Week 10 - Attending GDC and meeting open source devs

During the spring break, I had attended the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I went to some talks about open source and I visited some open source related booths at the Expo as well.

One thing to note was how big of a space Godot had. This year, the space they had rented at the expo was even bigger than Unity’s.

I visited the Godot booths and was able to talk to some of the developers as well as some game studios who are either remaking their game in Godot or using Godot in their new games. I can see a lot of benefits for the studios to use an open source engine to make their games. I think the most important one is the ability to customize the engine according to your needs. This is crucial for large scale projects and the reason why most AAA studios develop their in house engines. However, having an open source engine saves a lot of time as you don’t have to develop an entire game engine from scratch but you still get the customizability that you need.

In addition, I think Open 3D Engine is also becoming a potentially viable 3D high resolution alternative it’s commercial counterparts. This engine is being developed with large scale project in mind first, but it still needs a little bit more momentum behind it to take on the gians of the industry such as Epic’s Unreal or EA’s Frosbite.

Written before or on March 31, 2024