2025 on GodotFest

Ben Vehling

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ben Vehling is a producer at United Soft Media and Co-Founder of GodotFest. He leads the operational side of the event, from partner coordination and budgeting to keeping the onsite experience running smoothly. Ben balances community care with a detail-oriented mindset that helps the festival grow while staying true to its roots.

Kerstin Pfaffinger

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Johannes Ebner

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Raffaele Picca

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Senad Hrnjadovic

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Miguel (bitbrain)

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Matteo Tietz

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

ste

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veronika Gasser

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Veronika Gasser is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Mohamed Morad

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mohamed Morad is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Angela Hanko

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Angela Hanko is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Rainer Laschober

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rainer Laschober is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Jan Nothacker

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jan Nothacker is a volunteer at GodotFest.

SpesKnight

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

SpesKnight is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Evgin Hyusmenov

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Evgin Hyusmenov is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Fio Leukert

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Fio Leukert is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Chris Vogel

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Vogel is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Jon Bauer

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Jon Bauer is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Max Bredlau

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Max Bredlau is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Ao Gao

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ao Gao is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Daniel Pisanu

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Pisanu is a volunteer at GodotFest.

Mingqi Han

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mingqi Han is a volunteer at GodotFest.

A Peek Under the Hood: Technical Learnings from Halls of Torment

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Lawitzki

Game developer and educator

The development of Halls of Torment has taught us many lessons about making commercial games in Godot. In this talk we will take a deep dive into the games’ code and share our learnings about project structure, programming patterns, performance profiling, and many other technical topics.

Antti Tiihonen

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Antti Tiihonen is a co-founder of Almost Human, the studio behind the acclaimed Legend of Grimrock series of role-playing games. Currently, their primary focus is on solo game development and freelancing projects through their company, Hapatus Ltd.

Art Direction Crash Course (for non-artists)

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Simone Mändl

Half of DU&I game development studio

A talk aimed at non-artists that covers “how to art direct”. I want to cover basics like composition, lighting, colors and shape language. But also teach how to stylize, what the difference between a moodboard and a reference board is and just general art knowledge that could be helpful for programmers, gamedesigners and leveldesigners.

Ben Vehling

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ben Vehling is a producer at United Soft Media and Co-Founder of GodotFest. He helps keep the festival running smoothly, coordinating partners, speakers, and attendees to make sure every detail is covered. Ben combines a love for community events with a pragmatic focus on operations and support, making him one of the key people behind the GodotFest experience.

Beyond the Loop: A Primer on Interactive Music in Godot

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Bittmann

Interactive music specialist and audio designer

Unlock the secrets of interactive music in Godot and learn how to bridge the gap between game developers and audio creators. In this session you will discover how to use adaptive scores to transform your gameplay, boost the immersion, replayability, and emotional impact of your project through adaptive audio. Covering all the basic terms and techniques you will be equipped with a practical toolkit for implementing dynamic music in Godot, from layering to crafting transitions and driving the music through game states with signals and gameplay based parameters.

Building Robust Godot Games with GdUnit4 & GdUnit4Net

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Schulze

Creator of GdUnit4 & GdUnit4Net testing frameworks

Maintaining code quality in growing Godot projects is challenging. This presentation introduces GdUnit4 and GdUnit4Net, comprehensive testing frameworks that bring professional testing capabilities to Godot development.

Building Starfinder: Professional Godot at Scale

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

María Calle Galán

Level Designer at Epictellers

Ricard Pillosu

Co-founder of Epictellers

Felix Rios

Narrative Designer at Epictellers

Chris Ridenour

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chris is the founder of KAR Games, working on the early access title Drift: Space Survival and the multiplayer update for Dome Keeper. Before getting into games, Chris spent a decade in the startup world as a serial founder and CTO. His three kids are likely to be seen climbing on him during Discord calls.

Chrysa Bika

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At GodotFest 25, Chrysa will explore the critical role of human-centered research in making game development more accessible and inclusive. This session will advocate for co-designing with players at the center, presenting approaches, methods, and practical guidelines for incorporating accessibility and DEI into game development with Godot from the start. Through case studies, attendees will learn how inclusive design leads to more intuitive, usable, and engaging games for all players.

