Rémi Verschelde

Community driven and fully FOSS, Godot Engine has established itself as the main 2D and 3D game engine in the FOSS ecosystem, and one of the key players in the game development industry as a whole. Its third installment brings 18 months of hard work from over 400 contributors, and so many features that we can't possibly showcase them all during a lightning talk - still, we will give a quick overview of the engine, its strength and the most striking features that may light in you the spark of game development using FOSS tools!

The award-winning 2D and 3D FOSS game engine Godot got its bigger release so far in January 2018, and after 18 months of intensive development (10 to 20 pull requests a day!) it is ready to shine as the best game engine in the free software ecosystem, and one of the best even against proprietary engines, gathering a lot of interest from the game development industry.

Godot 3 brings state-of-the-art rendering features such as PBR shading (Physically Based Rendering), real-time global illumination, GPU particles and many more. It runs flawlessly on the Web using WebAssembly and WebGL 2.0 (even the editor itself, which is a Godot game!), and also exports to most desktop and mobile platforms (including of course Linux, *BSDs and even Haiku). On the scripting side, Mono/C# is added together with VisualScript and GDNative, an interface to use native code in Godot, paving the way to support languages such as Python, Nim, D, Rust and others. It ships with Bullet as physics engine, and a completely overhauled audio engine with advanced sound engineering effects. And many more features which can't all be listed here, but which the overenthusiastic Godot developers spread all over the FOSDEM campus will gladly tell you about at length!

This lightning talk will give a fast overview of what Godot is and the awesome features packed in its third installment. The presentation "slides" will even be a Godot game themselves, allowing to showcase game examples and special effects directly during the presentation.

The Godot community has released a full-featured point'n'click adventure game framework based on Godot Engine. It is fully open source (MIT licensed) and comes with a great open source manual and demo game written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community. This presentation aims at showcasing Escoria, its features and the basics of using it, to give attendants a good starting point for creating their own point'n'click games.

Back when they kickstarted their Godot Engine-powered point'n'click adventure game The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, its developers had promised that they would release the framework they developed under a free and open source license. This finally happened in October 2016, after some important refactoring to make it suitable for any kind of point'n'click game. At the same time, a great open source manual and demo game (see links) were released, written by Ariel Manzur, the Escoria creator, and the FLOSS Manuals FR community.

The free and open source world has therefore an advanced point'n'click framework at the ready with both source code, demos and documentation, only waiting for game designers and artists to create awesome adventure games (both open source and proprietary, the engine license is not restrictive). To give an idea of the tool's maturity, Tim Schafer of LucasArts and Double Fine Productions said of it, when visiting the developers of The Interactive Adventures of Dog Mendonça and Pizzaboy, that "it looks just like SCUMM!" (the engine used by LucasArts for their classic adventure games). Escoria is based on the 2D and 3D Godot game engine, and can thus leverage many features that are not common in point'n'click adventure games, which allows for the creation of interesting hybrid genres.

In this presentation, we will showcase the features of Escoria, how to setup a new project with it and use its scripting language to create classic point'n'click scenes. Basic knowledge of Godot's interface is not mandatory, as we will try to explain also what features are specific to Escoria and which ones are specific to Godot. The presentation will reuse elements of the existing manual and demo in attempt to be as clear as possible, and to allow attendants to continue their discovery of Escoria using resources they are already familiar with.