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.

With over 20 years of experience in various game development roles and more than a decade as an entrepreneur, Antti has contributed to over a dozen titles, including Legend of Grimrock series, Noita, Alan Wake, and Control. They are currently working on Reconfigure, an upcoming low-fi sci-fi FPS, as well as Secret Exit’s Turbo Dismount 2.

At GodotFest 25, Antti will share their approach to creating modern low-fi visuals, combining low-resolution dithered 3D graphics with contemporary rendering techniques. This talk will cover the development of a unique visual style that combines modern possibilities with retro restrictions, how to deal with limitations creatively, and how to use precision tools to enable rapid development of beautiful content.

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.

At GodotFest 25, Chris will share his experience adding mixed local and online multiplayer to Dome Keeper, a complex single-player game with tens of thousands of lines of GDScript. This talk will cover the challenges and solutions encountered when retrofitting multiplayer into an existing codebase, including playtest feedback, common bugs, and engine modifications required for multiplayer input handling.

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.

Hello! I'm Dom, I've been making games for almost 20 years now! I started with Macromedia Flash 8 way back in the flash game era, graduated to Unity, went to university to study game development, and worked as a professional Unity developer for 10 years. I now help developers succeed with web games, bringing them to CrazyGames and helping with SDK integration and optimization. It has been a fantastic journey, and I'm excited to share what I've learned with you!

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.

As the head of the Godot Foundation, Emilio oversees the organization’s efforts to promote Godot Engine adoption, support open-source development, and foster the growth of the Godot community worldwide. His role involves coordinating with developers, contributors, and stakeholders to ensure Godot continues to evolve as a powerful, accessible game development platform.

At GodotFest 25, Emilio will host a Godot Foundation Q&A session, providing attendees with the opportunity to ask questions about Godot’s development, the foundation’s projects, and future plans for the engine. This session offers a unique chance to get direct insights from the leadership of the Godot Foundation and learn about upcoming developments and community initiatives.

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.

As part of the team building Starfinder, a professional-scale cRPG with 30 developers, Felix has developed practical workflows for implementing branching narratives in Godot. Their expertise lies in adapting narrative teams to the engine’s capabilities and limitations, creating efficient systems that handle complex storytelling requirements.

At GodotFest 25, Felix will share insights from their daily workflow for implementing branching narratives in Godot, showing how the narrative team adapted to the engine’s capabilities and limitations. Their session will cover practical approaches to narrative system design and how to effectively manage complex storytelling in large-scale Godot projects.

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.

Henni is a professional graphic designer and hobbyist game developer, running her own type foundry. When she first encountered Godot, she was in the middle of researching how to make typography look better in games. She couldn’t get over how great Godot’s toolkit was for achieving that.

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

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.

Specializing in RPG and Adventure games, Jackie focuses on expressing deeper concepts through gameplay. With four years of experience using tilemaps in Godot for open-world RPG development, Jackie has become intimately familiar with the system’s capabilities and limitations.

Johannes is a Gaming Solution Architect who helps game developers & publishers of all sizes to build multiplayer games and online services for games.
He has 20 years of experience in the IT industry, including 15 in the games industry - many of which he built games himself and led game dev teams.

Johannes has been involved in a wide range of projects, from small web applications to large scale cloud services and Massively Multiplayer Online games and has consulted many publishers and game studios from indie to AAA on how to build online services and multiplayer infrastructures.

Johannes is also the maintainer of godot-playfab, the integration of Azure PlayFab for the Godot Engine, an active Godot community member, a co-host of the massively successful GodotCon 23, a co-founder of GodotFest and has spoken at various conferences like the Sharkmob DevDays (invitational), Nordic Game and Microsoft’s GDC event.

Find out more at https://blog.structed.me/about

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.

Joseph is also an active community organizer. He co-founded BoGo, the Boston Godot developers group, and helped organize GodotCon Boston, the first GodotCon held in North America.

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.

At GodotFest 25, Julien will share insights from the DOGWALK project, covering the creation process and asset pipeline behind this short open-source game that demonstrates the integration of Blender and Godot. This talk will provide perspective on planning and game design during a brief 4-month production period, the development of a distinctive paper-craft art style, and the glTF & Blender Asset pipeline that enables direct iteration between the two platforms.

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.

I am currently working on my PhD with the working title “Virtual Nature: Perception, Modelling, Processing, and Rendering of Vegetation and Biodiversity in Digital Experiences and Landscape Visualizations.” On the side, I teach a class at a game development college focusing on Godot and shader programming. I share some of my material for that course on my website hexaquo.at.

At GodotFest 25, Karl will present on large-scale vegetation rendering in Godot, sharing insights from developing realistic landscape visualizations. This talk will cover workflows for creating 3D assets of realistic foliage and trees using open-source tools, shading techniques for vegetation, level-of-detail systems, and impostors for large-scale open worlds. Attendees will learn comprehensive approaches to rendering foliage and trees in Godot for both stylized and realistic applications.

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.

In 2020, Krystof co-founded Mad Cookies with friends and has been making games together with the team since then. His experience spans both 2D and 3D game development, with particular expertise in creating engaging card-based gameplay systems and visual design.

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.

