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W4 Games raises $8.5M to support Godot Engine growth

464 points by mroche 4y ago

poetril 4y ago
Very exciting. Godot breathed life into my game dev hobby a few years ago, thrilled to see it getting more resources to grow.
- mackatap 4y ago
  Same with me. It had nothing to do with it being open source or the cost, it was simply the tool I was able to use. That made sense to me after trying them all.
danjoredd 4y ago
Nice! I don't think W4 has created any games though. To get some REAL traction, Godot needs some full well-known games published. Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker. We have Wrought Flesh by Miziziziz, but other than that I can't think of a single game actually produced by Godot. I know it is capable of it, but we need a "killer app" to make it really blow up.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker Wasn't GameMaker big a long, long time before Undertale existed?
- Operyl 4y ago
  Sonic Colors Ultimate was made with Godot, if I recall correctly. It's not "huge" in the sense of a major AAA title, but it's still a big franchise.
  - Toadtoad 4y ago
    Unfortunately, at no fault of Godot itself, Sonic Colors Ultimate isn't really a great title to advertise Godot, due to the increased issues on this version of the game.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Reception_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Reception_2
    - Operyl 4y ago
      That's unfortunate, I guess it makes sense that Godot was used then. Tight budget, and it shows :(.
      - an_opabinia 4y ago
        It’s incredible really that these guys are talking about using Godot on consoles when it is in such bad shape. Even if it’s a bait and switch, and they spend 100% of the funds on just like, making the engine better, $8m isn’t going to get you to 1/20th of Unity or Unreal. It is an insurmountable niche.
        danjoredd 4y ago
        I disagree. I find that it is delightful to develop for, especially for 2d games. Miziziziz made a full-3d game in Godot, and did a good job with it. There were a few glitches he caught post-release, but those were not because of the engine.
        nomel 4y ago
        > <anyone> made a full-3d game in Godot Why is this considered a notable achievement?
        HideousKojima 4y ago
        I'd argue that Godot already has a better experience for 2d dev than Unity and Unreal
        4y ago
- amitmathew 4y ago
  Agreed! I don't think there's anything really standing in the way of building high-quality games with Godot. As Godot continues to mature and with the right tools and support for the indie community, it's just a matter of time before there's a breakout hit built with it. Our company is building some open source game templates that will hopefully spark some cool creations with Godot 4. So far we have templates for a Streets of Rage-type beat-em-up game, a tower defense-style game, and something similar to Binding of Isaac. We're also including some high-quality art assets to go with the templates. We're still a few weeks away from launching, but I hope to post our work on HN when they're ready.
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    Looking forward to seeing them!
  - tomcam 4y ago
    That is a ton of work, thank you. What is your motivation for making the templates open source?
    - amitmathew 4y ago
      That's a good question and to be honest, we're still figuring it out. Making our templates open source have the benefits of allowing the broader community to contribute, helps make Godot more accessible, and seems to more in the spirit of Godot. Of course we're a business and we're trying to build something sustainable, but right now we're betting on Godot and its community and we think elevating Godot will help us in the long run. Of course, maybe this a terrible idea, but let's find out! Part of the reason I started the company was to try out some off-the-wall ideas.
      - tomcam 4y ago
        I think it’s a win-win because while the templates are a wonderful contribution, most of your work will be in the game play, set, and mechanics. You get to help other people along without a significant impact on your own bottom line, I think.
- jszymborski 4y ago
  Cruelty Squad[0] really demonstrated to me what incredible things can be done with Godot, but I think the game is to... how to say this... out there? It has an _extremely_ stylised aesthetic. I have a hard time thinking of any game like it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_Squad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_Squad
  - nightowl_games 4y ago
    Frayhem [1] is an awesome game using Godot with Nim. Rocket Bot Royale [2] is a game I worked on using Godot. We released it on lots of platforms: Google Play, iOS, mac app store, pc/mac/linux on steam, and several HTML game sites. It has cross platform multiplayer with custom netcode written in c++, and pretty advanced SDF based terrain destruction. I think it's pretty good. We are currently making a new game using Godot which I'm excited about. https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/ https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/ https://frayhem.com/en/ https://frayhem.com/en/
    - jszymborski 4y ago
      Played a few minutes of Rocket Bot Royale and it is pretty fun! I'm so happy that since the demise of Flash, games in the browser have only gotten better.
      - nightowl_games 4y ago
        I'm happy to hear that. As a game developer, the state of game development is really exciting from a technological point of view. From a business point of view, it is very hard to compete, the market is very saturated. We are hoping to carve out a niche of high quality multiplayer games on the web.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      What was your process to getting it on other platforms that Godot does not currently support?
