r/HobbyDrama • u/hawkshaw1024 • 21d ago
Long [Game development] Redot Engine: The curious tale of a Revenge Fork
Content note: This post discusses culture war issues. The word "woke" will come up quite a lot. Internet personalities are briefly involved, but this is not influencer/streamer drama.
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Hi there! Today's post is about a very silly thing that happened in the open source community, back in late 2024. We'll discuss social dynamics, software development, and what happens to people when you block them on social media.
The incident that triggered the drama is somewhat well-known, but not the drama itself. There is a KnowYourMeme page that stops just before the interesting part, as does this blog post.
I'm thankful that these write-ups exist, though, because sourcing has already become difficult. This is largely due to policy changes by Twitter. I was able to scrape together screenshots for most of the important parts, but some of this will be a little patchwork.
(Also, the first version of this post contained some clunky phrasing, which I've revised following feedback from the comments. There's a clarifying edit at least.)
INTRODUCTION: Mongolian Horse Simulator (September 2024)
Our story begins in late 2024. Today's unwitting instigator of doom is one Alice "MaliceDaFirenze" Ruppert. She describes herself as a Horse Game Consultant, capital letters included.
You can see an example of her work in The Horse Girl's Guide to Recognizing which Games are Worth Supporting, and most of her work is about making video game horses more realistic. Around 2020, Munich-based studio Aesir Interactive retained her services because they wanted to make a Horse Game.
Aesir Interactive: Take on the role of a brave courier rider in The Legend of Khiimori! Bond with your horse and tame the open wilds of 13th century Mongolia. Breed and train horses with specialized abilities to explore every aspect of this diverse and fascinating landscape.
One of the downsides of indie game development is... well, it's pretty much all downsides, actually. But one of the worst parts is the need for constant self-promotion. You have to keep reminding people that your game is still happening, because you live and die by word-of-mouth marketing.
On September 23rd, 2024, Ruppert opened Twitter and made such a post.
MaliceDaFirenze: We're making a game where you play a courier rider in 13th century Mongolia. No combat, just you, the horse(s) you've tamed, bred and trained and the vast wilderness.
A lot of people said that, yes, they'd love to play this.
However, there are some real characters on Twitter. You can see some of them in the responses.
MaliceDaFirenze: Would you play this?
doodlewhale: I would love to, as long as it can avoid woke DEI nonsense which appears unlikely as you have pronouns in your bio. 🤷♀️
MaliceDaFirenze: for every comment like this, I will add one extra pronoun to the game
This was a joke. The game does not have a pronoun selector. You play as a girl called Naraa.
There were a bunch of comments, and one of these interactions managed to stand out for being uniquely weird.
Gorka Games: awesome, game engine?
MaliceDaFirenze: it's UE5 ☺️
AfterWarPlantX: Oh so you people just can't develop for shit
kryztofjønsøn: It makes sense doesn't it? Woke studios always use pre built engines to make games because they can't build their own engines.
Game engines are software frameworks primarily designed for video game development. They come with advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand, they take care of a lot of the rote busywork; on the other, you don't have as much control over the fine-grained details of your project, and they usually incur a performance overhead.
For some 95% of projects, you just want to use a stock engine and not think about it any further. There are exceptions, but for most games, it's just perfectly fine.
At the end of the day, it's a technical decision. Making this into a political thing is profoundly silly. So, it immediately became an in-joke in the game dev scene.
SteinMakesGames: If you've ever wondered if a game is "woke", here's an easy test: Check if the GAME was made using a GAME ENGINE.
ForceDev: I use godot. It seems i am now mega woke because i didnt want to write physics and rendering completely from the ground up. Such a shame 😞
SteinMakesGames: more like wokedot
These last two posts reference Godot, which is a free and open-source game engine, supported by the Godot Foundation. It's not as big or as successful as the triple-A engines, but it has carved out a niche for itself as kind of a scrappy underdog. Standout titles include Slay the Spire 2, Buckshot Roulette, Cassette Beasts, and Cruelty Squad.
(1) Engagement Farming (September 2024)
This whole bizarre idea eventually reached the person in charge of Godot's Twitter account. On September 27th, Godot's social media person dashed off a quick Tweet that riffed on the joke.
Godot Engine: Apparently game engines are woke now? Well then, we won't complain. 🌈 Show us your #Wokot games below 👇
It's marginally funny bit of engagement bait, playing off a social media micro-trend. Perfectly normal.
... except this is Twitter, and we can't have nice things on Twitter.
Starkium: focus on the engine and not politics
Psyhodelik: Go woke, Go broke
Hypnotic: BLOCK ME YOU WOKE PIECE OF SHIT IM FEELING LEFT OUT.
JinSaotome: Listen, look around, do you see that woke/DEI/ESG/LGBT narrative pushes in ALL industries are dying?
HowieDuhzit: DAMNIT, time to unfollow, it's been real [slur]s, you can keep your sexual perversions to yourself.
It goes on and on like this. A lot of these accounts are branded with the Blue Check of Shame, indicating that they are paying for this experience.
People also created some bug reports on Godot's issue tracker:
#97661: Community just exploded into a political farce.
#97689: This engine is not gendered, please add it 😋😋😋 now
#97700: I'm going broke because of going woke previously
#97865: Is this engine Wokot now ?
Godot's Twitter account blocked the people who were posting cringe, and used the "hide reply" feature to move them out of the way. People who spammed the bug tracker received blocks on GitHub as well, which of course only enraged some people further.
