Welcome to GodotFest 2025 - the first entry of the GodotFest event series! 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.

Get ready to dive into technical insights, creative presentations, hands-on workshops, and networking opportunities with fellow Godot enthusiasts from around the world. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just starting your journey with Godot, this is your moment to be part of something special.

With Johannes Ebner and Senad Hrnjadovic

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!

Games can be more than finished products—they can be living classrooms.
In this session, Sarah Spiers (Senior Producer of Threadbare, former Development Director at EA, Forbes 30 Under 30) and Will Thompson (open-source developer, Endless Access) will share how collaborative development with Godot can transform game-making into a pathway for new creators.

Sarah will frame why open-source practices matter for the future of the industry and how collaborative models give new voices a way in. Will will showcase Threadbare, Endless Access’ open-source narrative adventure built in Godot, where learners and contributors from around the world are shaping the game. Attendees will see how the project is structured to welcome contributors of all levels, what challenges and successes have emerged, and how Godot powers not just great games but inclusive, community-driven learning.

The Blender Studio is presenting the creation process and asset pipeline behind DOGWALK, a short open source game, centered around incorporating Blender & Godot.
Get insight into the planning & game design of our brief 4 month production period, the paper-craft art style that resulted in a distinct low-poly look and our glTF & Blender Asset oriented pipeline, that allowed us to create & iterate directly in Blender for art-assets, animations and entire levels.

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.

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!

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.

I will cover how I iteratively developed a unique visual style that combines modern possibilities with retro restrictions. How I deal with problems and limitations - and how I squeeze every drop of juice out of those limitations. And how I use tools that are precision machined to work within the chosen fidelity to enable rapid development of beautiful looking content.

Come and see how a handful of pixels can be greater than the sum of its parts!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As Godot gains traction in game development, a critical question remains: can it handle professional, large-scale production? This talk presents a case study from Epictellers, where 30 developers are building Starfinder - a full-scale RPG. We examine the practical realities of pushing Godot beyond its traditional indie roots, sharing both the unexpected wins and the genuine challenges encountered when scaling the engine for commercial AA development.

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.

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.

Which platform should you ship and when should you branch out? This panel brings together perspectives from web, PC storefronts, consoles, and mobile to compare the main paths and what they typically ask of a Godot project. We’ll talk about assessing platform fit, what “ready for console” really looks like, how challenging different routes can be, and sensible ways to stage a multi-platform release. Expect candid experiences, high-level trade-offs, common pitfalls to avoid, and flexible guidance you can adapt to your team and game. You’ll leave with clearer expectations and a practical sense of the next step to get your Godot game into players’ hands.

A talk aimed at non-artists that covers "how to art direct". We will cover basics like 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 will be helpful for programmers, gamedesigners and leveldesigners.

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.

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.

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.

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

This talk will cover how we added mixed local and online multiplayer to an existing codebase of tens of thousands of lines of GDScript and how you can think about systems in your game to do the same.

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 this presented when making music and SFX as a one-man audio department for the roguelike deckbuilder on a grid - Fogpiercer.

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.

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.

Many Godot developers push mobile to the end of their roadm - 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. In this talk, we’ll explore how and why developers should start thinking about mobile earlier in their process.

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.

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.

Godot has grown from a community passion project into a real alternative for professional studios. The 4.x series brought the technical groundwork — a modern renderer, new architecture, and steady performance improvements — that make larger productions viable. Now the next milestones aren’t just in the engine itself but in the surrounding ecosystem: stable integrations, testing and CI pipelines, console support, and long-term maintenance. With studios increasingly open to new tools, Godot’s future depends on pairing its open, creative spirit with the reliability and workflows professionals expect.

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.