GodotCon Boston 2025

This workshop will teach participants how to reliably use small and open language models as components in larger procedural generation pipelines and game systems. Participants will use few shot learning and function calling to let language models generate resources and interact with game state at runtime, and learn how to use Godot's resource system and signaling system effectively for these use cases.

Learn how to write a plugin for Godot using C++, build for distribution as a GDExtension, write unit tests and setup test and build automations via GitHub Actions.

In this talk, we will discuss how developers can achieve an anime/toon style look for their 3D Godot games, similar to the style of Guilty Gear games. We will discuss various theories, techniques and concepts that are used to achieve the artistic look while working in the confines of 3D graphics. We will start by using Blender to discuss the main points in which 3D modeling this style would differ from traditional styles, then we will work our way into the Godot Engine to configure the shaders, outlines and lighting. The goal of this talk is to apply the principles used in the industry to create anime style characters in the Godot Engine.

Below are some of the main talking points, subject to change:
- Why the Anime style?
- Differences between traditional 3D models and stylized/anime 3D models
- What defines the anime style?
- Different types of anime style (comparing Guilty Gear to Genshin)
- Topology and Poly Count considerations
- Normal Editing
- UV Mapping and Texturing
- Building the Toon Shader
- The Outlines
- Vertex Colors for more control
- Rig Considerations
- Demonstration in Blender
- Exporting/Importing to Godot
- Rebuilding the Toon Shader in Godot
- Jiggle Physics
- Demonstration in Godot
- Tips and Tools
- Creator Shout-Outs
- Q/A

Build the basic components needed for a peer to peer multiplayer game.
- Creating a server and connecting to other computers
- Leveraging the MultiplayerSpawner, MultiplayerSynchronizer nodes
- How to use RPC functions
- Managing data
- Tips for optimization

Using the inkgd plugin, this workshop will walk through the foundational steps for integrating branching narratives for solo developers using Godot. Pairing lightweight tooling with robust variable handling, this workshop is for designers and developers who want to elevate their narratives with meaningful choices and dynamic storytelling.

Emilio Coppola, head of the Godot Foundation, kicks off the conference with opening remarks.

Modern game devs dont just bring models and environments to life - they orchestrate APIs, databases, and countless cloud-native services. But the local dev loop is messy.

Aspire changes that. It’s a dev-first toolkit that spins up your entire app - frontend, backends, and dependencies - with a built in dashboard for local logs, health checks, and traces.

No replatforming, no YAML, and no cloud required. Use C# to define your app and then simply “aspire run” to start everything from your code to your custom container images.

The Web platform has grown a lot since the days of Flash, if you're old enough!

This talk intends to give viewers an overview of the Web platform (including a small history lesson!) and how Godot uses the Web technologies in order to push the envelope.

It will also address the current state of the engine for the platform, and tackle what's next for the project.

HolyOS is my attempt at building a fake but functional '90s-style OS in Godot. I’ll show how I used Control nodes to create an instant messaging client, an email client, and a file explorer. I will also show the pipeline for the custom theme and animated cursor. To wrap up, I’ll discuss other quirks of making a fake OS feel real, as well as unresolved issues like drag-and-drop previews.

HolyOS is the fake operating system used in In Good Faith (Steam)

It can be tough to bring together teammates from multiple disciplines, but Godot has lots of features to make it easier! Sarah and Casey will discuss their experience collaborating with no-code designers, artists, and writers on Merchants of Rosewall, and share some tips on how to leverage Godot to help no-code teammates work in the engine.

Game-making is more than just a skill—it’s a gateway to digital literacy, creative expression, and career opportunities. In this session, we explore how learners transition from consumers of games to creators, contributors, and ultimately, career-ready game makers.

We’ll also showcase Threadbare, a community-driven game that integrates storytelling with cultural and language education, demonstrating how learners can shape game narratives with their personal experiences, folklore, and heritage. By the end of the session, participants will gain practical insights into game development and understand how they can use these skills to empower learners in their own communities.

We built MSEP.one (https://msep.one) a complex nanotechnology design utility using Godot. This talk will dive into the reasons, pros and cons of using Godot in this way. (It is mostly pro).

