boston-godot-con

This post tries to be comprehensive for my own experience of the conference - there were so many other talks and showcases that I missed that are unfortunately not represented in this post. :cry:

You can find the full schedule here, and when the conference talks hit YouTube, I’ll update this to include a link to that playlist. If there are other lists of all-the-things, lmk - I’d love to include a link to that.

As the YouTube videos land, I’ll update this post with some in-line links to make this more useful.

Update (May 2025): there’s an Interview with every Showcase Developer on Youtube - a great way to see all the indie games in the showcase!

Update (July 2025): Godot has started releasing the talks on YouTube! Here is the full playlist. They’re releasing one per day, so expect this list to grow over the next couple weeks.

Update (August 2025): All the talks are now released! You can watch my lightning talk here, all the videos via the playlist link above or linked throughout this post. Enjoy!

I’m feeling crazed but ambitious and in good spirits after a very busy few weeks. I got married! Then did a weekend in the Catskills with a bunch of Hyperactive (self-proclaimed) musicians! Then went to Godot Con Boston! What?! Yeah!

I finally got back Thursday and have been reeling from the positive energy. I’ve been in one of those ambitious, over-committing moods - writing out TODOs for all my projects, and trying really hard not to commit to any of them. Wish me luck!

Godot Con was a blast! So many nice Godot nerds - developers, artists, musicians, indie game makers all around. There were awesome talks, awesome games at the showcase, and awesome projects hidden up the sleeve of everyone there.

A few minutes after arriving Tuesday morning, I was captivated as someone else played Burrito Bear. Space Orca turned and asked if I wanted to play. Hell yeah I do!

I’m side-stepping around, eating burritos and batting away trash with a gorgeous island sunset in the background, when Space Orca hits some secret dev-ghost keybindings. Suddenly, the sky is filled with BSPs. I catch one, and we enter a hand-held pixel art minigame - I’m excite-biking the bear on a motorcycle over jumps with o.g. wario-ware vibes.

Later on, I was able to play some Dukkido by MariSuCho - this one is a bit of a Pikmin/RTS. The controls are reactive, and managing the troops was smooth and fun. I look forward to getting to sit down with this one later on. The devs for this game also had some great dev-console moments to show off, adding and removing various slime moments to make my playthrough more fun.

I didn’t get as much Day 2 showcase time, but have to mention Dunderbeck, which showed me that at least one way to make sausage is via an inventory-management autobattler with an awful lot of rats. So there’s that.

My favorite talk from Day 1 (and maybe the whole conference?) was badcop’s mixed-reality streaming hacks (video link here). It was an awesome hack-tale full of ingenuity, cutting-corners-to-dodge-deeper-rabbit-holes, and some stellar visual results. One of my TODOs is to hop in that discord and consider hacking on an OSX or Linux version.

There was solid Godot iOS content on Day 1 - Xogot (the Godot Editor as a native iPad app) and the SwiftGodotKit that supported it. I’ll definitely be exploring this more for my ongoing Dot Hop mobile port. (SwiftGodotKit talk, Xogot talk)

Jeff Ward’s overview of impling your own scripting language for Godot is still hitting me. My brain has been rooting around, wondering if it’s crazy to try to support a clojure-like syntax as a scripting language for Godot. (full talk here)

I hacked a .tscn/.tres <> .edn (clojure data format) thing together a few years ago called godot-edn… maybe there’s something there?

Eric Peterson’s (Baja The Frog) Event-Bus-Pattern talk was enlightening. I’d seen a bit about this pattern before, but always shyed away - I assumed I’d need to implement some fancy library to make it reasonable. Nope! Just an autoload with some signals on it! I’m hopeful to delete a bunch of defensive code in Dino :D Here’s a blog post by Eric covering this pattern.

Rawb Herb’s UI design talk was also awesome, and so was Adam Scott’s state of the Godot on the Web. Plus Casey + Sarah’s Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration tips (and love for custom resources and in-house tooling). HP van Braam’s nanotech tool was mind-blowing (talk here). So many insights and so much inspiration to glean!

By the end I was overwhelmed and socially fried, and walked back to the hotel in the rain, which I rather enjoyed.

I met Josh, part of Tiny Mass Games, a community of game devs drawing inspiration from Sokpop. They align their schedules to release solo and small-team games every 2 months, then take a month off. What a great cadence! I’m hopeful to join for Season 11, starting in July!

Chad Stewart’s (binarysolo) I make games on my phone talk showed some great mobile game-dev tools, if you lose your laptop to a flood but still need to make an indie game (e.g. for Tiny Mass). Between this and Xogot, I’m excited to get more time working on games away from the (proper) keyboard.