      - 4y ago
- zibby8 4y ago
  GameMaker filled a very specific niche by targeting indie devs with little-to-no coding experience and giving them enough support to make a game (similar to Flash). Maddy Thorsen used GameMaker for Jumper all the way back in 2004, which was really an amazing game that has similar game play elements to her phenomenal game Celeste. I'm not sure exactly what Godot's niche is, making it harder for it to have breakout hits.
- baud147258 4y ago
  I though the Deponia series of adventure games was made with Godot, but it seems it was only used for a port of the first game. Instead Deponia used a proprietary engine called Visionaire studio.
- prox 4y ago
  I think in the future “summer projects” like Blender did in the beginning was pretty good. So have a few veteran leads make a game with some of the best talents. They could pick a theme (say a minecraft clone, or a FPS) and slowly up the difficulty and technical feats required (which in turn will drive development)
- japhib 4y ago
  > I don't think W4 has created any games though W4 Games is not a game studio. It's a new company specifically for working on Godot and working on the Godot ecosystem, including offering console porting services and similar stuff that can't happen within the open source community because of NDAs and such.
- SXX 4y ago
  I havent seen that many Godot-powered games, but other than title I myself working on there is very promising game to be published by Raw Fury. I played the demo for several hours and had tons of fun, it called Dome Keeper. It's game with smaller scale, but it astonishingly beautiful and gameplay is addictive as hell. So there are Godot games with high production quality. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/
silent_cal 4y ago
Wow, that's quite a haul
dljsjr 4y ago
W4 Games's CEO Juan Linietsky is the creator and lead dev of Godot. Their primary mission, from my understanding, is providing the non-open-source tooling and support that's needed to make it feasible to use Godot as an environment for developing console games. The SDK's and their APIs cannot be included in the FOSS Godot code directly. Juan shared a blog post about the state of console support in Godot shortly before the launch of W4 that gives some more insight: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-... Often time folks say that what Godot is missing is a "killer app" that shows that the platform is viable. I think that this could potentially go a long way towards that.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I'm not sure it counts as a "killer app" since Unity and Unreal both have this feature already, but it's definitely another exciting step towards parity
  - bbkane 4y ago
    I think the largely open source nature of the Godot ecosystem is already the "killer app" and I hope parity in matters such as this expose that
    - klodolph 4y ago
      Unity has also gotten a bit intimidating to newcomers these days.
      - ygjb 4y ago
        It's also intimidating to people who have been using it for a long time as well. The proliferation of new features some of which compete with each other, and the lack of focus and polish on some of those features make it frustrating to stay current. That coupled with some questionable business partners and tone deaf comments by their leadership team has certainly piqued my interest in other platforms.
mesozoic 4y ago
Probably be purchased by Unity soon to avoid competition.
- ketzo 4y ago
  Why would W4 Games agree to be purchased? That seems pretty antithetical to, like, their whole thing.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Brand new venture started by the creator and lead dev of Godot to provide better console support for Godot just got millions in funding... I don't see why they would sell when they're just getting started.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I would sell my 8 million company for X million and then quit and start a x million company. Where X > 8. The question is, why would Unity buy a company like that?
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  The codebase is MIT Licensed, so Unity would be buying a shell intended to fund the project, it would be kind of a wasted efford really. The entire codebase (even the IDE) is MIT licensed last I checked.
  - brezelgoring 4y ago
    In this scenario, with Unity now being the owners of the author company, couldn't they change the license to another, or straight up make it closed source? I know the license says you have to be MIT - in perpetuity. That being said the author is the author and can do whatever, right? Especially if we're talking about Riccitello here, he has a past to consider.
    - stu2b50 4y ago
      You can’t retroactively delicense the codebase without the agreement of all other contributors, so basically you can’t. You can make any future work you write a different license. So in this hypothetical unity could basically continue with closed source fork.
jdoliner 4y ago
I'm incredibly excited to see Godot getting an organization like this behind it. Godot is an amazing tool. It's cliched to complain about names on hn, but every time I see W4 Games I think it's a company to help me cheat on my taxes.
- finder83 4y ago
  It didn't click for me before until I read it from someone else, but W4 seems to stand for "Waiting For" (Godot). Actually a rather creative name in my opinion. Apologies if you already knew that.
  - jdoliner 4y ago