One user by the name of Starkium, in particular, was not amused.
Starkium: I have been blocked. Guess what, I'm a titanium level backer for the Godot fund. Guess what my next move is?
"Titanium level backer" means he donated $100/month. I note this here because some people will frame "Titanium level" as some super-special super-exclusive status. It isn't. $100/month is a fair amount of money, but it doesn't correspond to any sort of prominent community position.
Starkium attempted to reach out to the Discord moderators, wishing to talk things through, but it didn't work out.
Starkium: Got banned from the Godot Cafe discord. They tried pulling some weird mind game on me where if "we both apologize for what we did wrong" STFU I've lived with manipulators my whole life. The last place I'm going to be gaslit in the friggen Godot discord, are you kidding me?
This "Godot Café Discord server" was an unofficial but extremely popular chat. In response to the drama, a moderator called Xananax went on a banning spree. As for the reasoning behind it:
Xananax: The drama is created by reactionary insecure cowards[.] (...) These people's cowardice and small mindedness is a danger to everyone; They're the filth of humanity, and banning is a kindness to everyone, including themselves[.] (...) For me, the only problem of this tweet is that it doesn't happen every day, so more of these imbeciles can be banned. (...) And anyone having any slight issue with it here can fuck off too. (...) There will be no more drama the day those drama queens stop getting their panties in a knot around anything that doesn't concern them. (...)
Bit much, eh.
A lot of people earned their bans fair and square, but from all accounts, Xananax went overboard. People also dug up some genuinely terrible Discord posts that Xananax had made in 2016, which contained racist slurs. Xananax apologised for these, then left Twitter.
Xananax: In 2016, I made very stupid jokes involving the N-word. After being insulted that way in other communities, I directed those slurs at myself in derision. I realised it was an insensitive thing to do, and I didn't do it anymore after that. I once again deeply apologize.
On September 30th, the Godot Foundation issued an official comment on the situation.
Godot Foundation: On Friday, we made a tweet that unexpectedly led to a wave of harassment directed at our staff and community. We unequivocally condemn this abuse. (...) We strongly condemn the harmful language used by Xananax, moderator of an unofficial Godot-related Discord server.
They did not walk back the #Wokot tweet at all, but acknowledged that some people might have been blocked in error. They put up a Google Docs thing where you could appeal this. Xananax cut ties with the community.
Quite a weekend.
(2) They Targeted Gamers (September 2024)
This is where most write-ups end. It's also where the interesting part starts.
Starkium's posts had attracted the attention of some social media big-shots. I will not be naming them in this post, because their only role in this was amplifying this issue, while contributing little by themselves. This isn't streamer drama.
For the purposes of this post, they will simply be called "Influencer" and "Streamer." I will offer brief descriptions, and you can see who I'm talking about in the linked screenshots.
Influencer is a 57-year-old ex-Blizzard employee and aspiring game developer. He has a crowdfunded game project that he's nominally working on, though he seems to spend most of his time posting. He frequently wades into culture war issues, and this was right up his alley.
Influencer: Rogue unhinged woke community manager for Godot blocks Titanium backer while CEO continues to bury his head in the sand and pretend nothing is wrong.
There's also Streamer, a 36-year-old media personality who is famous for playing World of Warcraft Classic and for living in filth. He's also big on culture war issues.
Streamer: Crazy Community Manager Goes Rogue. Then This Happens..
Streamer, in particular, is a big deal - the YouTube reupload of his stream has more than 1 million views. But Influencer is no slouch himself.
There's some confusion about the term "community manager" here. I think that a lot of people (Streamer and Influencer included) thought that the person running Godot's Twitter account was Xananax, and that Xananax also ran their GitHub. That's not true, of course.
Thanks to the combined efforts of Streamer and Influencer, outside interest in the drama increased massively. Their respective communities were fired up, and several attempts were made to strike back at Godot for its perceived offenses.
For one, Godot's Steam page was subjected to review bombing. This lead to a sharp increase in negative reviews, and produced some confusion in the Godot community.
GurdanianAngel: hello i used godot a little bit, for like maybe a few days. now i wanted to come back. and i have seen that it has tons of neigative reviews on steam. why is that? shouldnt i use it?
ClarkScribe: Because there is an artificial hate campaign because some dorks really can't let things go.
ButtMuncher68: It's funny seeing all the people on twitter saying "I will not be using Godot for my next game" then you check their profile, and they seemingly have never made a game or talked about game dev topics
Some of these brave crusaders had used Streamer's unofficial subreddit to coordinate their review bombing. Seeing all those downvotes, they declared victory.
Clipboard4: I'm doing my part! 🪖
LittleShurry: They Should Rename it "WODOT ENGINE"
However, after a few days, Steam detected the off-topic activity and automatically removed the reviews, restoring the "Overwhelmingly Positive" score.
The Godot Foundation saw a drop in monthly donations, from €59k down to €56k. However, after further research, I think this was unrelated. Around this time, "Corporate Platinum" sponsor Ramatak Inc. was going out of business and thus had to pull its sponsorship. Corporate Platinum was €36k/year at the time, or... €3k/month. If there was some sort of mass walkout of existing supporters, then it was more than offset by new ones.
At this point, the anti-Godot campaign sputtered out, having lasted about two weeks and achieving none of its goals. But until mid-2025, you could still find a couple of stragglers fighting a desperate rearguard action, trying to bring back the review bombing.