Acerola’s dry sense of humor was a riot, and now I know that a CE (some shader term) is a generic work load at the bottom of a GPU’s well… or something like that. Mostly I learned that now Godot can do everything in the known universe, across all space and time, whereas before things were slightly more limited. (Compositor Effects talk here)

Digging through my notes, it’s a Compositor Effect - here’s a tutorial for understanding them better. I can’t read this without laughing aloud at how lost I feel! Maybe this is a good candidate for a future stream or video tutorial.

The Godot Foundation AMA was great - too much to capture here. One moment I liked was Emi’s 5-years-in-the-future dream: more tools supporting all the disparate use-cases in the ecosystem. Godot is not trying to grab-all-the-game-devs like some of its for-profit competitors. The recent rise in popularity has led to problems of scale, and it is difficulty to support users with such a wide variety of needs. Some devs want amazing, Unreal-Engine-like 3D, while others just want an upgraded RPG-Maker.

Looking for more game engines to poke at? Defold, Bevy, Heaps.io, Luxe, Love2D all look pretty cool! If only we had infinite time…

Chris Ridenour’s Multiplayer Dome Keeper talk was spot on - multiplayer is challenging and complicated, and he did a great job of unpacking the terms and decisions required to make the magic happen. I was having flashbacks to working out our approach in Rapid Eye Madness last fall - a talk like this would have gotten us all on the same page much more quickly!

StayAtHomeDev’s Youtube Crash Course may have been my favorite overall - the strong throughline was encouragement to be yourself and to make things that are YOU. He also outlined a reasonable approach to finding your voice as a Youtuber - it’s inspired me to create a few more videos without sweating the stats. Maybe a T-shirt Tier List, or something fun?

Finally, there was nothing left but the Lightning Talks. After battling with nerves the whole conference, they finally reached a head in the last half-hour before my sentencing.

A major thank you to the other Lightning Talk speakers, who built up some camaraderie talking about our nerves beforehand. Maaack especially helped me out, recommending a deep breath and a power pose before we started.

The talk went by in a blur - my personal experience of it was very: “why am I out of breath?”, “what words am I saying?”. After the fact, I think it went pretty well, and I’m excited to watch the recording. I got great feedback and several people told me they’re excited to use Log.gd in their own projects.

I’ve been beefing up Log.gd’s documentation lately - feel free to reach out or create an issue about whatever!

Update: My talk is finally on youtube! Check out Log.gd, A Godot pretty-printer!

The other Lightning talks were excellent: Joesph’s push into the mobile space, Maaack’s Game Jam experience, Matt’s Time Management advice, Warner’s cutting edge Csound integration, and Sam’s Custom Resource clarity. Plus the final tale from Annalivia and Tyler about building a game and arcade cabinet for a museum - what a great way to wrap everything up!

I’m pumped to watch all of these again!

A fun occurrence at Godot Con was running into other New York City folks. We were inspired (jealous?) of the Boston Godot User Group’s traction, and have since started a Discord, laying plans to show-and-tell Godot things in the Big Apple. I’m pumped to be a part of this new group! Reach out if you’re interested!

Also, more kudos to Joesph Hill’s talk covering how the Boston Godot User Group started, its format, and encouraging more folks to follow their path.

I had some great conversations with other folks, and am excited to see what their futures hold. In particular:

• Tristin at Splashy Inc has been creating a game per month for a long while, with no end in sight!
• Phosfi by Ben at UpRoom Games looks amazing!
• It was great to meet talented artists buried among so many programmers, like Eron Hare.
• Eric and I connected over Chess and Wario-Ware likes, and it turns out he’s a stellar technical artist (check out that portfolio! :eyes:)
• I talked only briefly with David (vidvadgames), but he seems like a great resource re: console ports!
• I’m certainly forgetting other folks here, hopefully I’ll update this with more in the future as I comb through my notes.

Youtube:

• Interviews with every Showcase Developer
• My GodotCon 2025 Recap by StayAtHomeDev

Blogs:

• An itch.io devlog by AsFunAs/DevEarley
• Reflecting on Godot Con by Essay Games
• Exodrifter on showcasing no signal
• Snoozy Kazoo’s hilarious Godot Con wrap-up
• My Experience at GodotCon by Josh Anthony

Update (July 2025)! Now that the talks are coming out, I was able to catch up on more of them, and have to share at least a few here.

Nicholas O’Brien’s Narrative Design + Godot + Ink Workshop was awesome - a great pace and tons of background for working with inkgd. Highly recommend if you’re not familiar with the tools!

And now, things are settling back down. No more Godot talks to go to, just a ton of steam games, itch projects, github urls, and blog posts to wade through.

Thank you x 1,000,000 to the volunteers, coordinators, organizers, speakers, attendees, etc. The conference was a major success, and I mean to capitalize on all the energy I got out of it!

Thank you all, and hope to see you again soon!