    I did not know that! That's great actually
  - thrillgore 4y ago
    That only now clicked. And its based in Ireland.
brundolf 4y ago
I've started using Godot (4.0-alpha) for some hobby game dev recently. In the past I've done a fair amount with Unity and touched Unreal once or twice. Thoughts so far: Godot is far from perfect. It's definitely more sparse than the others in terms of features. I've encountered some bugs (nothing show-stopping, and it's tough to say how much of that is just from using the alpha version, but it has impacted my flow). There are unfortunate quirks; for example, saving scripts always saves the whole scene, and saving large scenes can pause the editor for multiple seconds, which is a particularly annoying combination. The programming model is heavily OOP. The custom scripting language, GDScript, is a blessing and a curse; its tight integration with the engine comes at the cost of subpar tooling (and of course, just learning a new language with new quirks). But. Godot has the distinct feeling of being cohesive. It feels like it was designed by one person, who knows what it takes to make games, and set out with a holistic vision. Everything you might need to do has an answer, or at least a story. You don't get confusing mixed signals from different parts of the interface or from the docs; there's one, intentionally-designed way to do each thing. GDScript has its quirks, but it also has very elegant built-ins for doing engine-specific stuff that would be super clunky in a general-purpose language. Using Godot almost has the feeling of using (good) Apple software; somebody anticipated your needs, and made sure they'd be met. Maybe not in the exact way you would have picked, but in a way that will work, and will fit in with everything else. That, combined with it being fully open-source, makes it feel like it has good bones. Especially in contrast with Unity - which felt like a growing pile of corpses being tossed on top of each other with each release - it's been so refreshing that it's singlehandedly gotten me back into hobby game dev. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time learning one half-baked API that's going to be replaced with another half-baked API six months from now. For every annoyance or missing feature in Godot, I have faith that things will continue to improve - because they're built on a solid foundation - or that I could at least build it myself if I really needed to. I believe in the vision and the future of this piece of software. And that makes it feel worthwhile to invest the time learning all its quirks.
- glanzwulf 4y ago
  What kind of features are you missing from Godot vs other engines?
ThePadawan 4y ago
I'm (positively) amazed at the number of open PRs on Godot's Github [0]. I'm used to those sorts of numbers for open issues without ongoing fixes - but the number of issues is actually only 5x the number of PRs. That seems insanely productive for an open source effort. [0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls
- capableweb 4y ago
  I'm super happy Godot is receiving so much attention, both in contributions and issue creation. But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that? Seems hugely unproductive to never close a PR unless the author do so (apparently? I don't know the dev process too closely). Most be very hard to navigate so many PRs, and surely most of them must be unmergable after some months due to conflicts.
  - sl3dge78 4y ago
    I think this is mostly because the core team has been working on 4.0 for a couple of years now so I would imagine that PRs get overlooked. It's a popular project and there's not a lot of people on the team so yeah it builds up. I have PR open since 2020 (small change for a bit of qol) still hasn't been merged and I believe that there will be major conflicts now.
  - ThePadawan 4y ago
    > But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that? Simply because I looked at some other tools recently and their PR backlog was simply a graveyard. A 3 year backlog seems really good to me in comparison.
BoorishBears 4y ago
I'm afraid this will be an unpopular opinion with how beloved Godot is... but this is how Unity ended up where they are. Unity launched with a very similar mission to Godot, very similar energy of busting up big game engine: then the funding came in.
- tmpz22 4y ago
  Well there's more hindsight for them to draw on and learn from the mistakes of the past. Im sure there were for Unity too, but its more immediate in this situation I think. You're probably right though.
  - Macha 4y ago
    The concern with something like this is that chucking the early adopters under the bus once they were established is unlikely to be viewed as a mistake given it likely didn't affect the investors or owners
- _manifold 4y ago
  The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project. That's not to say FOSS development doesn't have its own challenges and potential issues, but I don't think it's fair to say they are resigned to follow in Unity's footsteps simply because they are now receiving funding. By example, Blender is receiving a not-insignificant amount of funding from a variety of sources and they are doing better than ever.
  - homarp 4y ago
    godot started as a in-house engine, so commercial venture. (see https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release ). Just like Blender started as in-house tools ( https://www.blender.org/about/history/ https://www.blender.org/about/history/ )
    - larsiusprime 4y ago
amilios 4y ago
How exactly do game engines monetize, can anyone shed any light? Is it via additional support in using the engine for large companies? A freemium model like Unity's? But didn't even Unity succumb eventually to supplementing monetization via ads?