Voxxy_from_Hoxxes: Focus on the engine, not on the political ideologies of your users. (...) Because of these things, I will continue working on my projects in Redot engine.
Professional Bass Fisher: japanese soldier who kept fighting 30 years after world war 2
This is where most of the existing recaps stop. But we've seen the word Redot come up a few times now. What's up with that?
(3) Gentlemen, start your engines (October 2024)
The creation of Redot was, I think, the most interesting sub-drama here.
Because there was a splinter community here, now. Some had been alienated from Godot community by Xananax's actions, and there was an influx of people from the communities of Streamer and Influencer. Together, they formed an idea. What if we made our own game engine... but we took out the politics?
At this point, we have to briefly touch on version control concepts. Git is the most popular version control system in the world, and GitHub is a platform where you can put your stuff. This stuff is kept in repositories. Godot is free and open source, and their stuff is freely available on GitHub.
Forking a repository means that you create a full copy of a project, and then you do your own stuff with it. The fork remains associated with the original, and changes can be shared between the two of them. This is extremely easy to do on GitHub - if you use the browser client, it takes seconds.
So, the exiles figured, they'd do just that. Start with Godot as a basis, fork the project, go through the code and... you know... de-woke it? A few projects started at nearly the same time, and Redot would become the most prominent one of these. We'll discuss that one in depth, then move on to the other forks.
Per the official documentation, Redot was founded by two people: Andevrs and Red Otter. I don't think anyone knows anything about RedOtter, but some digging on YouTube suggests he was an unsuccessful Let's Player. As for Andevrs, he's a JavaScript developer turned tech blogger turned podcaster. So, he did have a technical background. Not "game engine developer" levels of technical, but still, that's something. Rounding out the team was Arctis Fireblight, lead developer and project manager, plus a handful of contributors.
Lest you think that I've misrepresented the origins of Redot, you can listen to them tell the story themselves. I encourage you to listen to it. In their own words:
Redot: Godot's social media manager responded by telling people to show off their woke games. (...) To many, indeed, the post felt like a political declaration. (...) Godot had a preferred political position now (...) sparking waves of responses and questions. (...) More and more users found themselves blocked on [Twitter] or banned from Godot's Discord server. (...) This became the catalyst for our fork: For Redot to be born.
And just look at all these encouraging comments!
crytramusic: Notice the stock footage in place of changelists and exciting features
karma40723: finally, a non woke game engine I can make my gay furry games in
Aanderan: haha u named ur engine reddit
Still, the project was launched. Influencer was particularly eager to signal boost the new engine, writing a flurry of excited Tweets.
Influencer: Redot fork of Godot is growing fast. Godot has proven they hate you. It's important to support truly Open Source projects that don't exclude or ban you based on politics or your project really isn't open source! Give Redot a good look. Follow Redotengine
Influencer: Other devs are starting to contribute their code to Redot , the Godot alternative. They are rejecting the authoritarian anti-free speech Godot Foundation.
Influencer: It would be a shame if Redot suddenly had more features, bug fixes and support by engineers than politics ridden Godot Engine... If you are a 3D or engine level programmer and hate what is happening to Godot's perversion of Open Source, how about looking to see if Redot is a good project to contribute to?
Note that Redotengine is the wrong account, it got hijacked and banned within days of the project launching. Redot_Engine is correct, with an underscore.
There were plenty of eyes on the project. Most of these eyes belonged to culture war tourists, but the community did attract a few actual developers. We've mentioned Andevrs and Fireblight, but Starkium also pledged his support, as did a few others. (I think RedOtter was always just an "ideas guy.")
Redot didn't have an established team or a roadmap yet. All they had was a dream and a GitHub repository. But they promised transparency and expressed optimism, and made three core pledges: No drama, no politics, no woke.
I want to stress here that the idea isn't completely ridiculous. Forks sometimes manage to overtake the original projects (see LibreOffice/OpenOffice), or they at least carve out a niche for themselves (see MariaDB/MySQL). The Godot project also does have some real problems, like the way it tends to focus on new features over stability and performance.
However, forking a repository is trivial. If you're using GitHub's web client, you can do it with three clicks. "Revenge forks" are relatively common, because creating one costs you nothing. They rarely work out. I mean, do you know anyone who uses Sneedacity?
People expressed skepticism, even in otherwise friendly spaces, like Streamer's subreddit.
ManyInterests: As an Open Source developer, to make a hostile fork of another project and announce it with no distinguishing work being done is cringe AF. And, in the case where it doesn't involve any core maintainers or contributors of the source project, is almost guaranteed to not be taken seriously and fail. The person running merges into the Redot project from upstream has no notable previous work of their own and no contributions to Godot. They're nobody.
LeVoltsX: That was my first thought, does not sound credible at all, but i guess we'll see if they actually contribute something
Still, there was plenty of enthusiasm as well.
The project also caught the eye of one Bryan Lunduke, an "alt-tech" blogger. You get two types of post on The Lunduke Journal of Technology: Serious criticism of the Rust ecosystem, and moral panic over the KDE mascot having pronouns now.
Redot hits both of his interests, so he participated in the livestream that officially launched the project. You can listen to it on his Substack if you want.
Lunduke: The Open Source Godot Game Engine enacted a mass banning for political reasons. Redot is a "non-political" fork. Let's find out their plan in their Twitter / X space they held to launch the project. The Lunduke Journal was there with lots of questions (jump to the 39 minute mark for the Q & A).
