 We thought Unity was doing well, so it was way bothering, so we just open sourced it and put it in GitHub. So we went through the whole backlog, we sorted everything, and then I started also reviewing pro-request. This looks cool, there is an editor, it's very interesting, I kind of got into it. And then at a certain point my friend comes and says, oh, my friend has found this random engine. And so, since it's open sourced, I decided I could check the code, and then I found a fix. Send pro-request. One day I got contacted by Juan and he said he wanted to work there, and that's how it started. So far it's been pretty good, because I actually enjoy doing my work a lot. And so I went on GitHub and searched for Game Engine, and then it did the Godot. This past June I went to the Godot sprint and user meeting in Barcelona. I met a lot of familiar faces and was lucky to get to interview some of the people behind the engine. I asked Juan, the co-founder of Godot, how he got started with programming. My parents were sending me to study computing, which at the time was like logo programming. So I started learning logo when I was like eight. I kind of learned to make games with it and moved to basic, and then I got a Commodore 64. I was using basic, but it was very slow. So I asked like an uncle I had, and he gave me an assembler book for the Commodore 64. After doing my more completed games when I was 16, like 95, just using mostly Pascal and assembly. I finished a game that I put some videos on my YouTube channel called Nuku. It was kind of like Mario, but it was weird. And then when I finished high school I went to university, started to do this more professionally. So I started getting like two with other people, very young, like finishing high school and dreaming of having a game industry in Argentina. Juan is one of the most prominent faces of the Godot engine. To search him online you will find many talks and interviews, but before the engine got public and many people started contributing to it, the other half of the project was Ariel. Juan met him there in 1996. Before the internet, there were some systems called BBS, bullet import system that connected you to a modem, and there was a chat, it was like a mini-internet. There was a chat, you could play, download files, play games, and there chatting, and the program was games in Pascal. And then, in 2001, Juan was with a group of people making a game, an MMORPG. It's the classic that they do with what everyone starts with. It's too big and stuff, but we were all like, let's do this. If you try to pinpoint the exact moment the Godot engine was created, you will soon notice that there isn't an exact date. The engine is something that they both develop in their journey, constantly changing and adapting to the projects they were working on. The first thing I did professionally was founding NGD Studios, which is a company that still exists today, it's called Nimble Giant. We put some other people who wanted to make games, and we worked on an MMO, which was called Indian Champions of Ragnum. I only worked for a bit more than a year doing the engine, the core engine. Then I left to do other stuff, but they continued and they published the game. Then I worked for many, many companies doing consulting and technical consulting, and eventually I was like, OK, I want to have my own company. So I joined Martina and other guys from Occam Studio, and Occam Studio was not really for making games, but we made it a game company working with them. It was really good synergy. They were very creative and it was very technical. So in very few years we got from not getting any clients, to getting to work for Square Enix, Turner, Koch Media. We published many games. We published a game with a football franchise. We published Ultimo Carnival for Square Enix. We published Documentosa, which was an adventure game. It's on Steam, all made with Godot, of course. So eventually, because the country is very, very, very unstable, I decided to close with my other partners, close the company, and just started doing consulting, mostly business consulting, because I got a lot of experience doing business. I was just working on the engine that I opened Source with Ariel in 2014, because we didn't plan on selling it. It was pretty good, but turning it into a product was too much and we didn't want to. We thought Unity was doing well, so it was way bothering. So we just opened Source and put it in GitHub. From the beginning we opened it. At the beginning it was Dual License, GPL, and a commercial license for QT, because QT was like that and we liked QT. But after a while we were using Godot, we started using Godot to work, and as we had work making games, there was nothing that could really be used in production. The motivation isn't the business, it's MIT, and that's much easier for everyone. But since people were using it and I was doing other stuff that wasn't taking that much time, I started working on it as a hobby, like taking issues and fixing them, like reviewing pull requests and getting more people to contribute, but eventually it did grow very fast, like a couple of years later. In 2018 it was already being used by a lot of people, and it grew exponentially from then. But what do you do when your project suddenly becomes popular? While they were working on the programming side of things, they needed some help with managing the beast that Godot was turning into. That's when Remy comes in. Remy is a crucial part of what Godot is now, but at the time he was working on another open source project, a Linux distribution called Majaya. I asked him about his introduction to open source. I actually did a bit of everything, since when I started I had no real technical skills, so I was working on the French translation, and then since I had free time and I was ready to take responsibilities, I became the team leader for French translation and then the team leader for all the internationalization teams, and then I started also working on documentation, on bug-training, on QA, and then eventually I learned software packaging and a bit of development. I was a packaging team, so I did a bit of everything, but then gradually I got into the more technical things, and as a packageer that I came