Closing Remarks

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As GodotFest 25 comes to a close, we’ll wrap up the conference with final thoughts, highlights from the past two days, and thank everyone who made this event possible.

We’ll celebrate the amazing talks, workshops, and connections made throughout the conference, recognize our sponsors and volunteers, and look forward to the future of the Godot community. Thank you for being part of GodotFest 25 – see you next time!

Collaborative Game Development with Godot: From Studio Model to Community-Built Games

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Spiers

Senior Producer of Threadbare

Will Thompson

Open-source technology and digital inclusion enthusiast

Dom Harris

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dom Harris leads publishing partnerships at CrazyGames, helping browser-first studios bring their projects to millions of players through the platform’s instant-play catalog. He guides teams on monetization, live ops, and the technical requirements that keep high-performance web games running smoothly.

Don't ship the wrong game!

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

René Habermann

Director at Bippinbits, game prototyping expert

Shipping a good game that no one desires is a sad affair. It’s also easy to accidentally make a production too large. I’ll share how we avoid this by building many prototypes, evaluating them against real people and then go into an appropriately scoped production, staying happy devs in rough times. Maybe most importantly, i’ll share how we validate prototypes to find the games with potential among the crowd, as it’s simply not something predictable or plannable.

Emilio Coppola

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Emilio Coppola serves as the Executive Director of the Godot Foundation, leading the organization’s mission to advance the Godot Engine and support its global community of developers. With deep knowledge of the engine’s development roadmap and the foundation’s strategic initiatives, Emilio provides valuable insights into Godot’s future direction and community support.

Felix Rios

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Felix Rios is the Lead Narrative Designer at Epictellers, where they specialize in implementing complex branching narratives in Godot. With a background in tabletop role-playing design and a long history in software development, Felix brings a unique perspective to narrative game design and storytelling systems.

Fireside Chat – Godot’s Next Milestones

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Rémi Verschelde

Project Maintainer of Godot Engine & Co-founder of W4 Games

Ben Vehling

Co-Founder of GodotFest

Matt Ellis

Developer advocate at JetBrains

From Theora to AV1: Transforming Video Workflows in Godot 4

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nils Zweiling

Software developer creating interactive experiences, games and apps

Godot’s video playback remains constrained by the outdated Ogg/Theora codec, limiting quality and integration. My talk introduces “Video Toolkit for Godot” (VTG), an open source extension proposing modern AV1 software decoding with cross-platform support. I’ll discuss VTG’s approach to future hardware acceleration, key design choices, and practical challenges. Attendees will see early results, with an open discussion welcomed to gather thoughts and suggestions.

GdUni4 live demo + technical overview

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Schulze

Creator of GdUnit4 & GdUnit4Net testing frameworks

See how professional testing fits naturally into Godot. In this fast‑paced live demo, Mike Schulze (creator of GdUnit4) writes and runs tests for gameplay logic and scenes, showcasing fluent assertions, scene runners, and tight editor integration—so you can iterate faster with confidence.

Godot Foundation Q&A

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Emilio Coppola

Executive Director, Godot Foundation

Do you have any questions about Godot you would like to ask the people at the Godot Foundation? After a short update about the projects we are working on, feel free to ask anything!

Godot meets JetBrains: Building IDE tools for a growing engine

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Matt Ellis

Developer advocate at JetBrains

JetBrains Rider is a great IDE for Godot. But how does it work? In this talk, we’ll take a behind the scenes look at how we build the Godot features in Rider. We’ll cover some of the challenges we’ve faced while creating a good user experience for Godot development in C#, GDScript and C++. We’ll see how we’ve made it easy to debug your game, either in C# or GDScript, and tell the story of adding unit testing support through GDUnit. We’ll see how we write inspections for your code, and provide code completion for resources and other string value. And we’ll look at how Rider’s Godot features are open source and hosted on GitHub, with contributions welcome!

Gyms, Zoos, and Museums: Your documentation should be in-game

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Robin Yann Storm

Workflow designer and consultant

Everyone always mentions that people do not read documentation. This is also the case for us as game developers. So what can we do about that? First, it is important not to force everyone to read pages and pages of documentation. Usually, only programmers and other technical folks go through all the effort of reading up on functionality. So what about artists, and designers? Thankfully, solutions already exist: Gyms, Zoos, and Museums. Let’s look at examples, see how they work, how they can be built, and how they improve the development of your games.