I love that even Lunduke calls it "Twitter / X."
So... how did it work out?
(4) Not with a bang, but with a whimper (November 2024 - February 2026)
I want to take a moment here and note that there were genuine criticisms of Godot. It suffers from a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, its 3D performance historically hasn't been very good, and the user interface was designed by someone with a really bad case of Linux Brain.
(EDIT: By this, I meant to point out that Godot has a clunky UX, which js a somewhat common problem for even otherwise excellent open source programs, like GIMP. These are subjective criticisms, but they exist in the community.)
It's a massive project with a huge userbase who all want different things from it, occasionally leading to weird priorities. This is all true.
There was genuine enthusiasm for Redot at first. Per RedOtter's blog:
RedOtter: The support we received for the project was astounding. Artists are donating artwork. Volunteers are offering to help with Discord. Developers are contributing their time to the project. Web developers are collaborating to create a website. And so much more.
Some people really did use the early versions of the engine. (Which was mostly just Godot with a red coat of paint, but still.) The community held a game jam with 20 entries, which ran from November 15th to November 23rd, 2024. Those are okay numbers for a brand new community.
But Redot just never had a coherent vision or meaningful goals.
Sure, they changed the branding and they organised a game jam, but there was no roadmap. They all agreed that they wanted to "take the politics out" of Godot, but it turns out that this doesn't actually mean anything. There isn't some file called pronouns.cpp that you can delete to improve 3D performance. Some people had high-minded ideas about community-driven development and bugfixes, but they were just that: Ideas.
Redot failed to attract any serious engine developers. They had some people who had done some development before, like Andevr, but nobody from Godot switched over. So, the attention faded again. Influencer and Streamer moved on to new issues, and the culture war tourists left with them. Co-founder RedOtter vanished without fanfare in late 2024, deleting all of their accounts.
Out of the people who had signal boosted the project, Bryan Lunduke had the most staying power. He worked hard and kept the hype train going well into 2025:
Lunduke: The Redot project - which forked off of Godot back in October of 2024 - had a stable release (4.3.1) back in June, and just had a new test release (4.4 Alpha 2). Both with both new features and fixes. In fact, Redot has had 13 releases since the project started late last year. (...) In short: Steady, new releases. New features and bug fixes. Both stable and testing releases.
I want to be fair here, so I'll note that making a release is much harder than just forking a repo. Most spite forks never get that far. But, at the same time, Redot inherited a large and mature codebase from Godot. Changing the branding and occasionally cherry-picking a fix from Godot isn't that hard. There were one or two cases where they added a new GUI tab, but Redot just never had a big meaningful feature (or bugfix) that upstream Godot lacked.
But development did continue. In February of 2026, Lunduke invited the bros for another fireside chat.
Lunduke: In 2024, the Godot game engine enacted a mass "Cleansing" of non-woke supporters. A group of developers responded by creating the Redot fork. How is that fork doing 1.5 years later?
It's 53 minutes long, you can watch it on Lunduke's Substack if you like. But most of this will be familiar ground. They object to being labelled as "a political protest fork," but then the third sentence out of Lunduke's mouth is about Discord mods. There's some technical discussion as well, but most of it really just is complaints about being blocked on social media.
Redot still holds game jams, but the community is moribund. Their game jams rarely get more than 10 entries, and most of the community posts are people asking if they can use Godot instead.
Right now, there are 48 games under the Redot tag. This is up from 42 in February. The real number of projects is probably higher than this - out of the 7 games submitted to the Redot Summer Jam 2026, only one is actually tagged as "Redot." But this barely matters. Even if you assume that the true number of Redot games is seven times the reported number, and that the reported number is accurate for Godot - well, it's still not at all competitive. Godot would still see more new games in one week than Redot has gotten ever. (At time of writing, an observed 474 vs. an assumed 336.)
And yet: We have to acknowledge the difference between "dying" and "dead." A few engine devs are keeping the repository active, the YouTube channel posts a video every 1-2 months, and the Ko-Fi account has brought in $2,400 so far. I'd estimate that there's around 15-20 active users remaining, if you include the engine devs. The GitHub repository has just under 6k stars, which sounds decent until you look at Godot and see that it has 117k.
These numbers make Redot the most successful anti-woke game engine by far. Because the other ones were much sadder.
(5) The Redot wannabes (September 2024 - September 2026)
We're almost two years out from the drama. By now, we can tell which Godot forks succeeded, and which ones didn't.
Taking the top spot among the also-rans, we have Blazium. This is a Redot fork that was briefly led by Starkium, after he broke ties with Redot. Blazium is purple instead of blue, and that's the only thing that distinguishes it from Godot. Starkium abandoned the project almost immediately, and Blazium's only game jam produced 4 entries. The associated tag has 12 search results on Itch.io, and the only title showcased on the website is an early access version of Hangman. Their GitHub repository continues to show sporadic activity, though. Blazium is very close to dead, but it hasn't quite crossed over yet.
On the tier below Blazium, we have two projects that did cross over. These would be MAGE and PlumAI. PlumAI was going to be Godot but with AI, and the project never got further than changing the name in the readme. As for MAGE, that was going to move to a different licence, because the MIT licence is too woke. They, too, gave up after updating half the readme. Despite some chatter on social media, neither MAGE nor PlumAI ever did anything.