to Godot and I was like, ah, that looks cool, I already package open source games, maybe I can package these so that people can make games on Majaya. And then I saw in Godot that there was a lot of potential, but I could see what was missing in terms of handling the project so that it succeeds better. There was a huge backlog at the time, huge, it's much less than now, but the project was much smaller. There was a lot of open issues which had actually been fixed and nobody had bothered closing them. There was a lot of pull requests which were not being reviewed. A lot at the time was like 100, now we have 1,500, but they are being reviewed, it's just the volume became massive. But Juan was the only one in charge and he was like, he's working really single-threaded, so he was working on stuff and then once per month he was checking some pull requests and he was like, yes, no, yes, no basically. So I poked and poked and said, we need to organize this better and then eventually it gave me permissions to organize the issue tree age with a team of contributors, many of which are still active now. And I was there and I thought, okay, don't you want to join also the GitHub organization, I can help you with bug triaging, which was did mostly at the time and I was very interested in doing something with G-Descript. So I asked Juan if I could do optional typing for G-Descript and he said, okay, go ahead. And so around that time I was looking how maybe I can contribute to something and I found out it was 2015, so GitHub just came out in that moment. If this looks cool, there is an editor, it's very interesting, I kind of got into it and my first PR was a small fix for gravity in the Godot physics. I don't load it and then I liked it. But there were some small things that weren't that great. So I started like maybe I should have looked at the code and it was quite simple, so I did some improvement. I started doing game development in university and then at a certain point my friend comes and says, oh, my friend has found this random engine. So I feel like it's a bit like cheating for me because I actually have a lot of programming background. So when something doesn't work, I go like, alright, I'm gonna fix it. I was 17 at the time. This is also where I started eventually doing contribution to Godot. At first I was just doing small things, like maybe changing a default setting or maybe fixing a small bug, but then I started becoming more confident in my abilities and certain implementing features that people eventually appreciated a lot. Well, I started using Godot when I was in university so I was just studying and I got into video games and then I started using Godot and I liked it. I fixed one issue, it was good, I fixed two issues and then it's the whole world. You want to do your best because everybody is seeing your code like if you work on a company and you can hack something together and it works and then you just forget it but here there's a record and everybody can see it. What we try to do is do it a bit different that you would do if you're a company because Godot has a lot of contributors doing things. We don't really have the classical structure where you really put KPIs and measure performance or it's more organic, we have people, we cannot micromanage them so we expect them to be self-driven and to take the lead in the areas. If we see that there are contributors doing something really well and they are doing it in their free time but they have proven that the way they do it is great, it's very easy to merge, it's something that is done the way we would expect it to be done then we try to use the donations to hire that person to continue working and do that for a job, you know? That's how we think and that so far works really well like this has made Godot improve lots the past year. The downside to that is that maybe it would be nice to get some parts of the engine worked but nobody is doing work there so even if you have the money there's not much you can do. Like many people in the community say why don't you do bounties? You put a bounty to make a feature then you select the person that you think that's going to make it and then you pay that person but in reality it doesn't work like that the problem is that if you have somebody that you pay to work that person may need help because if you want them to do things the way you believe are the best for the project, like I don't know writing the code in a certain way, doing it efficiently, using everything properly like you need to spend a lot of time helping the people do what they need to do instead of like you working on what you have to do. As you can hear this is a very different operation to what you might expect from a project of this size. There are other open source projects that are dealing with the challenges that Godot is but I don't think there are many at this scale yet so there's still a lot to explore. The interesting thing about Godot is that I don't really have like a super clear vision about it to me it's more understanding what others want and seeing how we can be smart enough to put it in there we take our time but we try to make it really good but it's always trying to follow what community needs so we focus the most on what has the most demand or just people coming and saying I just take it and that's great. I'm really looking forward to Godot 4 being released because it's quite stressful to like always be in the rush of development or something so unstable while also working on the 3.x branch. The most exciting thing for me working on Godot is that I am a tool maker and it's amazing to see everything that the community is making with it so I really feel like someone making pencils for painters and then I see the amazing paintings that they are creating which are way beyond anything that I could do from a creative perspective but I know that they could also not do it without the work that I and the team are doing to enable them so it's really nice feeling to participate in that. The anticipated version 4 of Godot is going to be releasing soon and the team keeps working very hard to make it a reality so while my initial goal was to make a small documentary on the story of the engine I think this project has still a lot ahead.