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Welcome to GodotFest 2025! A 2 day conference in Munich, Germany. It is great to see many folks from around the world, using, developing, publishing, and promoting Godot, all in one place!

The opening remarks mention this conference has grown a lot since it was first held in 2023, and they figure the reason for that is: Unity’s per-install fee. (It’s interesting how that will be forever part of the Godot chronology)

Here is @coppolaemilio.com talking about out the Godot priorities list. Kinda like a roadmap of Godot features and workflows: godotengine.org/priorities/ Not many people know about it yet, so I’m sharing it here as well!

At GodotFest I am giving a Tool Design talk today at 12:25 in the Iberico room, and Tool Design workshop tomorrow at 14:30 in the Italy room.

An interesting discussion I just had with @alecshea.com: Apparently selling game soundtracks on Steam can be quite profitable. The tail has to be long, but sometimes after 4-5 years it can eclipse the original fee for the game itself.

And as the soundtrack is a separate ‘app’ on Steam, the money can go directly to the musician. As in: Directly to their bank account, no middle man required. Setting up such a DLC page is free for the original game app page owner, after which they can transfer that page to the musician, for free.

My talk went great, thank you to everyone for coming! I often get questions about whether there is formal research about Tool Design, and there is! Two bachelor thesis' I know about, by @cookiebadger.bsky.social and @thesmall001.bsky.social: 1. tinyurl.com/tooldesign1 2. tinyurl.com/tooldesign2

I’m now seeing a talk about large scale vegetation rendering in Godot, by Karl Bittner. He mentions there is an open source alternative to speedtree, which he has barely heard mentioned: EZ tree: www.eztree.dev It even has an in-browser 3D viewer in which you can try different seeds for the trees!

Look at this foliage! You could make a “Unreal or Godot?” daily mini game with screenshots to pick between, and game devs would get it wrong at least 50% of the time.

Turns out foliage in real life sometimes grows in ‘unnatural straight lines’, and this is due to underground water currents, like underground rivers, which you can see on satellite photos. So in-game you should do this too. Neat, though I think I already learned this from @anyaustin.bsky.social

As I have gotten used to at Godot conferences: The attendees are a great mix of indie, AAA, and also outside of games such as automotive visualisation. In the hallways I also hear German, French, Spanish, American accents, British accents, etc, it's a great mix!

Every conference should have a swing, thank you @godotfest.com (📸 by @winston-yallow.bsky.social)

Now seeing how a 30 person team is using Godot to build a game. …and they run into the same issues every larger project will eventually run into. No surprise! Everyone will break a build sometime.