The Foundation has been working on a number of things behind the scenes that are important for the organization and for
the Godot ecosystem more broadly. We wanted to take the chance to highlight a few of them in this post.
Key policies and procedures
The Foundation was formed in August 2022, but we only began operating in a full capacity in July 2023. We initially
adopted the member project policies of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Doing so allowed us to operate exactly as we had when we were a member project of the SFC, and maintain very high
standards.
In September, we adopted a modified version of those policies that is more specific to our organization. You can read the
updated version on the Godot Foundation website.
We are very happy with the policies and we hope you are too. They hold us to a very high standard and ensure that the
Foundation will always operate in a way that supports Godot.
Contractors
The Foundation currently has 10 contractors working on the engine directly (6 full time, 4 part time) and 3 contractors
working on administration and infrastructure.
This is the most number of contractors we have had at once, and even so, we feel understaffed as there is always more
work that needs to be done than we can do. Accordingly, we would like to continue hiring once funding allows for it.
Upcoming projects
The Foundation is working on 4 major projects in addition to working on Godot itself:
- An official asset store
- An official job board on the Godot website
- A public project priorities page
- A public trademark policy
Asset store
We have been working towards an initial version of the asset store for a while now. It has taken us some time to get the legal aspects into place and a design agreed upon.
We expect to have an early access version of the site up and running this month and we will begin inviting testers to help us polish it and get it ready for a full release sometime in 2025.
Job board
We aim to have a place for people to post that are looking to hire Godot developers to add to their game team or Godot
contributors to fix high priority bugs that may be impacting your team.
In addition to a job board, we will be curating a list of service providers who have shown that they offer services in
the Godot ecosystem to make it easy to find someone to contract with if you need support or any other services.
Much of the foundational work for this has been finished, but it will likely be released after the asset store so we can
focus our efforts more on that first.
Project priorities
Soon we will be adding a project priorities page to our website to give the community more clarity on the direction of
development.
We have avoided providing a roadmap as we don’t want to promise more than we can deliver, or put too much pressure on
volunteer contributors. However, the Godot Project maintainers have agreed that it is time to at least write down what
the largest tasks are that we are working towards. This won’t be like a traditional roadmap where we have specific tasks
with expected dates. However, we believe it will answer a lot of questions that the community has about the future of
the project.
Trademark policy
We registered the Godot trademark and the Godot logo trademark while still a member project of the SFC. Last year, the
SFC granted the Godot Foundation ownership over the trademarks. Now we need to have a public policy that says how and
when others can use the trademarks to protect them.
We are working with our lawyers to craft a policy that is fair to existing users, as permissive as possible, and still
able to protect our trademark.
We will have a blog post soon with more information.
The Foundation’s role in the project
We also wanted to take this chance to muse about the Foundation’s role in the project. In particular, we want to
contrast the size of the Foundation with the size of the Godot project contributor pool. As explained above, the
Foundation currently hires 13 contractors to work on Godot, while the total number of contributors to Godot is over
2,500 (the 4.3 release alone had over 500 contributors)! This large group of contributors is the reason why Godot is
able to improve so quickly and do so much for a fraction of the funding that the other large engines have.
The Foundation (meaning the Board of Directors and the people hired by the Foundation) does not determine the priorities
of the project in a top-down way. In other words, the Foundation does not dictate to individual volunteers what they
should work on. Instead, it influences the project implicitly by making hiring decisions and hiring people for specific
tasks that aren’t being done by the community.
Ultimately, it is the Godot community that deserves the most credit for the growth and development of Godot. While we
hope to see the Foundation grow and take on a stronger role in the project, it should be seen as a central pillar of the
project that volunteers can rally around. Donating to the Foundation is one avenue to contribute, but there are many
more and Godot needs contribution in all areas in order to continue growing at this pace. Please consider contributing
however you are able!
Support
Godot is a non-profit, open source game engine developed by hundreds of contributors in their free time, as well as a handful of part or full-time developers hired thanks to generous donations from the Godot community. A big thank you to everyone who has contributed their time or their financial support to the project!
If you’d like to support the project financially and help us secure our future hires, you can do so using the Godot Development Fund platform managed by Godot Foundation. There are also several alternative ways to donate which you may find more suitable.