- anutrix 4y ago
  Afaik, it depends on the engine. Each one does differently. There are hardly any major game engines left who don't offer free versions. But commercial ones make money either through: 1. Having some features(aka Pro or Enterprise version) or export options paid. 2. Royalties from the games made(a cut in your profits). 3. Ads. 4. Contracts with bigger companies, government, orgs, etc. 5. Projects with movie industry and other fields(research, simulation, labs, universities). 6. There might be more ways. Free and Open-Source game engines mostly monetize from sponsors, donations and contributions or just don't earn.
- rozab 4y ago
  For legal reasons Godot itself can't include open source console compatibility. Third parties are already offering console porting for Godot games as a service, but this is an obvious way for W4 to generate cash without abandoning the principles of the project.
hgs3 4y ago
Just a thought I had: Godot is MIT and the project never had a contributor license agreement. W4 doesn't "own" the copyright anymore than anyone else. An investor with enough capital could start their own W4 competitor, or even a closed source competitor, based on Godot at any time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hresvelgr 4y ago
  Ariel Manzur, the other significant co-author of Godot runs Lone Wolf Technology, a consultancy for helping studios with Godot, primarily porting to consoles. The common theme is they were both started by people who made the engine so I doubt a competitor would pop up without similar qualification.
- japhib 4y ago
  Even if they did, what would be the point? The appeal of Godot is that it's open source; if you just want a full-featured game engine, with a large, existing ecosystem around it to boot, just use Unity or Unreal.
- esperent 4y ago
  Yes, that is how MIT (and similar) licensed open source work projects work. It's a feature, not a bug.
senectus1 4y ago
watching my son learn to program by watching youtube videos and replicating what he sees... honestly you want todays kids to be big fans of godot.. do more LOTS more youtube videos on how to do various different "things" in godot. if you build them they will come (and watch them).
SXX 4y ago
This is huge and I hope they'll manage to deliver working console support. Though real problem is not just code itself, but some backing from larger publishing companies. Basically pipeline of all major publishers is built around Unity and Unreal: porting teams, localization, QA and devops. You can create an amazing game, but just for the reason you are not using two of major game engines you won't be able to find funding and sign publishing deal. I am on 10+ people team building an indie game using Godot. Unfortunately for our next project we will have to use Unity because we had a hard time finding investment. Several companies loved our game, but refused a deal simply because it's not built on Unity or Unreal. In the end we found a smaller publisher that was interested, but it's likely we could get a better deal if we built it on Unity. PS: Shameless plug. Our game is here to be released sometimes in 2022: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/
- zibby8 4y ago
  Wow I love the style of this game. Sorry to hear it was hard to fund.
  - SXX 4y ago
    Thanks. In our case gettng funded was not as critical as our project been in development for more than two years before we signed publishing agrement in January 2022. Without at least some extra budget we wouldn't be being able to work on it full-time and hire extra artists. So gettting to release would take two more years. Also doing marketing in-house is really difficult, prohibitively expensive and distract you from actually working on a game. Overall our experience with Godot was good enough except for performance profiling and UI toolkit. I wish Godot get more traction, but unfortunately for now this is hot it is. So I have to warn fellow indie devs that decision to use less popular game engine have it costs.
    - drh 4y ago
      What did you use for UI in the end?
caniszczyk 4y ago
Nice to see more open source gaming engine options! There's an open source gaming engine event in Austin coming up next month: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/o3dcon/ https://events.linuxfoundation.org/o3dcon/
shantnutiwari 4y ago
Great, and now if they could just fix all the bugs and random crashing...
nameless912 4y ago
I'm finally building my first real game in Godot as a hobby developer, and I couldn't be happier for this news. Godot is the game engine I always wanted; it's powerful like Unity, but easy to hack something together with like GameMaker. I feel freed from architecture and implementation decisions because the built in decisions made by the engine are more than good enough for everything I want to build. Every time I think "hmm, I wonder if there's a pre existing pattern for this", the engine already has a solution. Sure it's not the most polished product in the world, and I run into bugs occasionally, but IME it's no worse than I experienced when using Unity in a previous job. I've had the editor crash on me a grand total of once (and it was my fault, I was writing an editor extension that contained an accidental stack bomb), and nearly every system behaves the way you would expect it to out of the box with no tweaking. I _cannot_ say the same about Unity, which crashed on me at least daily and took 100x as long to open as Godot, and had systems that behaved completely nonsensically unless you massaged them extremely carefully. All in all, I love Godot and I can't wait to see where this venture goes.