Henni

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Did you ever struggle with reading a piece of text in a game? Typography is still a crucial mediator for information in digital media. Be it a text log, an item description or just a menu option. Unfortunately, typography has been ill-supported by game engines for a long time. Along comes Godot, offering the best font support for games in any engine I have ever seen. In this workshop I want to explore interface design from a typographic angle, and how Godot can be used to accomodate for a wide range of gamers’ reading needs.

Jaanus Jaggo (Perfoon)

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an indie game developer, the author of the Abandoned Spaceship Demo scene. Currently still making the game Blastronaut.

Jackie Codes

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jackie Codes is a passionate game developer and content creator known for streaming game development on Twitch and creating tutorials and devlogs on YouTube. With a love for the Godot Engine, Jackie finds that it allows for creative expression in an awesome interactive medium.

Joseph Hill

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

By day, Joseph Hill works with longtime collaborator Miguel de Icaza at Xibbon, where they’re bringing the Godot engine to iPad and iPhone through Xogot, a native iOS port designed to make mobile game development with Godot more accessible. Prior to Xibbon, Joseph joined Miguel in co-founding Xamarin, where they brought C# to mobile platforms and helped enable C# support in several game engines along the way.

Julien Kaspar

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Julien Kaspar is a 3D artist and director at the Blender Studio in Amsterdam. They have worked on many of the recent open movies, primarily for character art. The most recent project was DOGWALK, a short game in which they took on directing and programming roles.

Karl Bittner

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After studying Computer Science and Game Engineering, I took that knowledge to an unusual place: not into the game industry, but into the institute for landscape development at the BOKU University in Vienna. Since then, I have primarily been working on a landscape visualization which we use in studies on collaborative landscape planning with a focus on climate change, biodiversity, and renewable energy. We develop this visualization with Godot, which is why I also maintain the open source Geodot Plugin , a tool for loading geographic data into Godot at runtime.

Keeper to Keepers: Adding Multiplayer to Dome Keeper

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chris Ridenour

Game developer and Godot enthusiast

The age-old wisdom for adding multiplayer to a complex single player game is: Don’t.

Krystof Klestil

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Krystof Klestil has been using Godot since April 2018 and credits the engine with helping him become a game developer, as it just made sense to him from the start. With a long-time passion for game creation, Krystof has explored various creative pursuits ranging from websites and graphic design to leatherworking and knitting before focusing on game development.

Less is More: Modern Approaches to Low-Fi Visuals

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Antti Tiihonen

Co-founder of Almost Human (Legend of Grimrock series)

Many indie developers choose to use retro or low-fi graphics in their games for style, ease of development and nostalgia. Join me in this talk to learn how I have combined low-resolution dithered 3D graphics with modern rendering techniques to come up with colorful, crispy visuals for Reconfigure, an upcoming sci-fi FPS-puzzle-adventure.

Luca Andre Martinelli

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Luca Andre Martinelli is an Italo-German developer and designer at Bippinbits, where they focus on unlocking Godot’s productivity potential for indie game development. With experience working on successful projects like Dome Keeper and PVKK, Luca brings deep insights into how productivity-focused development can lead to better games and faster iterations.

Luca Leonardi

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Luca Leonardi is a Godot enthusiast and generalist game developer with over 5 years of experience using the engine. With a background in web development and a passion for creative game development, Luca has successfully published several games across different platforms, including Zook Adventure on Android, which has surpassed 50,000 downloads.

Making Audio for a Godot Project in FMOD

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Havran

Audio designer and composer

As the last of the “big 3” engines still lacking an officially-supported FMOD integration plugin, Godot offers a unique working environment for sound designers and composers utilizing FMOD. In this talk, I would like to explore the advantages and disadvantages of making music and SFX as a one-man audio department for the roguelike deckbuilder on a grid - Fogpiercer.

Making of Cards in Fogpiercer

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Krystof Klestil

Game developer and creative specialist

We put in a lot of effort to make the cards in Fogpiercer feel and look awesome, the cards need a lot of information that is then also communicated to the player. In the talk I’ll show how we went about implementing both 2D and 3D versions of the cards.

