The Nodeletter
Welcome to the 1st edition of our Godot Engine newsletter: Thank you for showing continued interest in the project by subscribing, and enjoy!
Should you have feedback or want to suggest a feature, simply reach out to newsletter@godotengine.org. We are looking forward to hearing from you.
To make up for the lack of a comment section, use this forum post to discuss the news with other users and our contributors.
Foundation news
🍒 2024 Cherry-picks
With 2024 already in the rear-view mirror for many, we wanted to take the time and remind you of some new features and community highlights you might have missed in the scuffle. Reminisce together with us or mayhaps learn about something new in this review blog post!
⚙️ Godot 4.4 beta 1
Godot 4.4 is lurking just around the corner. The release of this first beta indicates feature freeze for this development cycle. But before any of our builds can be called stable and used in production, testing needs to happen, and a lot of it - which is where you come into play. Help our contributors out by submitting errors you encounter to the GitHub repository, and allow them to focus on fixing issues and improving performance in the meantime.
📂 UID changes
Partial Unique Identifier (UID) support – a way to reference resources without relying on human-readable file paths prone to change – has been present in the engine since Godot 4.0, but many file types did not benefit from it yet. Now this fully supported workflow makes Godot more resistant to changes in your filesystem organization, and therefore more suitable to larger projects. The blog post also contains an FAQ addressing common concerns with this approach and tips to manage the transition.
#️⃣ Move to .NET 8
With the release of Godot 4.0, we moved our C# packages from targeting Mono to .NET 6. This version of .NET was released on November 8, 2021 and ended support on November 12, 2024. Therefore, our next release will implement and raise the minimum required version to .NET 8; existing projects will automatically be upgraded when opened with Godot 4.4 while older releases will keep targeting .NET 6 to avoid breakage.
Community news
🏆 Godot Game Awards by StayAtHomeDev
We introduced you to this stay-at-home father, music therapist, and game developer in a recent blogpost, who took the initiative to organize a Godot community award show. You can now watch the winner announcements in this YouTube video.
🦇 Acerola moves to Godot
The content creator and technical artist Acerola recently announced on social media that he will be moving his personal projects from Unity to the Godot Game Engine. In his video about the transition he explains that the addition of compute shader support and the new compositor node revitalized his interest in the engine and enabled him to move. He also hints at the fact he plans to develop tools with it.
🌾 The Godot Barn opens
The Godot Barn is a new site operated and run by a group of Godot enthusiasts, who hope to enable the community in sharing learning material and resources amongst each other. Everything hosted there is supposed to be free to use.
Events
🇺🇸 GodotCon US
This year, there will be two GodotCon installments, so do not despair EU folks! Join us in Boston, Massachusetts on the 5th, 6th, and 7th of May . While tickets are not available just yet, the call for submissions has opened already. We are also still looking for sponsors to help us level up the event!
🍓 Game Jams
Looking for a game jam you can still join this month? Inspired by a fun little blog post we shared last January, we aim to include one or two interesting events in each newsletter. Such jams are perfect for trying out experimental releases and helping us catch bugs, or trying out a version of Godot you have not upgraded to just yet.
For this month, we want to highlight the ongoing public domain game jam “Gaming Like It's 1929” in which participants make a game centered around works that have newly entered the public domain. The event is annual and shares the spirit of our open-source community rather well.
If you want to plan ahead for next month, you might be interested in signing up for the “Godot XR Game Jam” organized by maintainers of the engine area themselves. The itch.io page for this event also contains some beginner-friendly resources for Godot XR development.
Just released indies
The Godot Game Engine project has grown up alongside its community and the games made with it, with a lot of our success stemming from the trust of indie game developers who jumped into the cold water and transitioned early. To honor that commitment and support, we want to give back and shout out to a few recent releases in the indie market here.
Find more Godot games released this month on SteamDB and in this permanent itch.io showcase.
🏛️ Digseum
Start your own museum collection in this game about digging up treasure to fill up an exhibition. Use the admission money to upgrade your abilities.
📰 The Roottrees are Dead
You might have seen this detective game on social media recently. Scour through the early internet as well as physical evidence to puzzle together the genealogy of the Roottree family. The goal is to deduct who is eligible for a sizable inheritance.
👻 Everything Ends In 0
The world is doomed, and you are for once not the hero destined to save it. Instead you get to spend one last hour chatting.
Thank you…
…for reading this far. Remember that you can always reach us via newsletter@godotengine.org and see you next month!
If you want to support the progress of the Godot Engine, consider donating to the Development Fund: it enables us to hire people to work part- or full-time on the project.