Previously working at Mimimi Games with Unity, Luca has a unique perspective on what makes Godot special for indie developers. Their expertise lies in identifying and harnessing Godot’s productivity features, creating efficient workflows that enable small teams to compete with larger studios through smarter development practices.

At GodotFest 25, Luca will share practical examples and insights from their work at Bippinbits, demonstrating how focusing on productivity not only unlocks faster iterations but generally leads to better games. This session will cover workflow optimization techniques and how to make the most of Godot’s productivity features for indie game development.

https://lucamartinelli.de/

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.

Currently working at Rising Pixel, a studio focused on web games, Luca has been releasing titles on platforms like Poki, CrazyGames, and others for the past two years. As a generalist developer, Luca loves working across disciplines—programming, art, design, and music—to craft interactive experiences.

What initially drew Luca to Godot was its open, flexible nature that empowers solo and small-team creators. With experience in both web development and game development, Luca brings unique insights into the current state of Godot Web development and the challenges of shipping web games with the engine.

At GodotFest 25, Luca will share practical insights about what works and what doesn’t when using Godot for real-world web game production, drawing from extensive experience in both the engine and the web gaming industry.

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.

Their work focuses on developing practical solutions for large-scale game production, creating tools that enable seamless collaboration between different disciplines. Maria’s experience demonstrates how Godot can be effectively extended and customized to handle complex production workflows, from level design iteration to narrative system integration.

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 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.

With professional experience across multiple software companies, Mike has made development both his career and passion. His extensive background in software engineering has led him to create and maintain the GdUnit4 and GdUnit4Net testing frameworks for the Godot community, bringing professional-grade testing capabilities to Godot developers worldwide.

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.

At GodotFest 25, Nils will present “From Theora to AV1: Transforming Video Workflows in Godot 4”, discussing his open source GDExtension “Video Toolkit for Godot” (VTG) that aims to establish AV1 as the new baseline for software decoding, offering improved quality-to-size ratios and maintaining cross-platform compatibility.

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.

I make software for a living and games on my free time. And a lot more stuff, my mind can’t stop creating!

And no, I don’t port to GameBoy. Never trust AIs.

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 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.

His expertise covers the complete GDExtension development workflow, from setting up development environments to integrating external C++ libraries with Godot projects. Patrick’s practical approach focuses on getting developers quickly started with GDExtension development while building on intermediate C++ knowledge.

At GodotFest 25, Patrick will lead a workshop on integrating external C++ libraries with Godot through GDExtensions. This hands-on session will cover essential techniques for extending Godot’s capabilities, practical examples of library integration, and best practices for developing robust, maintainable extensions that leverage the power of native C++ code.

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.

At GodotFest 25, Paul will present on interactive music in Godot, teaching attendees how to bridge the gap between game developers and audio creators. This session will cover adaptive scores, horizontal and vertical music techniques, layering, transitions, and driving music through game states with signals and gameplay parameters. Attendees will also learn strategies for communicating with composers and effective use of reference materials.

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.

At GodotFest 25, Paul will share technical learnings from the development of Halls of Torment, their first Godot-based commercial project. This talk will cover project structure, programming patterns, performance profiling, inter-object communication for modular entities, and the benefits of compiling custom Godot editor builds. Attendees will learn from both successful approaches and mistakes made during development.

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.

As one of the few sound designers and composers working with FMOD in Godot projects, Peter has navigated the challenges of integrating third-party audio middleware with the engine. His work on Fogpiercer has involved creating both music and sound effects using FMOD, while working within the constraints of Godot’s audio architecture.

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 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.

René Habermann, Director at Bippinbits will be talking about how to prototype your next game and how to avoid common pitfalls.

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.

Now, he’s focused on pushing Godot to its limits for complex RPG systems, blending open-source tools with rich storytelling. Ricard loves talking about production workflows, team dynamics, and what it takes to build big games with small teams.

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.

They have consulted companies both big and small on workflows, tools, and UGC. Next to that, they created and organizes the Tool Design Roundtables, talks at conferences around the world, and has contributed a chapter about Tool Design in the book ‘An Architectural Approach to Level Design, Second Edition’.

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.

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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.

Specializing in teaching art direction to non-artists, Simone understands the challenges that programmers, game designers, and level designers face when trying to create cohesive visual experiences. Their approach covers fundamental art principles like composition, lighting, colors, and shape language, while also addressing practical aspects like stylization techniques and the distinction between moodboards and reference boards.

At GodotFest 25, Simone will deliver an art direction crash course specifically designed for non-artists, sharing essential art knowledge that can help developers and designers create more visually compelling games. This session will bridge the gap between technical development and artistic vision, empowering creators to make better artistic decisions regardless of their background in visual arts.

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.

With deep knowledge of both Blender’s 3D capabilities and Godot’s game engine features, Simon specializes in developing technical solutions that bridge the gap between content creation and game development. His work focuses on optimizing workflows, creating custom tools, and ensuring seamless integration between Blender’s asset creation pipeline and Godot’s runtime environment.

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.

With experience in both Blender and Godot, Vivien specializes in creating seamless workflows between 3D content creation and game development. Their work on DOGWALK demonstrates how to effectively integrate Blender’s powerful 3D tools with Godot’s game engine capabilities, resulting in efficient production pipelines and distinctive visual styles.

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.