At GDC 2026, Room 312, South Hall. Talk starts at 13:50.
Godot Roundtable
Moderated by Ezra Goss

The Godot roundtable is all about our favorite open source game engine: Godot! From game jams to Battlefield 6's official community level editor, Godot is rising in adoption across the industry. This roundtable is a place to discuss common questions regarding adoption, development, studio pipelines, and commercial workflows that come up when considering using Godot for a project. We'll gather questions from the room and discuss them in detail as a group. Example questions:

• How does one get involved with Godot code contributions?
• How can Godot be used in game development education?
• What are the big drawbacks with Godot adoption for a commercial production today?
  Any experience level is welcome!

Notes:

• Fully packed room
• Two people from the Godot Foundation are present
• Moderated by Ezra Goss, Naughty Dog has nothing to do with Godot, Ezra is just a fan.

Topics:

• Node based vs component based
  • It presents problems at an educational level as people learn it
  • Going from Unity, you have prefabs, a component scene, a playable scene, etc. In Godot you don't have this structure.
  • You have to have an interface on your root object, is there a way around this?
  • Someone else has the opinion that it forces you to know the design upfront and that it encourages your game to stay smaller. The scene tree shows you how big your game is and that you should narrow your scope.
  • Nomenclature overlaps between engines but they mean different things.
  • It's easier for people new to game development to learn object oriented approaches than entity component.
  • Question if anyone knows how to work with C# nodes when they dont appear until the game runs. Apparently there's a hotkey for building which updates the inspector and solves this issue.
• C# Web Exports
  • Can't use C# code or tools in web exports.
  • It is an active target, but not available yet.
  • Web export is important for jam games and sending over quick prototypes.
  • C# integration is a priority but it is very complex and needs time
• Audio workflow/Middleware
  • GDscript audio middleware is slow
  • There is an fmod plugin, with two russians working on it with no documentation. when you ask for an event on that plugin, if it doesnt find the event it crashes the whole engine.
  • Not enough people using audio middleware in their games.
  • I remarked that there is a brief section in the documentation for writing a custom dsp plugin
  • There are some other less supported audio middleware
  • Raytraced audio DSP plugin was added to Godot too by someone
  • Is there a preference between wise and fmod? no one in the audience expresses an opinion.
• How transferable is Godot to other Engines. How to find work?
  • There's not much work for Godot specifically.
  • Godot is attractive to education because it has no cost.
  • Indie studios tend to use Godot.
  • Unreal is considered the industry standard
  • Godot is good for prototyping
  • Skills unrelated to Godot directly are transferable
  • High school teacher switched from unity to godot, had a student who went from Unity to Godot in class to using Unreal in the industry.
  • Person who runs a studio using GenAI (>90% code is AI), Godot's strength is that everything is in text, which means the AI can generate everything.
  • new hires at naughty dog tend to get stuck in the abstractions of what they use
• Is anyone using Godot to make standalone tools which are not included in the build of a game?
  • Godot was used to make the scoreboard and a bunch of other ui for a minigolf escape room game.
  • There's an asesprite competitor written in Godot.
  • Godot is being used in Robotics
  • There is work to make Godot embeddable as a library
  • If you are using Godot as a UI toolkit, you should check out a talk from the last GodotCon about it.
• Tips and tricks for mobile development
  • Unity has a builtin emulator, but Godot does not
  • Mobile support is also a high priority by the foundation
  • If you set up real devices you can deploy directly to that device for testing

Questions not answered:

• What is the art pipeline for Godot, can it be made more efficient
• Godot in 3d, has it gotten better?
• Future of Godot in higher education?
• How to prevent reverse engineering, export security? Games are getting stolen.
• How do people mod Godot as a modular and extensible engine.

Thoughts:

• People have a lot of C# questions and struggles
• Roundtables feel too unstructured, slow, and broad, at least with this many people involved