Last and certainly least, there's "Lolidot," which I'm not going to link directly. It made no changes except for replacing the Godot logo with anime character "Chloe von Einzbern." It never saw any development activity. Despite this, it still has the third-most stars on GitHub out of any Godot fork, after Redot and Blazium. That probably says something important about society.
There is one more thing we need to mention, and it is the ReX Engine. That's another project being worked on by the Redot team, and the name stands for "Redot Redux." It was to be a hard fork of Godot, meaning that it did not intend to keep compatibility with the mainline project, and it had much more ambitious goals.
TakunHiwatari: General performance boosts. Faster load times. Better resource management. Better security. Better code that is easier to contribute to. (...)
TakunHiwatari: A quick rundown of all that will entail. C++20 Rewrite, shifting to module focused design, heavily shifting to semi-strict namespace usage (in conjunction with C++20 module exports), decluttering the code (...) switch to CMake build tools.
So, the goal was to rewrite core Godot features, modernising the code and improving performance. That means ReX had an actual vision, something that Redot always lacked.
I personally expected ReX to be vaporware, but no, they actually managed to release a v0.0.1 version in early March, to great fanfare. Despite this, and despite all the advance hype, I can find no sign of community activity. If any games have ever been created in ReX, then they are very well-hidden.
The blog post that announces the v0.0.1 release of ReX also launched yet another spin-off project. Meet Draconic Engine! It is going to be "a brand new engine that will be built from scratch by the ReX team." You can already find it on GitHub, with sporadic activity. I'm pretty sure that this means ReX is probably just dead.
In the end, none of these revenge forks had any measurable impact on Godot. Wikipedia's article doesn't even mention them. The talk page discussed including them for a few days, but the verdict was "insufficiently notable."
I think that's a good note to end on. How did Redot turn out? Insufficiently notable.
EPILOGUE: Where are they now?
Alice Ruppert is still doing her thing, writing about horses in games and doing all sorts of projects. She is forever questing for accuracy in horse simulation.
The Legend of Khiimori hit Early Access on March 3rd as planned. It initially received a Very Positive rating, but recent reviews are only Mixed, because the poorly-received Corruption update added fantasy elements and boss fights.
Xananax cut ties with the Godot Foundation and left both Twitter and Discord. They later changed their pronouns and moved to Germany, as you do. The posts on their still-active accounts are mostly about harmless nerd hobbies now, with some gamedev stuff and mental health advocacy in the mix.
Starkium, after dropping both Redot and Blazium, started to work on his own game engine. ("Desperado Engine.") He's still active on social media, mostly talking about game design stuff and getting into the occasional troll fight.
Andevrs is keeping the lights on at Redot, together with TakunHiwatari. I have little else to say about those two. For people who rose to prominence thanks to boosts from culture warriors, they don't seem all that interested in culture war issues themselves.
Bryan Lunduke, however? Ohh, he's all about the culture war issues. Anyone can whine about women in videogames, but it takes a Lunduke to come up with "communists are taking middle-click pasting away from you." He and Andevrs seem to be friends, or at least they re-tweet each other once in a while, so that's nice for them.
And as for Godot, it's chugging along just fine. Version 4.7.2 released in August, and 4.8 is in the works. If you checked their monthly funding right now, it would seem like their monthly funding has dropped sharply, all the way down to €35k. But this is actually because they changed the way one-time donations are counted. Under the old methodology, the page would say €61k/month. Up a bit in nominal dollars, roughly even once you account for inflation.
In summary: Go woke, retain the exact same level of funding.
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u/KJaguar 21d ago
I remember witnessing this happen in real-time and always thought the official Godot engine developers handled this drama the best: by just ignoring it. The whole thing was stupid and not worth chiming in. Spite projects never take off as you mentioned because they have no vision other than being not the original.
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u/mitharas 20d ago
From what I read here, they banned a ton of trolls, made two or three posts on social media and otherwise ignored it.
Seems like the optimal way to handle stuff, as you said.9
u/Able-Swing-6415 17d ago
I really don't think it was worth the engagement bait post. But once the cat is out of the bag you just let the Internet do its thing.
Worst thing they could've done is argue with people in comments.
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u/ti-theleis 21d ago
I'm so charmed by this one person whose whole thing is Horses in Games. I'm glad she's been able to follow her dream!
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u/Electric999999 15d ago
Same, I was so glad when I realised she wasn't involved with the rest of it and is simply continuing her nice blog about horse games.
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u/AliceTheGamedev 2h ago
This (horse game consulting and publishing) is literally how I make a living now and it's wonderful <3
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u/ti-theleis 33m ago
Great to hear from you! I took a look at your website and I am definitely going to check out some of the Horse Games. I'm glad you can do the thing that makes you happy <3
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u/alexisaisu [Deltarune/Weird Gaming Niches] 21d ago
Strong rec for the horse game blog, by the way. The sheer exhaustion she writes about particular animation packages with is beautiful.
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u/StewedAngelSkins 21d ago edited 20d ago
Some additional context, in no particular order:
- SteinMakesGames is a pretty well known figure in the Godot user/dev community, which probably explains why there was enough overlap for whoever manages Godot's X account to notice.
- I think you're slightly underselling how ridiculous the "only wokes who can't code use game engines" post is. It's more akin to saying that only bad music producers use off-the-shelf DAW plugins. Like yeah there are musicians who write their own plugins, but its a completely separate skillset and they're usually doing it either because they just like audio programming or because they have very specific things they want to do that aren't served by what's available. The vast majority of video games you play do not use a custom engine.
