hard to get them back.

rights from people like it's really hard to get them back and you know i wouldn't wouldn't want to be in their situation of you know having a game in unity or having a lot of services for unity games and now like losing trust in in that company but it is the the system where we are living in i guess i I think the weird thing with Unity is they kind of approached it like you know how there's been a lot of AAA studios as of late who release a game that is just

broken beyond any reasonable doubt. Like, you had Gollum, you had Redfall, you had um, Forspoken was just a bad game. And then they just, they put out this, like, video game apology. It's like, we're sorry, we made a bad game. It seems like, I guess, Unity tried to approach it in a similar way, like, we're sorry, we'll do better. And it's like, that works when you're dealing with

a video game purchase, because, you know, you pay whatever it is in your local currency, we go to the US price, $60 for a new game, you know, you buy the game, if it's a bad game, like, you lost $60, like, whatever, like, that's obviously a big deal for some people, it's it's 60 but if you're building your career like you're building the next four years on this engine and now you're in a position where you don't think you can trust it like like that's a much more serious position and even with this change back like I could see companies that are like unity specialists sticking with unity but if someone is you know getting into this they or in a position where they're already thinking of changing community anyway like I think the long-term effects we still haven't seen. Like, yeah, like, people are kind of happier now,

but, like, I don't know what's going to happen in a couple of years from now after new projects have been settled, whether people keep, like, they just, you know, they trust Unity now, they just keep going with it, or if they start migrating to other engines, whether that be, you know they trust unity now they just keep going with it or if they start migrating to other engines whether that be you know unreal whether that be godot or anything else that's out there i think we still we still have to wait and see what the actual consequences of doing this really are yeah yeah no it's gonna be like a ripple effect, like that's gonna be, you know, for many years to come, like you're gonna see it everywhere.

And yeah, like a lot of schools are teaching Unity, right? And that's the first thing that people are getting used to. Yeah, my university had VR courses and its other gamedev courses all doing... Actually, they had one course in in unreal but most of the rest of it was unity yeah so that's even if you ask me like if i get the usual like uh relative who has like a kid and they want to get into games in the game industry of course like yeah learning got all right like learning to to try stuff but if you really want to get a job right now it's kind of you have to know unity that's where the industry like wants you to do um now that they really are considering like do we want to do this like do we want to collectively bet all of our like businesses to one company like you're gonna see the changes everywhere. But it's going to be slow. And it's not going to be something that happens overnight. And yeah, I just hope people see the value in different options.

And I wouldn't like that now everybody goes to Unreal, which could be the same situation in the future. There's a lot of open source alternatives that you can try. And, you know, there's also a lot of things that you can do to just think about the parts of your business that are based on that and really consider, am I like in the right moment to change or not?

Because sometimes it might not not make sense right maybe there's like an audio editing tool that you're using for your job that you know it's just the best and there isn't any alternative that's fine but keeping an eye on it like are there gonna be like something where they're like just trying other things but yeah i know that the ramifications from this are very very big and it can be a long time until we really start seeing it, how it looks like. It's also very sad to see that there were a lot of people inside fighting for not having this sort of change,

because they understand how game developers work and how they do things. So everyone that was there because they really like unity like the editor the project the engine right like they they were not agreeing with this change and unfortunately that's how you know publicly traded companies work. And if they didn't say anything like this, it will also mean the financial ruin of the company in the long run. I think that that's the biggest thing that happened to Unity. When they IPO and they are suddenly like a public traded company,

there's a shift in priorities. And all based like the industry around this tool and now you know that tool is maybe not profitable for them it takes a lot of developers and a lot of money and resources to have the editor just working like on the engine and all that and if it's not making money for them like they need to do something about it well you you made a good point in there about like the people who are just working on unity like i i said a very similar thing when a couple of months back when there was all of this drama with uh red hat and changing the way they were handling their umributed like handling the source code as like I know a lot of people that work I don't know anyone that works at unity