464 points by mroche 4y ago

Very exciting. Godot breathed life into my game dev hobby a few years ago, thrilled to see it getting more resources to grow.

mackatap 4y ago
Same with me. It had nothing to do with it being open source or the cost, it was simply the tool I was able to use. That made sense to me after trying them all.

danjoredd 4y ago

Nice! I don't think W4 has created any games though. To get some REAL traction, Godot needs some full well-known games published. Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker. We have Wrought Flesh by Miziziziz, but other than that I can't think of a single game actually produced by Godot. I know it is capable of it, but we need a "killer app" to make it really blow up.

thaumasiotes 4y ago
> Basically, we need a game to do to Godot, what Undertale and Nuclear Throne did to GameMaker Wasn't GameMaker big a long, long time before Undertale existed?
Operyl 4y ago
Sonic Colors Ultimate was made with Godot, if I recall correctly. It's not "huge" in the sense of a major AAA title, but it's still a big franchise.
- Toadtoad 4y ago
  Unfortunately, at no fault of Godot itself, Sonic Colors Ultimate isn't really a great title to advertise Godot, due to the increased issues on this version of the game.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Reception_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Colors#Reception_2
  - Operyl 4y ago
    That's unfortunate, I guess it makes sense that Godot was used then. Tight budget, and it shows :(.
    - an_opabinia 4y ago
      It’s incredible really that these guys are talking about using Godot on consoles when it is in such bad shape. Even if it’s a bait and switch, and they spend 100% of the funds on just like, making the engine better, $8m isn’t going to get you to 1/20th of Unity or Unreal. It is an insurmountable niche.
      - danjoredd 4y ago
        I disagree. I find that it is delightful to develop for, especially for 2d games. Miziziziz made a full-3d game in Godot, and did a good job with it. There were a few glitches he caught post-release, but those were not because of the engine.
        nomel 4y ago
        > <anyone> made a full-3d game in Godot Why is this considered a notable achievement?
      - HideousKojima 4y ago
        I'd argue that Godot already has a better experience for 2d dev than Unity and Unreal
        4y ago
amitmathew 4y ago
Agreed! I don't think there's anything really standing in the way of building high-quality games with Godot. As Godot continues to mature and with the right tools and support for the indie community, it's just a matter of time before there's a breakout hit built with it. Our company is building some open source game templates that will hopefully spark some cool creations with Godot 4. So far we have templates for a Streets of Rage-type beat-em-up game, a tower defense-style game, and something similar to Binding of Isaac. We're also including some high-quality art assets to go with the templates. We're still a few weeks away from launching, but I hope to post our work on HN when they're ready.
- danjoredd 4y ago
  Looking forward to seeing them!
- tomcam 4y ago
  That is a ton of work, thank you. What is your motivation for making the templates open source?
  - amitmathew 4y ago
    That's a good question and to be honest, we're still figuring it out. Making our templates open source have the benefits of allowing the broader community to contribute, helps make Godot more accessible, and seems to more in the spirit of Godot. Of course we're a business and we're trying to build something sustainable, but right now we're betting on Godot and its community and we think elevating Godot will help us in the long run. Of course, maybe this a terrible idea, but let's find out! Part of the reason I started the company was to try out some off-the-wall ideas.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      I think it’s a win-win because while the templates are a wonderful contribution, most of your work will be in the game play, set, and mechanics. You get to help other people along without a significant impact on your own bottom line, I think.
jszymborski 4y ago
Cruelty Squad[0] really demonstrated to me what incredible things can be done with Godot, but I think the game is to... how to say this... out there? It has an _extremely_ stylised aesthetic. I have a hard time thinking of any game like it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_Squad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruelty_Squad
- nightowl_games 4y ago
  Frayhem [1] is an awesome game using Godot with Nim. Rocket Bot Royale [2] is a game I worked on using Godot. We released it on lots of platforms: Google Play, iOS, mac app store, pc/mac/linux on steam, and several HTML game sites. It has cross platform multiplayer with custom netcode written in c++, and pretty advanced SDF based terrain destruction. I think it's pretty good. We are currently making a new game using Godot which I'm excited about. https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/ https://rocketbotroyale.winterpixel.io/ https://frayhem.com/en/ https://frayhem.com/en/
  - jszymborski 4y ago
    Played a few minutes of Rocket Bot Royale and it is pretty fun! I'm so happy that since the demise of Flash, games in the browser have only gotten better.
    - nightowl_games 4y ago
      I'm happy to hear that. As a game developer, the state of game development is really exciting from a technological point of view. From a business point of view, it is very hard to compete, the market is very saturated. We are hoping to carve out a niche of high quality multiplayer games on the web.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    What was your process to getting it on other platforms that Godot does not currently support?
    - 4y ago
zibby8 4y ago
GameMaker filled a very specific niche by targeting indie devs with little-to-no coding experience and giving them enough support to make a game (similar to Flash). Maddy Thorsen used GameMaker for Jumper all the way back in 2004, which was really an amazing game that has similar game play elements to her phenomenal game Celeste. I'm not sure exactly what Godot's niche is, making it harder for it to have breakout hits.
baud147258 4y ago
I though the Deponia series of adventure games was made with Godot, but it seems it was only used for a port of the first game. Instead Deponia used a proprietary engine called Visionaire studio.
prox 4y ago
I think in the future “summer projects” like Blender did in the beginning was pretty good. So have a few veteran leads make a game with some of the best talents. They could pick a theme (say a minecraft clone, or a FPS) and slowly up the difficulty and technical feats required (which in turn will drive development)
japhib 4y ago
> I don't think W4 has created any games though W4 Games is not a game studio. It's a new company specifically for working on Godot and working on the Godot ecosystem, including offering console porting services and similar stuff that can't happen within the open source community because of NDAs and such.
SXX 4y ago
I havent seen that many Godot-powered games, but other than title I myself working on there is very promising game to be published by Raw Fury. I played the demo for several hours and had tons of fun, it called Dome Keeper. It's game with smaller scale, but it astonishingly beautiful and gameplay is addictive as hell. So there are Godot games with high production quality. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