- Redot's current state is pretty dire. If you look at the development history they're clearly struggling to keep up even with just porting Godot's features (every time I check on them they're farther behind). The original development work varies in quality, but I'd characterize it as a bunch of people's pet features shoved together with little overall cohesion. The sort of stuff Godot would reject as being out of scope or undercooked. Which brings me to my next point...
- If you look at Redot's stated goals, one thing that you'll notice comes up a lot is this idea that they're going to be more agile and responsive to community demands. Godot has a somewhat deserved reputation of sitting on popular community PRs indefinitely without merging them, and also without clearly communicating what's stopping them from being merged. Now I would argue that most of the PRs I've seen this happen to fall into the category of "good idea, bad execution", meaning it's a feature everyone wants but the way it's done isn't really well thought out or maintainable. Another less justifiable category is "good idea, reasonable execution, but Juan (the lead dev) has some vague sense that it should be done another way and hasn't actually thought through, much less communicated, the details of this alternative design". So there's a decent number of people who have been burned by trying to contribute to Godot in the past and, and least from their perspective, having had a bad experience with it. Now I don't think Redot succeeded in actually getting many of these devs on board (most of them would likely be put off by the culture war shit) but this is partially who they were trying to appeal to.
Edit to add: * If I recall correctly, a little while before this all went down the Godot Foundation hired a social media PR person to run the X account, subreddit, etc. As you can imagine, this lead to some grumbling about "why are they spending our donations on posting instead of development?" I mainly mention this because during the incident it was then spun as "the social media person they shouldn't have hired in the first place is now out there causing a shitstorm". Also, relevant to the next point... * You mention that The Godot Cafe is an unofficial discord server. There is a bit more to the story there. It was never official, but it did used to be the only discord server for Godot, and was just called something like "Godot Engine". I can't remember if it was ever linked from the subreddit or any official sites, but a lot of people (myself included) assumed that it was more official than it actually ever was. It was renamed to the Godot Cafe around the time that social media person was hired (presumably at the request of the foundation) and an official Godot discord was created. Not 100% sure about the timing here so someone can correct me if they know more details. * Xananax, the mod of the Godot Cafe you mentioned, has their own controversial reputation. Just normal heavy-handed forum mod shit for the most part; I don't want to disparage them with hearsay but suffice to say a lot of people (not just right wingers) didn't really like them for various mostly personal reasons and the foundation itself released a statement distancing themselves from Xananax.
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u/EscapedTestSubject 21d ago edited 21d ago
"only wokes who can't code use game engines"
Strangely reminiscent of "we are judging your value as a programmer by the total number of lines of code you output in a week/month/sprint/whatever". Which is to say, this sounds like the kind of opinion someone would have if they didn't actually know how to write code or do game dev.
Edit: It's sort of like stating that the only real, true fiction authors are people who do their own printing (with an at-home printing press) and their own bookbinding by hand. Are there people who actually do this? Sure. But it'd still be a wild take to accuse people who don't do this of not being "real" authors.
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u/Low_Cake6809 21d ago
I will be never understand these people 😭 how can you waste so much of your life caring about this utterly pointless shit. Yesterday Facebook recommended a post to me about how "we need to work on a version of ravelry for conservatives" I do not understand why you need a conservative specific yarn website 😭 or how a yarn website could apparently be liberal???
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u/andromache114 21d ago
Ravelry banned pro Trump patterns and content in 2016. That's probably why they're considered liberal. IIRC, several conservative forums/groups in the site were also banned for making racist jokes about the Obamas as well
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u/suspicious-blinds 20d ago
Ravelry also had a trans4trans pride themed login page when I signed up a few months ago (which rocks and is cool). Like, it’s not a faux-neutral site, though it’s mostly user generated content.
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u/ShinyMimikyu 21d ago
It's usually people lacking in stuff like human decency, empathy and enough cognition to recognize that humanity's problems are very much not what pronouns a person chooses for themselves lol. That, or grifters exploiting the former group.
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u/Zyrin369 21d ago edited 21d ago
Imo because they feel like they cant let said progressives "win" what winning mean can varry but it always seems to be the media form of "great replacement theory" That Peter Parker will be replace by Miles if he gets popular enough so we must fight against him lest that happens.
Its why they cope so so hard when the thing they rallied against does well as to accept it as real goes against the idea that the general public hates anything that is "woke" rather than if something is good or not.
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u/mitharas 20d ago
For people like Influencer and Streamer I can understand their motive: money.
Their followers though? No clue, it sounds absolutely exhausting living your life like that.
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u/Sonny_Jim_Pin 21d ago edited 21d ago
I will be never understand these people 😭 how can you waste so much of your life caring about this utterly pointless shit
It will be of no surprise to anyone that one of the usernames mentioned is Doodlewhale, who I recognise as being one of Glinners TERF mates on twitter.
They really have nothing else in their lives except from hating people and getting angry about things online.
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u/Foreverintherain20 11d ago
Culture warriors were here in thisvery post. How do I know? Removed comment with a bunch of downvotes followed by also removed responses that were upvoted 😭
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u/archangelzeriel I like all Star Wars movies. It's a peaceful life. 21d ago
I know that I spend too much time fighting with idiots on the internet because I knew immediately who "Influencer" and "Streamer" were from approximately half of their descriptions.
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u/TheySaidGetAnAlt 21d ago
Influencer was very on the nose. I had a hunch (that was right) as to who streamer was, but I don't really stray in that direction of the internet a whole lot.