I know a lot of people that work at Red Hat and all of these engineers are great people who are Passionate about what they are working on and I'm sure it's exactly the same at unity There are people that work on the engine who just want to make a good engine that everybody can benefit from. But those people aren't the management. Those people aren't the ones who are making the financial decisions that, you know, some people aren't happy with. Like, they are just the engineers who are doing doing they're the engineers doing the cool things They don't Really have any say outside of that like they can talk their direct boss I'm like hey talk to your direct boss your boss like but that's pretty much as far as it goes

Yeah, yeah, yeah You know, it's also you meet these people, like, it's not that we fight each other, right? Like, we go to any gaming conference, like a game development conference, we're all just mixing and, you know, talking with each other. You know, we all kind of know, maybe not directly, but we have a friend who works with that. And, you know, like, everybody kind of knows each other. And we are all there for the games. Like, we want to see cool games.

We play games. Even us right now chatting we were chatting for a while about games just in general because what we like and we want to see more and if there's a way of making it sustainable that people can make games in a sustainable way and all that that's amazing but once you're a company that needs to have these sort of priorities you know unity had already like 70 of the market and i mean yeah maybe they could push to get a hundred percent of the market but then what right there always need to be more and that extra like how are you gonna get it like i don't know let's just start charging for this for that let's try to make it's it's how these sort of uh companies work so

yeah like people that are passionate and they really like to make games and the technology and all that they just couldn't like fight enough inside to to make you know the change that needed to happen i don't know if you're hearing it going by but the uh the firetruck whatever it was yeah yeah if you're ever in Berlin you're gonna hear it every day everywhere it's I don't know what happens with the sirens here oh it's okay I noticed a couple of a couple of them early but that one was real loud yeah it's a huge avenue but everywhere in the city you get like i don't know they're super loud here i don't know hey well people people know

they're coming at least yeah um well i i don't know if I have anything else to really touch on. Like, I think we touched on most of what I really wanted to talk about. Let's see. No, I think I've really talked about everything I want to talk about. Unless there's anything that you want to get into that we didn't really mention no no i think i think we mentioned though like i i also tried to to talk about the topics you know without directly talking about unity and what unity is doing because again like it's like unfortunate like the situation for them but also like it's like one thing that happened now and honestly we've been kind of here before like not as big as this one right but every time that unity has

an issue we kind of hear a lot of people coming a lot of interest again in godot and all that and nothing tells me that we are not going to be here in the future again, right? Like, I'm pretty sure that we're going to be here in the future, like, maybe one year, two years, or whenever, right? So, like, I try to cover all those topics as well from our point of view, right? Like, what we are doing and what we want Godot to be and, you know, also what the community wants got it to to be and yeah we're just here like doing our own thing and it's really nice that people now notice and that they see how powerful got it is and uh yeah like it's been amazing to see like our funding doubling like during this week and yeah yeah we got we went from 25 000 euros per month to 50 000 euros per month and also with on top of that like donations like the the free logic one which was 100k

and you know that's gonna give us more breathing room uh to say okay we can continue doing this you know people like it we can maybe get a few more people on board to continue working on it full time and you know make the best we can do with god but we are going our own way like we are not gonna be like trying to replace unity we are just gonna make god better with it right and that And that's our goal. Well, right now, what do you see as, like, a deficiency that Godot has that is being worked on or that you feel probably needs to be worked on?

There are many things for different people, right? We have this C-sharp situation, like the fact that you can export or not to mobile. I think that's something that we have to, and it is being worked on. Also importing assets in general sometimes is a bit weird. Of course the industry standard, like the FBX file, which is proprietary by Autodesk, is what people use. You know, we try to push for GLTF or open, like, formats. So, you know, like improving those for, like,

just getting more people to use it good out of the box and, you know, getting all in, no problems. I think that's also something we are working on and we can improve. And there's a lot of things from the foundation side also, like we are just very, very small and we would need more people to handle more stuff. Things that you might not think about, like we run a lot of web servers with a lot of stuff

that needs to be constantly up to date. It has to be safe. It has to be safe. It has to be right. Like the website, how we distribute the installation, like version of that, like the executables, like the forums, the Q&A platforms, many platforms that we maintain that are kind of part, like the documentation and all that, that are not specifically making the engine itself,