silent_cal 4y ago

Wow, that's quite a haul

dljsjr 4y ago

W4 Games's CEO Juan Linietsky is the creator and lead dev of Godot. Their primary mission, from my understanding, is providing the non-open-source tooling and support that's needed to make it feasible to use Godot as an environment for developing console games. The SDK's and their APIs cannot be included in the FOSS Godot code directly. Juan shared a blog post about the state of console support in Godot shortly before the launch of W4 that gives some more insight: https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-know https://godotengine.org/article/godot-consoles-all-you-need-... Often time folks say that what Godot is missing is a "killer app" that shows that the platform is viable. I think that this could potentially go a long way towards that.

brundolf 4y ago
I'm not sure it counts as a "killer app" since Unity and Unreal both have this feature already, but it's definitely another exciting step towards parity
- bbkane 4y ago
  I think the largely open source nature of the Godot ecosystem is already the "killer app" and I hope parity in matters such as this expose that
  - klodolph 4y ago
    Unity has also gotten a bit intimidating to newcomers these days.
    - ygjb 4y ago
      It's also intimidating to people who have been using it for a long time as well. The proliferation of new features some of which compete with each other, and the lack of focus and polish on some of those features make it frustrating to stay current. That coupled with some questionable business partners and tone deaf comments by their leadership team has certainly piqued my interest in other platforms.

mesozoic 4y ago

Probably be purchased by Unity soon to avoid competition.

ketzo 4y ago
Why would W4 Games agree to be purchased? That seems pretty antithetical to, like, their whole thing.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Brand new venture started by the creator and lead dev of Godot to provide better console support for Godot just got millions in funding... I don't see why they would sell when they're just getting started.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I would sell my 8 million company for X million and then quit and start a x million company. Where X > 8. The question is, why would Unity buy a company like that?
giancarlostoro 4y ago
The codebase is MIT Licensed, so Unity would be buying a shell intended to fund the project, it would be kind of a wasted efford really. The entire codebase (even the IDE) is MIT licensed last I checked.
- brezelgoring 4y ago
  In this scenario, with Unity now being the owners of the author company, couldn't they change the license to another, or straight up make it closed source? I know the license says you have to be MIT - in perpetuity. That being said the author is the author and can do whatever, right? Especially if we're talking about Riccitello here, he has a past to consider.
  - stu2b50 4y ago
    You can’t retroactively delicense the codebase without the agreement of all other contributors, so basically you can’t. You can make any future work you write a different license. So in this hypothetical unity could basically continue with closed source fork.

jdoliner 4y ago

I'm incredibly excited to see Godot getting an organization like this behind it. Godot is an amazing tool. It's cliched to complain about names on hn, but every time I see W4 Games I think it's a company to help me cheat on my taxes.

finder83 4y ago
It didn't click for me before until I read it from someone else, but W4 seems to stand for "Waiting For" (Godot). Actually a rather creative name in my opinion. Apologies if you already knew that.
- jdoliner 4y ago
  I did not know that! That's great actually
- thrillgore 4y ago
  That only now clicked. And its based in Ireland.