Making of DOGWALK - Blender Studio's game project

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Vivien Lulkowski

Blender Studio developer and game creator

Simon Thommes

Blender Studio developer and game creator

Julien Kaspar

Blender Studio developer and game creator

María Calle Galán

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maria Calle is a Level Designer at Epictellers, where they specialize in creating custom tools that bridge the gap between level design, code, and narrative systems. With expertise in extending Godot’s capabilities to meet production needs, Maria plays a crucial role in the development of Starfinder, a professional-scale cRPG built with a team of 30 developers.

Matt Ellis

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Matt Ellis is a developer advocate at JetBrains. He has spent over 20 years shipping software in various industries and currently works with IDEs and development tools, having fun with abstract syntax trees and source code analysis. He also works on the Unity support in Rider.

Mike Schulze

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Schulze is a software developer from Germany, with over 35 years of programming experience. Starting his coding journey at 18 with Basic and Turbo Pascal, Mike has evolved through multiple programming languages including Assembler, C, C++, Java, C#, and GDScript.

Mobilizing Godot

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Joseph Hill

Bringing the Godot engine to iPad and iPhone through Xogot

Many Godot developers push mobile to the end of their roadmap…if they consider it at all. The common pattern: build for desktop, ship on Steam or itch, and think about mobile later if the project takes off.

My experience porting Godot games to Nintendo Switch

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo Navarro

Game developer, porter and publisher (RAWRLAB Games)

I’m Pablo Navarro, the guy behind RAWRLAB Games. The last few years I have been porting serveral Godot games to Nintendo Switch (and one for Xbox!), and somehow I even ended up being the main maintainer of a free “community” port only available to Nintendo Switch developers. I might have some advices to share, being the first one that there is no easy port.

New Game+: Adding Backend Features to Your Godot Projects

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Patricia Berger

Game developer and Godot enthusiast

Ready to unlock the next level of your Godot development? Just like New Game+ adds exciting features to enhance replay value, adding backend capabilities transforms your games from single-player experiences into connected, community-driven platforms. In this talk, we’ll explore how to level up your Godot projects with robust backend features like real-time multiplayer, analytics, and social systems that keep players engaged and coming back for more.

Nils Zweiling

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Nils Zweiling is a software developer, creating interactive experiences, games and apps. Yet somehow, he’s also a passionate maker and shirt designer. Every now and then, he enjoys sparking others’ enthusiasm for DIY projects in his workshops.

Oh, that UI looks dope—wish it wasn't so hard to read tho

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Learn UI typography and accessibility best practices for better readability in Godot games.

One Does Not Simply Ship Web Games with Godot (Yet)

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Luca Leonardi

Game developer and educator

Godot is growing fast, but when it comes to web game development, is it really ready for production? In this talk, I’ll explore the current state of Godot Web, focusing on what works, what breaks, and what’s missing for real-world use.

Opening Remarks

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to GodotFest 25! Join us as we kick off two exciting days of talks, workshops, and community connections. We’ll introduce the event, thank our sponsors, and set the stage for an amazing conference celebrating the Godot Engine and its vibrant community.

Pablo Navarro

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo Antonio Navarro Reyes is a software developer and indie game creator from Castellón, Spain. He is known for developing and porting games to platforms like Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and GameBoy, often using engines like Godot and SDL2. Beyond gaming, he builds tools for IT technicians through projects like PiXE.es and Zpixe.es, and maintains several open-source initiatives, including BennuGD.org. With over 18 years of experience in IT consulting and a strong commitment to the open-source and indie dev communities, Navarro Reyes continues to support developers worldwide while balancing his work with fatherhood and personal projects.

Patricia Berger

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Patricia Berger brings a decade of professional backend development, cloud consulting, and data engineering experience to the game development world. With hands-on work in professional game development while maintaining game development as a hobby, Patricia is excited to share practical insights and real-world solutions.

Patrick Exner

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Patrick Exner is an expert in GDExtension development and C++ integration with Godot. With deep knowledge of the official Godot documentation and extensive experience using the godot-cpp-template, Patrick specializes in helping developers unlock the full power of Godot through native extensions.