but that also need a lot of work and love. And that's something that if you want to contribute, it's always very nice to have people helping in those areas. So yeah, we need to have more people working not only in the engine itself which is really important but also in the structure to support it the asset store for instance would require like those sorts of things yeah if somebody wants to get involved with the project uh where is the best place for them to go to where should they start if you go to the website you will see links to the communities in which you can get maybe

involved. Generally speaking, we hang out in most of the places, the usual places, right? Like Mastodon, Twitter, or Reddit, or places like that. But if you want to really get into collaborating with us or like just trying to get something out github of course it's where everything happens like proposals go to github like discussions go to github like prs or opening issues things like that and then there's also the development chat which is chat.godotengine.org in which we use kind of like a discord or slack just for working and there's different channels for different topics where you can go in and chat with the people who are working on those areas

you know to improve it we also do meetings for different areas so if you're interested in gd script you can come and you can join to one of those meetings you don't have to participate if you don't want to at the beginning but you can listen to what people are working on or what the problems are and then if you get comfortable you can just start contributing that's you know

wow I was scrolling through the list you guys have like a lot of like different things here. You even have an IRC matrix still set up, which I love the fact. See, so few people still like, a lot of young people just aren't going to use IRC,

but it's nice that you still have it there just for like, there's going to be people that just, IRC is their thing. Yeah, I mean, that's also changes, right? Like it was the place where people chatted. That was the only place where the maintainers were. And after a while, you know, with new needs,

like you need to have proper like tools to do other stuff that IRC maybe doesn't provide. So that's why we moved to this Rocket Chat, which is the service we use for our chat. But then there's a lot of people on Discord as well now. We don't like Discord that much because

of course it's just like a closed company with you don't get any indexable results from it. So there's a lot of Q&A that happens in this car that just stays in this course and nobody else can see but people like young people really like it so you will see it it's very active but yeah everywhere almost like some platforms where we are not there there's

always like people that are very motivated about Godot and they create their own communities and you know you can you can find them that's uh you know I think a very pleasant place to end it um direct people to places they

should know about a website foundation any any places you want people to go to yeah i think the website is the best place uh we have everything from there that is gidoengine.org and then the foundation is gido.foundation yes yeah yeah it's just the foundation site is only like you know explaining a little bit what the foundation is we will start this year like this next year showing more like financial reports similar to what blender does in terms of like where the money was coming from where it's going like you know all those kind of like accountability things that we need to do, which before that was handled by the SFC.

And it was a bit more like you have to open the documents, like the IRS documents. And it was kind of like people didn't want to see that. So if we can make it easier for people to see where their money is going for, like we're going to make it there. But yeah, most of our activity happens on the website on the blog we publish a lot of stuff you can get up to date with everything there's rss feed everything awesome um is there any other place you want to direct people to like your own stuff or anything like that no no no that that's it I just got out yeah

okay if they want to I hope they will find it they will find my old tutorials oh I'll leave a link to the YouTube channel in the description down below anyway so if you want to check those out yeah I did a small documentary about God I think like the last video I uploaded there. I haven't checked it out yet, but I did see it was there. I might have to go and watch it afterwards. Actually, I'm going to go to sleep after this. Maybe I'll go watch it after I wake up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds cool. Must be quite late for you already. It's 1.30am, it's not that late. I'm usually in bed like half an hour ago, so it's not that bad. Yeah, I guess as for me, the main channel is Brodie Robinson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. I've got the gaming channel Brodie on Games, that is on Twitch and YouTube. Right now I'm playing through Armored Core 6, and I've probably finished Final Fantasy 16 by the time this comes out, so I'm gonna say Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance,

but don't quote me on that. And this channel, if you're listening to the audio version you can find the video version at tech over t on youtube and there is an audio version on pretty much every podcast platform look up tech over t there is an rss feed put it in your favorite app and you're good to go I'll give you the final

word what do you want to say just keep making games awesome Awesome. Awesome. See you guys later.