brundolf 4y ago

I've started using Godot (4.0-alpha) for some hobby game dev recently. In the past I've done a fair amount with Unity and touched Unreal once or twice. Thoughts so far: Godot is far from perfect. It's definitely more sparse than the others in terms of features. I've encountered some bugs (nothing show-stopping, and it's tough to say how much of that is just from using the alpha version, but it has impacted my flow). There are unfortunate quirks; for example, saving scripts always saves the whole scene, and saving large scenes can pause the editor for multiple seconds, which is a particularly annoying combination. The programming model is heavily OOP. The custom scripting language, GDScript, is a blessing and a curse; its tight integration with the engine comes at the cost of subpar tooling (and of course, just learning a new language with new quirks). But. Godot has the distinct feeling of being cohesive. It feels like it was designed by one person, who knows what it takes to make games, and set out with a holistic vision. Everything you might need to do has an answer, or at least a story. You don't get confusing mixed signals from different parts of the interface or from the docs; there's one, intentionally-designed way to do each thing. GDScript has its quirks, but it also has very elegant built-ins for doing engine-specific stuff that would be super clunky in a general-purpose language. Using Godot almost has the feeling of using (good) Apple software; somebody anticipated your needs, and made sure they'd be met. Maybe not in the exact way you would have picked, but in a way that will work, and will fit in with everything else. That, combined with it being fully open-source, makes it feel like it has good bones. Especially in contrast with Unity - which felt like a growing pile of corpses being tossed on top of each other with each release - it's been so refreshing that it's singlehandedly gotten me back into hobby game dev. I don't feel like I'm wasting my time learning one half-baked API that's going to be replaced with another half-baked API six months from now. For every annoyance or missing feature in Godot, I have faith that things will continue to improve - because they're built on a solid foundation - or that I could at least build it myself if I really needed to. I believe in the vision and the future of this piece of software. And that makes it feel worthwhile to invest the time learning all its quirks.

glanzwulf 4y ago
What kind of features are you missing from Godot vs other engines?

ThePadawan 4y ago

I'm (positively) amazed at the number of open PRs on Godot's Github [0]. I'm used to those sorts of numbers for open issues without ongoing fixes - but the number of issues is actually only 5x the number of PRs. That seems insanely productive for an open source effort. [0] https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pulls

capableweb 4y ago
I'm super happy Godot is receiving so much attention, both in contributions and issue creation. But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that? Seems hugely unproductive to never close a PR unless the author do so (apparently? I don't know the dev process too closely). Most be very hard to navigate so many PRs, and surely most of them must be unmergable after some months due to conflicts.
- sl3dge78 4y ago
  I think this is mostly because the core team has been working on 4.0 for a couple of years now so I would imagine that PRs get overlooked. It's a popular project and there's not a lot of people on the team so yeah it builds up. I have PR open since 2020 (small change for a bit of qol) still hasn't been merged and I believe that there will be major conflicts now.
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  > But, how is having PRs open since 2019 a positive indication, and a productive one at that? Simply because I looked at some other tools recently and their PR backlog was simply a graveyard. A 3 year backlog seems really good to me in comparison.

BoorishBears 4y ago

I'm afraid this will be an unpopular opinion with how beloved Godot is... but this is how Unity ended up where they are. Unity launched with a very similar mission to Godot, very similar energy of busting up big game engine: then the funding came in.

tmpz22 4y ago
Well there's more hindsight for them to draw on and learn from the mistakes of the past. Im sure there were for Unity too, but its more immediate in this situation I think. You're probably right though.
- Macha 4y ago
  The concern with something like this is that chucking the early adopters under the bus once they were established is unlikely to be viewed as a mistake given it likely didn't affect the investors or owners
_manifold 4y ago
The key difference is that Unity was a commercial venture from the start and Godot is a FOSS project. That's not to say FOSS development doesn't have its own challenges and potential issues, but I don't think it's fair to say they are resigned to follow in Unity's footsteps simply because they are now receiving funding. By example, Blender is receiving a not-insignificant amount of funding from a variety of sources and they are doing better than ever.
- homarp 4y ago
  godot started as a in-house engine, so commercial venture. (see https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release https://godotengine.org/article/first-public-release ). Just like Blender started as in-house tools ( https://www.blender.org/about/history/ https://www.blender.org/about/history/ )
  - larsiusprime 4y ago

amilios 4y ago

How exactly do game engines monetize, can anyone shed any light? Is it via additional support in using the engine for large companies? A freemium model like Unity's? But didn't even Unity succumb eventually to supplementing monetization via ads?

