Through 2020 it seems the free and open source game engine Godot Engine has gone from strength to strength, and they've managed to hire another developer.

Not long after announcing a new hire thanks to funding from Facebook , developer Camille Mohr-Daurat has now been hired thanks to a "generous donation" to work part-time over six months to improve Godot's 2D and 3D physics systems. They said their main goal is to modernise the whole thing - no doubt something that will excite a number of developers using Godot.

Mohr-Daurat has listed a few interesting goals to get started including sorting out a physics test framework, an audit of existing issues and sorting through pull requests from others, implement a bunch of new features like soft bodies and buoyancy, optimise and more.

See the announcement here .

All sounds pretty great and wonderful to see Godot end 2020 on another high note. Hopefully through 2021 we will see more developers take a look at using Godot Engine as it grows more feature-filled and powerful. The cross-platform support it offers is excellent. If you're working with Godot and plan to have whatever it is supported on Linux, do feel free to mention it in the comments.

Godot Engine, the free and open source game engine for 2D and 3D games is getting a nice VR boost - thanks to Facebook Reality Labs. We can expect great things from this by the sounds of it.

Admittedly, anything with Facebook attached ends up raising a few eyebrows over here but we are talking about open source and the work will benefit everyone here. Writing in a blog post on the Godot website, Project Manager Rémi Verschelde mentioned that Facebook has given the team a grant which has enabled them to hire developer Bastiaan Olij, who will be working on Godot full time as of February 2021.

The work will involve lots of exciting areas like: hooking up OpenXR support for both desktop and mobile which has wide industry support now from the likes of Microsoft / Valve / Oculus, upgrading the Godot input system to support VR specific actions, upgrade their XR plugin system for the upcoming Vulkan renderer in Godot 4.0, optimizations and so on. All big areas to see improvements for Godot and VR.

Hopefully this means once it's out (which is a while away of course), we might see even more developers opt for using Godot Engine . If you're a VR fan, this must be quite exciting news!

Vulkan support is coming with Godot Engine 4.0 and with it plenty of modern 3D rendering features, however the 2D side of Godot is also seeing plenty of love. In a fresh blog post , lead developer Juan Linietsky went over some of the big stuff that will be coming and it all sounds quite impressive for this free and open source game engine.

Performance is going to be improved, partly as a result of Vulkan with Linietsky mentioned as it has a "lower draw-call cost than OpenGL". However, that's not the only reason as they've done some dedicated improvements to optimize the 2D side including changes to enable "thousands of draw() functions from a node's _draw() callback" which will speed up both the GLES3 and GLES2 back-ends.

You're also going to see:

• Improved 2D lighting - all lights drawn in a single pass.
• Improved 2D materials - adds a new CanvasTexture texture type that can be used with any node or resource  to provide normal, specular and shininess map.
• Directional 2D light and shadow support.
• A new CanvasGroup node option - merges together the draw calls of its children nodes to have effects apply to all.
• 2D Masking / Clipping - the ability to easily mask out children 2D nodes using the parent shape.
• Signed Distance Fields for 2D - from any point in the screen, you can request the distance to the closest solid. Linietsky said they can be used for circle tracing, with the example picture below for a long-drop shadow simulating 2D lightshafts:

Lots more is to come for the 2D side of Godot Engine, with developer Gilles Roudiere working on a new 2D tilemap system and editor to improve on the limitations of what they have currently. You can follow progress on their Twitter account for that

Aside from that, Godot also teamed up with the Ogre3D developer Matías N. Goldberg who was commissioned by Godot to work on Betsy , a GPU texture compressor that runs on GPUs. Why do they need Betsy? It's to help solve a "major complaint" with importing textures being "excruciatingly" slow. It will work as a standard command-line tool outside of Godot but it's made with integration with Godot in mind.

There's still no date set for Godot 4.0 with Vulkan, as it seems they're going with a "when it's done" approach. You can support the free and open source game engine on their Patreon . On the subject of funding, recently they did also announce ASIFA-Hollywood as a Silver Corporate Sponsor and also Zenva Academy as a Silver Corporate Sponsor - so each should be giving them a little over £400 a month.