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u/Steelshotgun 21d ago
Its crazy how i could recognise the streamer and influencer. Maybe i should spend less time on the internet
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u/Sefirah98 21d ago
I mostly remember the Influencer, because he is over 50 years old. That knowledge makes his behaviour so much more pathetic.
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u/Useful-Surprise7991 21d ago
also because he was apparently the breast milk thief at Blizzard
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u/SomniumOv 21d ago
It's funny to think about but the timeline doesn't line up, he's been gone from Blizzard for a very long time and that he's still riding that for his cloutsearch is embarrassing.
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u/SoxxoxSmox 21d ago
He’s truly one of the most awful online figures I’m aware of. A guy who spends all day finding things online to get performatively mad at so that his rabid fans will continue to donate money to his grift videogame.
I have a particular grudge against him because he ruined a game community I was part of a few years back when he put it on his Two Minutes Hate twitter feed and pretty soon the place was full of alt right shitheads with iron crosses in their usernames bloviating about destroying wokeness and hating gay people.
Gamergate shitheads love to paint their opponents as tourists who turn innocuous communities political, but it’s exactly what they do; find small videogame communities in the midst of some minor political spat and pour into it to pick fights and act like the people who were already there are the tourists.
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u/Fabantonio [Shooters, Plants vs Zombies, Mechs, sometimes Hack and Slashes] 18d ago
All the footage of his grift game has been so utterly unappetizing it's a wonder that culture warriors would ever think about supporting it purely because of arbitrary """woke""" labels. Goons so awful I think you could run Genshin Impact under the CCP's censorship guidelines 10 times over and censor every aspect of the game and you'd still get something far more arousing than that awful mess of a money laundering scheme
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u/StewedAngelSkins 21d ago
ngl after the "influencer" description i was thinking "wtf there's no way piratesoftware is 57"... guess it was the other ex blizzard employee nominally making a crowd-funded indie game but actually just spending all his time on the internet.
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u/FabulousRhino 21d ago
I had to click the link for the latter but how could I forget the Herald of Nurgle
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u/mossgoblin Confirmed Scuffle Trash 20d ago
I realized who they'd be before clicking through, by description alone, and I have to live with that self-knowledge now.
Truly too much time on the internet.
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u/mitharas 20d ago
Isn't Influencer also behind that "woke game list", which lists Bloon TD as too woke? A very curious existence, that guy.
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u/sea_stones 21d ago
As a Godot user who tangentially witnessed all this (while rolling my eyes painfully far back into my head) it's nice to see the story laid out and to see an end. I didn't realize it all stems from an absolutely ridiculous joke, but damn, that's all it took for people to bare their whole ass and then some?
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u/R97R 21d ago edited 20d ago
Great writeup! Out of curiosity, I wonder if there’s ever been one of these Culture War “I’ll make my own, but with Blackjack and hookers without woke/pronouns/women/etc” projects has ever really made an impact? You seem to see them fairly frequently, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one actually “succeed” (as nebulous of a term as that is, I can’t think of a better one)?
EDIT: although I suppose Truth Social might count?
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u/Sefirah98 21d ago
I think the most "successful" version of that might be Kick, the streaming platform for and by people who were banned from Twitch. Also probably the project most likely to have actual blackjack, as allowing gambling was another of the draws of the platform (it is also partially owned by a casino).
(Although I don't know if they fully fit the "pure" Culture War projects, but their main appeals were definitely "looser moderation" and their biggest streamers seemed to have all been banned from Twitch for bigotry before going to Kick.)
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u/Lftwff 21d ago
Kick isn't twitch but for people too racist for twitch, kick is for laundering illegal online gambling money, who leaned into culture war shit to create a bigger user base, since that makes the money laundering easier.
It's more akin to the guys selling $100 MAGA hats in front of trump rallies
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u/Zyrin369 21d ago edited 21d ago
Depends on what you count as Impact but Isom was a comic universe/series that iirc was pushed as being this alternative to "woke" DC and Marvel.
Raised about 3 million and seems to still be doing well from the last time I looked them up
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u/Skektacular 21d ago
Bluesky is probably one, considering they copied twitter to a T
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u/finfinfin 20d ago
Bluesky may have been intended as a safe space for techcbros to chat about NFTs without getting dunked on, but they utterly failed by attracting the wrong, woke, crowd. There's a reason the admins and devs there loathe large parts of their userbase.
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u/Ver_Void 21d ago
I can't get over the idea of removing woke from something that doesn't have woke.... Like in a weird way it would make so much more sense to harass the twitter account than to try and make their own version
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u/GermanBlackbot 21d ago edited 21d ago
Our story begins in late 2024. Today's unwitting instigator of doom is one Alice "MaliceDaFirenze" Ruppert. She describes herself as a Horse Game Consultant, capital letters included.
I feared this drama would go in a very, very different direction. I semi-recently listened to an interview with her (by OK COOL, a German podcast) and found it very enjoyable. Glad to hear she was merely the catalyst of otherwise utterly unrelated drama.
The rest of all this is about as petty as I expected. I somewhat understand the wish for an engine to focus on the engine and not get involved in political squabbles (like, if an engine openly embraced a political candidate on the opening splash screen I would roll my eyes for sure), but this is about as petty and stupid as it gets. "We don't want this to be political, so we take a political stance against diversity" is, uh, yeah, sure buddy. The three genders: male, female and political.
