In April, the Godot foundation organized a conference close to their home base: GodotCon Amsterdam. It was a good occasion for us to showcase Paradox Tower and get some beta feedback from other developers.

Most importantly it was two entire days of talks about game development in Godot. Here are some of the ones I recommend checking out if you are into it.

1000 rigged AnimationPlayers in 3D, impossible?

Having a lot of animated 3D objects in Godot can seriously damage performance. This is something to look for if you’re developing for systems with limited resources, which may rely on the Compatibility renderer (like Android or Switch).

Bertrand Bordage explains how to get around this limitation using Vertex Animation Textures. It basically consists of baking an animation into a shader.

I had previously never heard of it and this talk really seems like a doable solution for Switch ports of 3D games.

The Clone Wars: Defending Godot Games From Reupload Scams

Godot games are very easy to reverse engineer. Many developers assume this is not an issue and will only be used by modders and curious players. Sadly, there’s a cottage industry of shady publishers who will take advantage of this to copy your game.

I’ve previously talked a bit about technical countermeasures you can use to make this process harder. In this talk, Yasen Dinkov also explores the legal and marketing aspects of the problem. He provides ideas that can make taking down illegal store pages much easier.

From model to gameplay in seconds: setting up your Blender Godot pipeline

Doing a lot of manual steps can kill your productivity. A big source of this is manually importing 3D assets and setting them up as Godot scenes.

Godot comes with a set of tools to speed that up: post-import scripts. Here, Marion Allard explains how to make the best use of it, with step-by-step examples using Blender objects:

Make your own fractal!

A more relaxed talk to finish, with a short and fun introduction to fractals by Marta Imke. It explores visual math and the different ways you can build fractal images out of simple functions.

This is definitely something that can be useful if you want to create some trippy visual effects.