Hi!

I’ve had the pleasure to attend this year’s GodotFest taking place in Munich, Germany. The conference was a two-day event with over 20 talks, and several workshops. Target was more towards professionals, based on the price of the tickets and the talks. Lots of people with experience of releasing successfully Godot games.

The venue was the Munich-Bogenhausen smartvillage site. The organizers were kind enough to lead the way from the nearest underground station (German: U-Bahn) Arabellapark with blue balloons.

(source: made with my phone camera, faces of random people blurred)

From all the talks, I’ve tried to attend those more technical ones and trending towards C++ or engineering aspect. Below I summarize those that I’ve seen briefly, with a link to the recording. All recordings are available at the GodotFest subpage on the Chaos Computer Club here.

Day 1

• Opening remarks by Johannes Ebner
  • More on the organizational site of the conference.
  • Info on volounteers, noone’s technically getting paid.
  • It is towards professional.
  • Included a big thanks to everyone involved, including their families helping them do that after work!

(left: before the Opening Remarks, right: Emilio from the Godot Foundation)

• Godot Foundation Q&A by Emilio Coppola
  • First part included broad info on various ways how community can influence the direction of Godot (priorities, voting, surveys).
  • Secord part was an interactive-live Q&A, similiar to how Emilio conducts it on their YouTube channel (according to him, it’s just starting – has been going on for about 3 months).
  • Good questions, with Emilio revealing how the foundation works (i.e. they have contractors helping out in triaging tasks, or developing some things; the foundation is hesitant to accept code changes into core, as that means maintenace cost)
  • 48:20 my question about maturing extentions/addons into the Core 🙂

• Making of DOGWALK by Simon Thommes, Vivien Lulkowski and Julien Kasper of Blender Studio
  • Cool little game developed “at least 51% in Blender” available on Steam.
  • Presented and developed by Blender Studio employees, more artists than programmers, so a slightly different take.
  • They explained how they developed their on pipeline to quickly update Blender assets in their Godot project. This is to iterate fast, and develop easily.
  • Shared some tricks how they got such a pretty looking world and characters. As a programmer, that has slightly reduced my ignorance.
  • Their game was included in the Godot Engine 2025 Showreel.

• GdUnit4 live demo + technical overview by Mike Schulze
  • Quick presentation of the key features of GdUnit4 by its creator
  • Reportedly production-ready framework for testing, strong focus on unit test
  • Very cool “SceneRunner” to replay scenarios (import scenes, define inputs, assert events happening)
  • I really think this could be extended to be a collaboration tool between graphics and programming (so you can pre-record actions to show some effects, and have artists just re-run such tests to see how new assets looks like), my question about it around 25:10 – answer is to file a feature request 😉

• Unlocking GDExtension Power by Patrick Exner
  • Workshop, unfortunately no recording
  • Showed live how to get both custom C++ code and an imported third party library code to be usable in Godot via GDExtension and SCons, on Linux and Mac (not sure if there was any Windows user present)
  • Available on GitHub.
• A Peek Under the Hood, Halls of Torment by Paul Lawitzki
  • Technical, explains their process.
  • Done in GdScript. Too slow? Move key parts to C++. Which parts are the key? Profile, profile, profile!
  • Focused on making the game fast.
  • Created their own “in-house” automated-player on devices (literally devices playing the game 24/7). Found a lot of bugs!
  • Get it on Steam. It has a very fitting price, at least in EUR, 6.66.

(left: Paul’s presentation summary: “Profiling”; right: René’s development/exploration phase vs duration)

• Don’t ship the wrong game! by René Habermann
  • Behind the scenes on how the company behind the successful DomeKeeper chose to work on it.
  • 19th (sic!) game jam to finally find a good game prospect.
  • Decent metrics definition to answer “should we continue development?”
  • Shows the important of early testing.
  • Possibly the best presentation of the entire conference – clearly a motivator to finish the project.
  • “Don’t wait extra 2 months for the key feature, nobody cares, or you can retry again”
• Building Starfinder: Professional Godot at Scale by María Calle Galán, Ricard Pillosu and Felix Rios
  • The biggest game studio present on the conference, about 30 people strong.
  • Info on how they work together: make your own tools! (at their scale, saving hours for that many people might really be worth it)
  • Might be paving the way for bigger studios, or AAA games?

Whoa, and that was just the day 1! I will share the insights on the second day in another post, as this was is clearly *packed*. Happy (re-)watching!

The loot!

It wouldn’t be a real conference with some goodies. A t-shirt (extra paid for), two pins, several stickers, some cool memories and a new-found motivation to finish my demo 🙂

As per the organizers, they hope to make it a yearly event. I hope for that as well, that was definitely a fun conference, suprisingly professional for a niche (relatively, in professional terms) game engine.

Bonus

DOGWALK presentation included a Hollow Knight reference. That wasn’t the last one 🙂