Operation Outbreak (OO) is an innovative platform for science education that uses a mobile app to spread a “digital” virus among participants’ phones via Bluetooth. This enables immersive real-life outbreak simulations that have been tested in hundreds of schools in the US and abroad. You can learn more about OO by checking this website: https://operationoutbreak.org/
In this talk, we will describe the prototype of a Godot-based port of the Operation Outbreak educational game. We started working on this prototype back in December of 2024, based on an initial exploration by a graduate intern in the Colubri lab, which were continued by two skilled Godot developers that joined the team after reading a posting about the project on the Godot forum. The prototype successfully implemented all the basic functionality of the real-life Operation Outbreak simulations, including contact detection, disease transmission, illness progression, resource management, etc. Furthermore, the Godot-based OO game reuses all the existing OO backend infrastructure, which makes it possible to read the same parameters that drive the phone-based simulations, store the resulting data in the same databases, and explore the data interactively with the web-based Outbreak Visualizer tool.
We are currently designing plans to pilot this prototype at schools in the US and abroad, to evaluate the engagement of students with this new educational game and collect their feedback. Based on the success of these plans in the coming months, we may be able to report preliminary results and insights during the talk.

In this session, I will share the current state of Xogot, our iOS-native of the Godot engine and editor to the iPad. We’ll explore how Xogot offers game developers on iPad a unique way to build with Godot — from touch-first 2D and 3D scene editing to game development on-the-go.

We’ll discuss why Xogot is exciting for current Godot users looking for flexibility, and how it opens the door for a new generation of developers by making game creation more accessible, portable, and intuitive than ever. Whether you're a seasoned Godot developer or introducing someone to game development for the first time, Xogot reimagines where and how you can build games.

This talk will discuss the work on Embeddable Godot to augment any existing non-Godot application with Godot content, how to drive Godot from your app, and how to blend these two worlds together.

The talk will focus on Apple platforms, using SwiftGodotKit, we will explore how to augment an existing iOS, Mac, Vision or tvOS app with Godot - and if you have an existing Godot app, how you can augment it by calling Apple-native APIs via the SwiftGodot API.

Very quickly into the development of a game, any developer will find themselves thinking about how to best "hook everything up". Either from character to object, character to character or character to UI.

You can do this by directly referencing your object or calling get_parent 18 times but eventually you're going to start regretting that decision. Things moving, references breaking, scenes having more and more dependencies. Don't worry - the Event Bus pattern has you covered!

Every game can and likely will benefit from some use of the Event Bus pattern. This talk aims to introduce you to the pattern, why its valuable and how to approach a few different implementations in Godot!

Discover what's new in XR and Android in 2025 for Godot developers!

We'll provide updates, new development and features in Godot XR since 2024, and dive in depth through live demos.

I've been working on an unusual project with Godot recently, and I thought it might make for a potentially interesting talk. I'm working on a mixed-reality livestreaming setup in Godot, blending together the live feed of my camera with a 3D scene matched to the perspective of the camera.

The project is still pretty early, but I could already easily fill a lightning or short talk with all the strange things I've done to achieve this so far; plus, I expect to have it a lot more fleshed out in the month or so.

I've attached an image of one of the effects I've been working on that I think is interesting; there's a transparent quad behind me in my real world-space, clipping into a physical table in the background, with accurate(ish) depth of field blur.

image: https://cdn.badcop.live/2025/03/image%20%281%29.png

in the (near) future, the idea is that these quads will be displaying different windows from my computer, and shuffling around depending on what program I have foregrounded

Godot has two major languages it supports for scripting: GDScript and C#. But what if you wanted to write your Godot scripts in a different language? With the new GDExtension system in Godot 4+, we now have the ability add other languages. This talk will take you through the process of binding a language to Godot, using examples from Godot Dart. It will take you through some of the inner workings of GDExtensions, the pitfalls of using GDExtension to add a Script Language, and various ways for new languages to interact with core Godot features, addons, and other extensions.

Getting your game onto Steam used to be a thousand mile journey, but nowadays all it takes is $100. That said, if you lack the marketing prowess to stand out, you'll be left floundering. Ideally, you want to bring your community to Steam, rather than build it there, so where do you build it? If you're just starting your game development journey with Godot, this talk will introduce you to building a home for your game and your studio at itch.io. This includes building and uploading your Godot project, the basics of page design, the tools for building a community, important site features, and a broad understanding of what itch.io is and how it can help you grow as a Godot developer.

Rawb, an experienced Art Director and Solo Dev, teaches you beginner principles for designing appealing and accessible UI, as well as the nodes and code (C#) commonly used to implement it in the Godot engine. We’ll discuss step-by-step how to plan, mock-up, code, and animate common UI elements such as menus, HUDs, and cursors, in this interactive crash course.

