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Team building, strategy, an impromptu game jam, and GodotCon 2024—all in one week
Earlier this month, the all-remote Endless Tech team spent a week collaborating in Berlin, followed by exhibiting and presenting our Block Coding plugin at GodotCon 2024.
Working Together
Since we’re an all-remote team distributed across the globe, we scheduled productive work time while we were all face-to-face. In fact, on the first day, we realized this was the first time everyone had been in one room together, and we counted over ten new in-person connections made among team members!
We held a retrospective on our Godot Engine learning tools work so far (including both Moddable Games and Block Coding), discussed our current and future strategy, and even pretended to be students during one of our Learning team’s sessions to get more exposure to what learners are going through when they use what we build.
Finally, we prepared for our GodotCon presentation on Block Coding—which evolved into an impromptu two-day game jam! Together, we created a new spaceship runner game (complete with original, hand-drawn artwork and sound effects recorded and mastered on-site) and implemented it entirely with our Block Coding plugin. Along the way, we even made several improvements to the plugin as we dove into building a real game and aimed to demonstrate “the right way” to do it.
Building software together in the same room was a refreshing change. It was an excellent way to experience the joy, constraints, and pressures a learner or team might feel using our work. It was also a valuable opportunity for Justin, from our Learning team, to observe us in action—seeing how we put theory into practice. And yes, he could also see that even experienced developers occasionally create pesky git conflicts!
Fun With The Team!
Since we were all in the same place, we decided to take some time for non-work activities and have a bit of fun. One afternoon, we headed to Showdown, split into three teams, and played a series of wacky, physical games. We discovered who among us has great balance, that we’re all embarrassingly bad at recognizing flags and obscure theme songs, and that Team Sqwerty are the undisputed champions.
We also visited the Computer Games Museum, ate yummy tapas, explored a bunch of street art, were nearly eaten by wacky monsters at Monsterkabinett, home-cooked some delicious Indian food, and had many laughs competing in an Ultimate Chicken Horse tournament while also marveling at the level-design mechanics and community-made levels.
GodotCon 2024: Sharing What We Love
Finally, we wrapped the week up at GodotCon 2024 exhibiting our work at our booth and presenting a live demo of building our spaceship runner on the main stage in front of hundreds of attendees.
Presenting Block Coding with a Live Demo
We challenged ourselves to deliver a strong presentation within our 25-minute session. We designed and rehearsed a 10-minute introduction succinctly explaining Endless, our learning programs, and the Block Coding plugin itself. We set the rest of the time aside for our live demo, which we rehearsed carefully and made some contingencies against worst case scenarios. For this demo, we deleted all the logic blocks from the new spaceship game leaving just the assets, and then rebuilt the game live on stage to deliver our key message: you can now build a game in Godot Engine without writing a single line of code.
Surprisingly, we were one of the few sessions that went beyond slides; the stage technician came up to us during the session and remarked that we were really brave to be doing a live demo and that this was really engaging the audience, who gave hearty applause at the point when the game first became playable… and further applause when we broke the game just as our session’s time expired. Several people personally complimented us afterwards, including one of the creators of Godot Engine who commented that our work should have more exposure.
In the end, it was a successful and supremely gratifying presentation!
Our Booth Experience at GodotCon
We didn’t really know what to expect from GodotCon: Would we find much engagement in our work? Or would it be a bunch of game and engine devs who were way too technical to care about introductory experiences?
The conference was in an underground bunker of sorts, and along with other sponsors our booth was in a bit of a weird position: out of the way behind the main stage seating area. We were a bit worried about the positioning at first, but minutes after opening it was clear that we would not be lacking any foot traffic. We set up three machines running Godot Engine and our Block Coding plugin with demo projects open, inviting attendees to come make, break, or fix the games.
We were kept on our feet for the whole two days, with plenty of people dropping by to play with the Block Coding plugin and chat. Many were pleasantly surprised at the existence of the plugin, apparently previously unaware of it. Several educators stopped by who were excited by the possibility of being able to teach Godot Engine using this tool in settings ranging from classrooms to coding “dojos” or bootcamps. Experienced game developers came by to share their appreciation and excitement of the possibility of growing the overall ecosystem with block coding. Core Godot Engine developers and Godot Foundation staff visited to offer their praise and encouragement. And over all, many attendees were impressed and tickled that the plugin is entirely open source—we even got a handful of suggestions and issue reports from folks poking at the plugin at the booth.
In a unique twist, we discovered that two tables away from us an indie developer was exhibiting Keep the Heroes Out, a digital deck-building game based on their physical board game; they had adapted our block coding plugin into the game itself as a way of building out the scenarios, which was wild to see! We never intended for the plugin to be embedded into games themselves, but the topic was actually raised by several game developers for different use cases—and the fact that it’s open source means that they’re able to take it and run with it if they want.
While block coding was obviously a super hot topic, we also used the opportunity to understand the indie game dev world better and explore some ideas and opinions around community game building—something we’re passionate about at Endless, and will continue to work on.
A Big Thank You!
We’d like to offer our sincere thanks to all of the Godot Foundation staff and especially the incredible GodotCon volunteers who put together an excellent conference! It was truly a unique and encouraging experience. And thank you to the attendees and wider Godot community who were so welcoming, passionate, and optimistic when chatting with us. We hope our work continues to be useful to and inspire others out there—and we can’t wait to see how people use it!
Cassidy is passionate about helping design and build useful, usable, and delightful products using open technologies. In the past he co-founded elementary OS and served as the chief experience architect, and he's worked as a UX architect, web developer, and writer—and worn many, many other hats. He contributes to GNOME and Flathub.
Outside of work and open source he enjoys mobile photography, playing video games, watching and reading almost everything Star Wars, and being a dad.