And Then There Were Many

In 2017 I forked the very popular game engine Godot with the intention to submit pull requests and just help out. I've used the engine off and on since 2014, and I love the game engine. In the last week the engine's social media made a post leaning more political than game engine related, blocking or purging members from the community that disagreed with the moderators, and I questioned the founder about it.

After receiving what I felt were unsatisfactory answers, and having realized over time that the engine is now more corporate driven than community driven, myself and a few others decided to make an official fork and try to build a small community focused on the game dev and engine aspects. We called the fork Redot Engine.

Things blew up.

Our discord went from 4 guys to 100s of members in less than a day. We made a Twitter account and that skyrocketed as well.

People have poured in to offer their help and support for the project. We now have ten core developers and seventeen contributors helping on the engine side of things. We have a growing documentation and web team working on the website and improvement to the docs.

Our community members submitted logos and branding. People are in chat helping each other, and the general vibe is very positive. A small group of community members have decided to put together a free community driven school for game dev called Redot Engine Gamedev Academy where they stream various aspects of game dev and teach people how to use the engine and provide a free resource for learning.

My takeaway is seeing the true power of open source and community. People come together with a shared interest or purpose and work together to make things happen. I think we take that for granted, and in just trying to make a little fork of a great engine, we see the huge storm of people from all over the globe come together to make something great.

We have no idea how this will go. It could crash and burn, but we are hopeful it won't. We have had the usual bad actors try to derail us, posting issues on our github, searching for anything and everything to throw us off.

What I've learned from that is sometimes what you do matters, even if you don’t see it. It would be easy to say "this is too much, I don't want to do it anymore." I've been personally attacked, people trying to find any and all personal information or things to use as cannon fodder.

If anything, this just strengthens my resolve.

I want to thank all the people who I can't name for helping with this. If you see this, I appreciate all the help and guidance, all the voices that continue to inspire me to make the most of this opportunity to help make something great. Thank you.

We appreciate all the work the Godot Foundation have put into the engine over the years. We loved it enough to fork it.