Whether you want to develop entirely on your phone or mix it into your development pipeline, I've got tips, tricks, and thoughts on mobile Godot development. Told through the lens of the development of three games, I will share the things phone work is best suited to tackle as well as certain concessions you need to make in order to create your game.

LibGodot will be one of the major features of Godot 4.5. Our PR has already been submitted and reviewed by multiple Godot Maintainers. It is scheduled to be merged early in the Godot 4.5 development cycle.

LibGodot is the short name of multiple new Godot Engine features:
- Build Godot Engine as a shared or static library
- This library can be embedded into a host application written in any language that supports the GDExtension API.
- It is already being used in production with C++, TypeScript, and Swift. We are already working on other language support with our clients, which will be demonstrated during the talk.
- LibGodot also enables embedding the Godot UI into the host application. UI embedding for iOS and Mac Catalyst is already available, and support for other platforms (MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Android) is already in progress and is planned to be included in Godot 4.5 and will be demonstrated during the talk.

In the talk, I will describe the features of LibGodot, its use cases both in Game and Application development, and show live demonstrations of some of them, including:
- LibGodot allows enhancing mobile apps with interactive 2D and 3D content
- LibGodot will enable .NET developers to start up Godot from their .NET application so they can use standard .NET tools for development
- LibGodot can be used to provide complex 3D graphics capabilities in Qt apps
- LibGodot can be used from Python scripts and enable complex automation workflows

Compositor effects are a relatively new feature in Godot that exposes the stages of the Godot rendering pipeline to execute arbitrary graphics code at any desired stage. Acerola will go over the basics of compositor effects, example implementations, and the doors they open up for future high fidelity graphics techniques in Godot.

Have you ever wished there was a time where you could ask the maintainers of Godot your burning questions?

Lucky for you, this is it! Folks from the Godot Foundation will be here taking questions from the audience in a riveting tell all session for the ages.

This is a quick overview of some of the art processes we used to create the visual style for a 3D cell shaded 80's anime rogue like drafting game. Some things we'll cover.
-Visual shader editor for VFX, Environment and cell shading
-Modular characters from blender
-Reducing frame rate per asset intentionally to create that 2d Look

This presentation provides a comprehensive overview of profiling Godot Engine games using Arm Performance Studio. We start with a simple benchmark and show how to ready your Android device for profiling it, and then make use of Streamline and Performance Advisor to identify opportunities for improvements. Analysis is then made easier through the use of the Arm Performance Studio Integration, where you can add custom markers, channels, counters, and activity maps to track in-game events and metrics.

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.

TDD and game creation don't always go hand in hand, but when they do it can make iterating on your game faster with less bugs. Regardless of your experience with TDD, programming or game development there will be something in this talk for you. We'll cover the basics of TDD, discuss the obvious aspects of a game to write tests for, and more involved examples of integration testing.

Examples will all be using Godot/GDScript/GUT (since I'm the author of the latter and that's what it works with), but most of the talk will apply to any testing framework, language or engine.

3D Tiles For Godot

Summary

The Battle Road Digital team partnered up with Cesium to integrate the 3D tiles ecosystem to Godot, bringing this open-source standard to the most popular and fastest growing open-source engine. This easy-to-use plug-in presents a huge opportunity for the community to effortlessly create experiences based in the real-world and to stream tiled, LODed 3D data. In addition, the Godot community will be able contribute to this constantly evolving standard.

Focus

This talk will focus on the work done to integrate Cesium as a plugin for Godot, the challenges we encountered, and the solutions we developed. We will also share how we believe these learnings can influence the development of the engine to better accommodate data- and processing-intensive applications moving forward.

Technologies

• GDExtension
• Godot Engine submodules
• C++ bindings
• Cesium Native (3D tiles)
• glTF

Speakers: Leónidas Neftalí González & Andrés Botero

Hi, I've released several Godot shaders, and am currently releasing some planet shaders as open source.

In this talk, I'll make the case for using shaders as a canvas for expressing art from code. I'll break down how you can layer simple techniques to make amazing images and scenes iteratively. I'll reference the CSS art community (like https://a.singlediv.com/). I'll advocate for the limiting the use of AI in shaders to discover what you don't know.

As a conclusion, I'll show that those of us who may struggle to draw may find an artistic expression through code.