Godot Engine continues seeing upgrades to the current 3.x series while the work is ongoing to bring Vulkan support the upcoming Godot 4.0. The second Beta of Godot Engine 3.2.4 is out now.

This has quickly become the most advanced and fully featured free and open source game engine around, and their work on it continues to be seriously impressive.

Here's what's coming to Godot 3.2.4:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (remember that we added it for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).
• Rewritten and greatly improved FBX importer (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• Improved Web editor prototype and AudioWorklet support for multithreaded HTML5 builds (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• New option to snapping 2D transforms to whole coordinates , helps prevent jitter on pixel art camera motions (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).
• Configurable amount of lights per object , now defaulting to 32 instead of 8 (new in 3.2.4 beta 2).

The lighters per object change is a great one, something I've seen a few developers gripe about and try to get around. Speaking on Twitter about the old limit, Godot's lead developer Juan Linietsky mentioned how "stupid" they felt about not having made it customizable originally and that while it's not optimal having it as an option is better, especially given the power of most computers now.

Read more over on the Godot 3.2.4 Beta 2 release announcement .

If you're looking for some Godot tutorials you should check out GDQuest , and they have a number of examples open source and up on GitHub like their recent Tactical RPG movement release pictured in testing below.

Are you working with Godot? Feel free to let us know what you're doing with it in the comments.

Cave-flying is a genre that was big a very long time ago, now though not so much but Gravity Ace from John Watson entered Early Access recently and it's absolutely brilliant.

The idea of cave flyers are that you're always fighting against gravity while you pilot some sort of spaceship. Developer John Watson took that basic idea with Gravity Ace, threw a load of code at Godot Engine and came out with an Early Access game that shows how timeless certain types of genres can be. Gravity Ace has you fly, fight, and manoeuvre through various tight levels with intense gravitational fields and cramped firefights and it looks awesome while doing so.

Watch video on YouTube.com

I don't have a bad thing to say about it. It looks fantastic with the bright pixel-art and animations, the controls are great with both mouse/keyboard and gamepad (Xbox One controller tested) and I think I prefer it on gamepad as it's been a great game to kick-back with a bit. Being able to do a little boost, and then drift along with the gravity while you annihilate enemies just looks and feels so satisfying. Gravity Ace is thumb-aching fun, and I seriously can't wait to play a whole lot more of it.

Their current plan is to remain in Early Access for 6-12 months, while they add new enemies, bosses, more levels and campaigns, fix bugs, and add a local multiplayer/Steam Remote Play mode for player-vs-player battles which all sounds great. It's already brimming with content thanks to 24 levels, along with a fully integrated level editor which they play to expand to have a special hub for players to share levels and whole campaigns.

Since it uses Godot Engine, the Linux version is pretty much perfection.

You can buy it on itch.io and Steam .

Also a shout out to itch.io, as their press system is brilliant. Anyone approved can go in and try a game, as long as the developer has opted into it. So people like me can pick a game they think looks interesting, and just give it a go. It's super useful.

Despite the small version bump, Godot 3.2.4 will be quite big release for game developers wanting to squeeze out some more performance.

The first Beta release is out now , and the Godot team mentioned it's best to get in and start testing now to ensure your games and Godot as a whole is as good as can be when Godot 3.2.4 is released properly. With 3.2.3 now behind them which added in batching for GLES2, they're moving to ensure it's hooked up for GLES3 too.

Apart from the usual assortment of fixes, these are the major changes:

• Android App Bundle and subview embedding support.
• 2D batching for GLES3 (remember that we added it for GLES2 in 3.2.2), and improvements to GLES2's batching.
• A new software skinning for MeshInstance to replace the slow GPU skinning on devices that don't support the fast GPU skinning (especially mobile).