Paul Bittmann

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Bittmann is a Lithuania-based software developer turned composer and audio designer, with a degree from Berklee College of Music, where they were honored with the Patty Larkin Scholarship. As co‑founder of 251 Studio, they lead the creation of interactive music and sound assets, and has contributed scores to award winning short films. Alongside their creative work, they have developed audio accessibility tools as part of academic research to enhance visually impaired players’ ability to engage with 3D games.

Paul Lawitzki

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Paul is a game designer and programmer at Chasing Carrots and has been part of the team since over a decade. They are also the creative director on Halls of Torment, influenced its visual style, and created the soundtrack for the game. Previously, they have worked on Good Company and Pressure Overdrive.

Peter Havran

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Peter Havran is an audio specialist and FMOD integration expert, working as a one-man audio department for the roguelike deckbuilder Fogpiercer. With extensive experience in both Godot’s native audio system and FMOD middleware, Peter brings unique insights into the advantages and disadvantages of using FMOD with Godot Engine.

Plants, Polygons and Pixels: Large-Scale Vegetation Rendering in Godot

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Karl Bittner

Game developer and educator

Whether you’re working on a stylized open-world game or a realistic landscape visualization, vegetation will be a major part of your application’s graphics. But it’s also uniquely tough to create and render: diverse habitats, delicate geometry, complex shading, and unique animation require an entire toolbox of tricks to look good. In this presentation, we’ll showcase our easy and free workflows for creating 3D assets of realistic foliage and trees, reveal the most important shading tricks to get them looking great, and touch upon the use of impostors for level-of-detail.

Putting Players First: Human-Centered Game Development towards Accessibility & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Chrysa Bika

Game developer and educator

This talk explores the critical role of human-centered research in making game development more accessible and inclusive. In both everyday life and leisure activities, people with impairments, as well as underrepresented groups, often face exclusion—sometimes unintentionally, but with lasting impact. Leading a self-determined life is a fundamental right for everyone, and this is not only a moral imperative but also reflected in legal frameworks demanding equal access and participation.

Raytracing is simple for 2D games!

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jaanus Jaggo (Perfoon)

Indie game developer and author of the Abandoned Spaceship Demo scene

2D games often struggle to match the visual appeal of 3D games, since they can’t use common lighting techniques. However, these effects can be created with quite simple shaders, and they perform much better than the 3D counterparts. In this talk, I will share the lighting techniques I have implemented for my game, Blastronaut, including the new 2D ray-traced lighting system for the indoor spaceship environment.

Rémi Verschelde

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Rémi Verschelde (also known as Akien) directs the day-to-day development of the Godot Engine as project manager and release manager. He co-founded W4 Games to help studios adopt Godot at scale, bridging the open-source community with commercial partners. Rémi continues to collaborate closely with contributors around the world to evolve the roadmap, steward long-term maintenance, and keep Godot’s open-source governance thriving.

René Habermann

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

René Habermann is a German indie game developer and co-founder of the studio Bippinbits, based in Radeberg near Dresden. He developed Dome Keeper, a roguelike mining and tower defense game that originated from a Ludum Dare game jam.

Ricard Pillosu

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ricard Pillosu is the co-founder and CEO of Epictellers, a studio currently building a narrative-driven CRPG with Godot Engine. Before starting Epictellers, Ricard worked on a mix of AAA and indie games — including as Development Director on Rise: Son of Rome for Xbox One — and spent time at studios like Crytek, Smilegate Barcelona, and Arhat Games.

Robin Yann Storm

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Robin-Yann Storm is a freelance Product & UX Designer for Tools. They have worked as a full time Tool UX Designer in the AAA games industry on the Glacier 2 editor on which the Hitman series was built, the Decima editor on which the Horizon series was built, and spent a few years working at Apple on AR creation tools such as Reality Composer and Reality Converter, which has made them well acquainted with the workflows of Pixar’s USD framework.