I'm an experienced conference speaker (in the open source, open standards, and javascript communities), so I know how quickly 25 minutes can go. My talk will be polished with good slides, and well practiced. I'll have additional materials for viewers to explore.

Game developers often seek innovative ways to showcase their work, share experiences, and connect with their audience. I'll share my insights over 2+ years of building a Youtube channel including how YouTube can serve as a powerful platform for game developers to build an engaged community and market their games. We’ll discuss practical steps for launching a channel—from content strategy and branding to choosing the right equipment and production techniques. We will also cover methods for growing a loyal subscriber base through engaging storytelling, consistent posting, and responsive community management.

Come meet some of your favorite Godot creators. But be cool about it!

Multiplayer games bring players together, but building robust multiplayer systems can be challenging. Godot provides the tools for local networking and peer-to-peer connections, but scaling beyond these setups often requires additional frameworks. In this talk, we’ll explore the full spectrum of multiplayer development in Godot: from local peer-to-peer setups to advanced solutions like hole punching with WebSockets and hosted, autoscaling servers using Agones on Kubernetes. Whether you’re building a small co-op game or a global multiplayer experience, this talk will equip you with the knowledge to succeed.

Chickensoft provides open-source tooling to help C# developers build great game architecture from the ground up. In this talk, we discuss why software architecture is important, challenges developers can face making architectural decisions in games, and how Chickensoft tools are designed to help overcome those challenges.

Log.gd, a Godot pretty-printer

Log.gd is a drop-in print(...) replacement that formats and colorizes Godot data structures. It is focused on readable output and ergonomic call-sites.

We'll look at how this addon was implemented (spoiler alert, we wrap print_rich(), branch on the passed object type, and recurse!).

We'll see some of Log's features, including colors, supported data structures, spaces between arguments, not printing a million-billion items in your lists, and prepend the module and line-number in the output.

We'll look at some limitations, such as term-colors and the lack of a call-stack in production builds and threads.

We'll dream about future work and hope to inspire fancy versions of Godot's built-in print functions.

For the sticklers out there, I'll also mention that yes, you should be using the debugger, not print statements, to debug your code. But, you'll see that you still want a nice looking log when you run your game.

You can find more on Log.gd here: https://russmatney.github.io/log.gd/

Going Mobile with Godot

Half of all gaming revenue is on mobile, but most Godot developers do not target mobile. This lightning talk will make the case that Godot developers should consider targeting mobile gamers, and will provide guidance on simple steps you can take to enable gamers on iOS and Android to enjoy your games.

Lessons from 25+ Game Jams with Godot

I go over lessons learned from participating in 25+ jams with Godot, primarily for the Godot Wild Jam.
https://itch.io/c/3319934/game-jam-titles

This will briefly touch on scoping, designing, development, production, motivation management, and team management.

Time Management in Game Development

Programming, game design, art, sound, marketing - the list could go on and on. Game developers are responsible for so many aspects when it comes to releasing a commercial game. Add in a full-time job, kids, or other life responsibilities, and it can be incredibly difficult to find balance.

This talk will provide time management best practices for balancing it all while lowering stress and getting that game released on time!

Synths and Sound Design in Godot with Csound

What if you could design and control custom synthesizers directly within Godot? godot-csound enables real-time sound synthesis, allowing developers to create procedural audio systems tailored to their games.

In this talk, we’ll cover the technical process of writing synthesizers in Godot using godot-csound, from generating basic waveforms to designing more complex, interactive synths. We’ll explore how to send parameters from Godot to Csound, implement real-time control for dynamic sound variation, and optimize performance for game-ready audio synthesis.

Best of all, godot-csound is free and open source, making it accessible for developers, composers, and audio enthusiasts alike. Whether you're building a dynamic soundtrack, interactive sound effects, or experimental audio systems, this session will serve as an introduction to creating custom synthesizers inside Godot.

Custom Resources for global state management

Custom resources offer a way to store global state in a way that is convenient and debuggable. This state can be accessed and manipulated by any node, regardless of their place in the hierarchy, leading to better separation between Nodes and state.

Bringing the Arcade to the Museum with Godot

Interested in making physical games with Godot? In this lightning talk, Tyler and Annalivia discuss making SUPER ULTRA RACING XTREME, an arcade racing table, for the San Fransisco Museum of Modern Art. We'll break down the technical setup of the arcade table and its Godot integration, as well as the challenges of developing games for institutions and permanent display.