If you're not a game developer, this is probably like speaking another language. Originally, Godot was drawing up various parts of the graphics you see on an individual basis, meaning that each rectangle, polygon, line and so on added to the OpenGL overhead. To better take advantage of a GPUs power, batching pulls a load of it together to save on that performance. Want to know a bit more detail? You can see one of their original blog posts about it here .

While Godot 4.0 will bring with it Vulkan support, a lot of developers stick with the current version of a game engine for a long time, as moving and upgrading can cause all sorts of issues. So giving developers the most performance they can get in the current Godot is great. Godot 4.0 is also still quite some time away so it makes sense.

Binogure Studio, developer of City Game Studio have released their casual Zuma-like marble shooter and it seems like another lovely little coffee-break game.

With a wonderfully simple idea, you just need to shoot marbles from your little cannon towards matching colours to make combinations that set off chain-reactions, so it works very much like a match-3 puzzler, with everything gradually moving along the snake-like path and you need to remove them all before the snake at the end gobbles them all up.

Very much like some casual mobile games, and that's not a bad thing. There's plenty of games in my own collection that I repeatedly go back to like this, simply because they're easy for a quick blast. With full Linux support, Sneak In is a wonderful little distraction.

Feature Highlight:

• 7 magic marbles: The frozen, the bumpies, the ghosts, the rocks, the bubbles, the viruses and the blackholes
• 1 new endless mode every week
• Over 200 unique challenging levels
• Easy to learn, hard to master
• Play on multiple devices cloud-saved

The developer mentioned that the game was made with open source tooling like Godot Engine , Inkscape and Blender and they're actually quite a big Linux fan being a Debian user themselves.

You can pick it up from itch.io and Steam .

Need to get something done and remove distractions? Virtual Cottage is a real sweet idea for a screen-saver style application that gives you tunes and a timer.

It reminded me instantly of Kind Words , the beautiful little game about writing letters to random people in a tiny little room. Virtual Cottage echos that same style and feeling. You get a visually pleasing little room, some lovely music and you can set a timer with a subject to focus on and let your mind melt away as you do it and listen to the great beats.

Why was it made? On the itch page, the developer mentioned they built it for themselves to "help me get things done again" with a goal to have "a super simple desktop app (so that I'm not even tempted to open the browser)" and so they've shared it with everyone. I thought it was a beautiful idea, maybe you will too.

Also, it's made with Godot Engine , so that's awesome too.

You can grab it free on itch.io and if you like the idea you can donate there too.

Sounds like things continue going well for Godot Engine , as a free and open source game engine it's made huge leaps over the last year and they're pulling in more developers.

The next is Hugo Locurcio, also known as "Calinou" who has now been hired full-time to work on Godot's web infrastructure to ensure it's ready for future progress. Locurcio has been contributing to Godot for a number of years across various areas and they also developed things like the nightly builds , a build options generator and the class reference status viewer .

Announced in a new blog post , they put out some of their plans to enhance the web experience for multiple major areas of Godot. Their plans include:

• Create a Godot Development Fund page to summarize the paid developers' efforts and improve funding transparency.
• Deploy the new asset library developed by yours truly .
• Create a new Showcase page featuring high-quality, published Godot projects.
• Update the homepage with newer screenshots rotating over time.
• Publish a community map with local communities.
• Update the design of the Features page to better showcase the new features coming in Godot 4.0.
• Integrate a Q&A system into the online Godot documentation.
• Improve the online Godot documentation's search to return more relevant results. Add a way to filter between the manual pages and the class reference.
• Add a C#/GDScript toggle to the online Godot documentation, to switch between snake_case and PascalCase naming conventions automatically.
• Update software used on the various Godot community platforms.
• Revise the web hosting setup for better performance and reliability.

The new Asset Library is definitely one that's needed. Part of why developers go for engines like Unity, Unreal and others are because they have these big popular areas full of free and paid assets for developers - it's something that really can help pull developers in. The current one for Godot is…not great.

Really exciting to see so many areas of Godot improve, and this comes recently after another hire to get the Godot documentation expanded and improved too.