Sarah Spiers

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Spiers is a seasoned game producer who believes in the power of games to open doors for new creators. She is the Senior Producer of Threadbare, Endless Access’ open-source narrative adventure built with the Godot engine and shaped by a growing community of learners and contributors. Before Endless, Sarah was Development Director at Electronic Arts, where she led the simulation team for Project Rene. Her work has been recognized with a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Games (2022) and induction into the Women in Games Hall of Fame (2021). Outside of production, Sarah channels her creativity into surrealist fantasy-horror writing. She also serves on the Board for the Boston Public Library Fund, always connecting her professional craft with a passion for accessible, community-driven creativity.

Seeing the forest for the trees: How to think about workflows when designing tools

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Robin Yann Storm

Workflow designer and consultant

When creating plugins, publicly available tools, or in-house one off fixes, it can be easy to shoot for only exactly what the tool is supposed to achieve. However, this can have unforeseen consequences when the tool achieves exactly what it needs on its own, but does not fit within the other workflows that users are working with. The user experience as a whole is important to consider, especially for publicly available tools.

Shipping Godot: From Build to Player

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pablo Navarro

Game developer, porter and publisher (RAWRLAB Games)

Paul Lawitzki

Game developer and educator

Joseph Hill

Bringing the Godot engine to iPad and iPhone through Xogot

Dom Harris

Head of Publishing Partnerships at CrazyGames

Ben Vehling

Co-Founder of GodotFest

Simon Thommes

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Simon Thommes is the Lead Technical Artist at Blender Studio, where he spearheads the technical implementation of innovative game projects that showcase the synergy between Blender and Godot. As a key member of the DOGWALK development team, Simon brings extensive expertise in creating efficient asset pipelines and technical workflows.

Simone Mändl

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Simone Mändl is one half of DU&I, a game development studio focused on creating unique and visually striking games. With expertise in art direction and visual design, Simone brings a comprehensive understanding of how to guide artistic vision in game development projects.

Tilemaps in Godot 4

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jackie Codes

Game developer, streamer, and content creator

This talk explores the powerful capabilities and practical challenges of working with Godot’s tilemap system, drawing from real-world experience building an open world game. From optimization techniques that keep large worlds running smoothly to the underutilized Scene Tiles feature, you’ll learn how to leverage tilemaps beyond basic level design. The session covers procedural generation using noise and resources for testing, serialization strategies that make saving and loading efficient, and the evolution of terrain systems from Godot 3.5 to modern approaches.

Unlocking GDExtension Power: Integrating external C++ Libraries

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Patrick Exner

Game developer and educator

In this workshop attendees will learn about different ways to integrate third-party C++ libraries into the Godot Engine using the GDExtension system. We will explore C/C++ package managers such as Conan and vcpkg for managing the C/C++ library dependencies and how they can be integrated with SCons and other build systems. As a demonstration we will use the open-source simdjson library and integrate it through a GDExtension wrapper. By the end of the session, attendees will have a clear idea how to integrate third-party C/C++ libraries into Godot in a scalable way using the GDExtension system.

Unlocking Godot’s Superpower: Productivity

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Luca Andre Martinelli

Godot productivity and workflow expert

While working on Dome Keeper and PVKK over the past year and a half, people often ask me what I love most about Godot. My answer is always the same: productivity. In this talk I’ll discuss why Productivity is even more important for indie game development than many realize and what makes Godot so good at it IF you know how to harness it. I’ll share practical examples and insights from our work at Bippinbits to show how focusing on productivity not only unlocks faster iterations but generally leads to better games.

Vivien Lulkowski

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Vivien Lulkowski is a developer at Blender Studio, where they work on innovative game projects that bridge the gap between Blender and Godot. As part of the team behind DOGWALK, a short open-source game, Vivien brings expertise in asset pipeline development and game production workflows.

Will Thompson

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Will Thompson has spent his career at the intersection of open-source technology and digital inclusion. After more than a decade building Linux distributions and desktop tools to help close the digital divide, he now develops open-source games with Endless Access. As a core developer on Threadbare, he uses Godot not just to build a game but to create an entry point where learners and first-time contributors can practice real-world skills in coding, art, and collaborative development.

Wojtek Kubiak

contact@godotfest.com (GodotFest) — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Wojtek Kubiak is the co-founder and producer at Pineapple Works, where he helps independent teams bring their Godot-powered games to consoles and PC storefronts. He focuses on porting pipelines, certification, and long-term support so that small studios can launch with confidence across multiple platforms.