anutrix 4y ago
Afaik, it depends on the engine. Each one does differently. There are hardly any major game engines left who don't offer free versions. But commercial ones make money either through: 1. Having some features(aka Pro or Enterprise version) or export options paid. 2. Royalties from the games made(a cut in your profits). 3. Ads. 4. Contracts with bigger companies, government, orgs, etc. 5. Projects with movie industry and other fields(research, simulation, labs, universities). 6. There might be more ways. Free and Open-Source game engines mostly monetize from sponsors, donations and contributions or just don't earn.
rozab 4y ago
For legal reasons Godot itself can't include open source console compatibility. Third parties are already offering console porting for Godot games as a service, but this is an obvious way for W4 to generate cash without abandoning the principles of the project.

hgs3 4y ago

Just a thought I had: Godot is MIT and the project never had a contributor license agreement. W4 doesn't "own" the copyright anymore than anyone else. An investor with enough capital could start their own W4 competitor, or even a closed source competitor, based on Godot at any time.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hresvelgr 4y ago
Ariel Manzur, the other significant co-author of Godot runs Lone Wolf Technology, a consultancy for helping studios with Godot, primarily porting to consoles. The common theme is they were both started by people who made the engine so I doubt a competitor would pop up without similar qualification.
japhib 4y ago
Even if they did, what would be the point? The appeal of Godot is that it's open source; if you just want a full-featured game engine, with a large, existing ecosystem around it to boot, just use Unity or Unreal.
esperent 4y ago
Yes, that is how MIT (and similar) licensed open source work projects work. It's a feature, not a bug.

senectus1 4y ago

watching my son learn to program by watching youtube videos and replicating what he sees... honestly you want todays kids to be big fans of godot.. do more LOTS more youtube videos on how to do various different "things" in godot. if you build them they will come (and watch them).

SXX 4y ago

This is huge and I hope they'll manage to deliver working console support. Though real problem is not just code itself, but some backing from larger publishing companies. Basically pipeline of all major publishers is built around Unity and Unreal: porting teams, localization, QA and devops. You can create an amazing game, but just for the reason you are not using two of major game engines you won't be able to find funding and sign publishing deal. I am on 10+ people team building an indie game using Godot. Unfortunately for our next project we will have to use Unity because we had a hard time finding investment. Several companies loved our game, but refused a deal simply because it's not built on Unity or Unreal. In the end we found a smaller publisher that was interested, but it's likely we could get a better deal if we built it on Unity. PS: Shameless plug. Our game is here to be released sometimes in 2022: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1076120/Dwarven_Skykeep/

zibby8 4y ago
Wow I love the style of this game. Sorry to hear it was hard to fund.
- SXX 4y ago
  Thanks. In our case gettng funded was not as critical as our project been in development for more than two years before we signed publishing agrement in January 2022. Without at least some extra budget we wouldn't be being able to work on it full-time and hire extra artists. So gettting to release would take two more years. Also doing marketing in-house is really difficult, prohibitively expensive and distract you from actually working on a game. Overall our experience with Godot was good enough except for performance profiling and UI toolkit. I wish Godot get more traction, but unfortunately for now this is hot it is. So I have to warn fellow indie devs that decision to use less popular game engine have it costs.
  - drh 4y ago
    What did you use for UI in the end?

caniszczyk 4y ago

Nice to see more open source gaming engine options! There's an open source gaming engine event in Austin coming up next month: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/o3dcon/ https://events.linuxfoundation.org/o3dcon/

shantnutiwari 4y ago

Great, and now if they could just fix all the bugs and random crashing...

nameless912 4y ago

I'm finally building my first real game in Godot as a hobby developer, and I couldn't be happier for this news. Godot is the game engine I always wanted; it's powerful like Unity, but easy to hack something together with like GameMaker. I feel freed from architecture and implementation decisions because the built in decisions made by the engine are more than good enough for everything I want to build. Every time I think "hmm, I wonder if there's a pre existing pattern for this", the engine already has a solution. Sure it's not the most polished product in the world, and I run into bugs occasionally, but IME it's no worse than I experienced when using Unity in a previous job. I've had the editor crash on me a grand total of once (and it was my fault, I was writing an editor extension that contained an accidental stack bomb), and nearly every system behaves the way you would expect it to out of the box with no tweaking. I _cannot_ say the same about Unity, which crashed on me at least daily and took 100x as long to open as Godot, and had systems that behaved completely nonsensically unless you massaged them extremely carefully. All in all, I love Godot and I can't wait to see where this venture goes.