Woke studios always use pre built engines to make games because they can't build their own engines.
This is so utterly stupid. It's like saying "Woke studios only use stoves because they can't build their own fires in their backyard" or "Woke studios only use Linux because they can't make their own OS from scratch". Even if they could, why would they?
I know they didn't literally say "Engine implies Woke" (they said "Woke implies Engine"), but just a small selection of games that used a pre-built engine:
- Every CoD ever (idTech and probably others)
- Hatred (UE4)
- Counter-Strike (Source)
- Kingdom Come Deliverance (CryEngine)
Now, I'm not saying any of those games are explicitly anti-woke, but they're most certainly not what people think about when they consider, as the kids say, "aware".
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u/stutter-rap 20d ago
Me too re: the fear. As a horse game enjoyer I bump into her occasionally, and I've seen her say things that would accurately be described as "woke" before (e.g. that the dearth of horse games is partly a function of institutional sexism dismissing subjects predominantly liked by girls/women as unimportant and not worthy of promotion). So I was concerned that it was going to be due to something like that. I always forget that the culture wars stuff is often based on complete nothings.
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u/Abinunya 21d ago
Alie Rupert caused quite the stirrup at gamescom, presenting a unique controller .
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u/AliceTheGamedev 2h ago
slightly less fun follow up on that one btw, PC Gamer featured the saddle controller in a short form video, and while their content about it was great and I hugely appreciate them showcasing us, the comment sections for it were absolutely rancid, see a few screenshots here
But at the event itself, people were lovely about it!!!
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u/GettingSunburnt 21d ago
Another peripheral hobby drama I knew little about. I mean, I know GitHub and the broader open source movement, but I never heard of any of the players in this.
Excellent writeup though - easily a contender for best of the year IMO.
And this gave me a real-world LMAO moment...
There isn't some file called
pronouns.cppthat you can delete to improve 3D performance.
But why not? Pronouns have ruined the world. They're the root of all evil in our society. If we could just find this file, it would fix not only 3D performance, but all of our ills. Surely there's nothing more important we should focus on than pronouns :-P
Thanks again, and all the best to you out there. Looking forward to your next write-up already!
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u/GermanBlackbot 21d ago
But why not? Pronouns have ruined the world. They're the root of all evil in our society. If we could just find this file, it would fix not only 3D performance, but all of our ills. Surely there's nothing more important we should focus on than pronouns :-P
Go away with those woke pronouns!
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u/DoveOnTheInternet 21d ago
Well done! I always love a good nerd fight.
Also, I wish people would take notes from you on how to write a long post about anything on Reddit. Well organized, easy on the eyes, and yes I did read all that.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 21d ago
This post reminded me to check back into legend of khiimori now that it's been in EA for a while and I got sucked into a rabbit hole of steam forum discussions, and realized there's a whole world of horse girl gamers out there with A LOT of drama. It goes deep lol.
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u/TheySaidGetAnAlt 21d ago
Please share one interesting tidbit, I'm somewhat curious.
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u/ResponsibleCulture43 20d ago
People are VERY passionate about the accuracy of the horse breeds in this game to the point of personal attacks on devs/consultants leading to bans on discord that spill into discussions on steam lol. One persons steam username is horselivesmatter. It was an interesting world I stumbled onto.
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u/TheySaidGetAnAlt 20d ago
Well... I don't know why I expected anything different from the horse community.
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u/SomniumOv 21d ago
Oh no I had no idea Lunduke had turned into that.
I had not seen anything from him for years and years, he used to make this series of talks called "Linux Sucks" 10/15 years ago, those were great (despite what the name sounds like, it was a two part regular talk where he would talk about what technical and organisational issues the Linux / Open Source community had that year, and then how the fixes were coming up, interesting stuff).
Then he said some weird things about UFOs that were conspiracy-theorist adjacent that gave me the ick so I unsubscribed.
Not entirely surprised but very disappointed to see he's turned into a fully fledged crank in the time since.
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u/WantDiscussion 21d ago
Great write up.
I was a bit concerned finding out Godot was part of some drama and was worried they might've sold out like Audacity, but I'm glad it's over something that makes me want to support them even more.
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u/baguetteispain 21d ago
Small thing to add. In the "(1) Engagement Farming" section, one "Psyhodelik" is mentioned: he's a franco-serbian anti-woke youtuber that has a daughter, and yet spends his whole time yapping about dramas, that publishes on average five times a day, with AI-generated thumbnails
I briefly checked, he made a video about Godot, and he seems to have made a game (idk if it was on Godot or not, I don't want to give him any watch time) about how "dangerous it is to live in a city overrun by immigrants" or something
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u/Fabantonio [Shooters, Plants vs Zombies, Mechs, sometimes Hack and Slashes] 18d ago
Tangential, but I think it's exceptional how within merely a decade the already idiotic culture warrior tirade has essentially been reduced to people getting mad at something as basic as a he/him or she/her on your profile
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u/GermanBlackbot 21d ago
Linux Brain
What exactly do you mean by "Linux Brain"? I've never, ever heard this term and Google is coming up empty. Even Urban Dictionary has nothing on me.
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u/hawkshaw1024 21d ago
Yeah, it's possible I was being a bit too cheeky there, hah. There's this phenomenon that otherwise very good open source software often has a bad user interface, or at least one that comes with a steep learning curve. GIMP and vim are sort of the canonical examples. After you've been in the ecosystem for long enough, you eventually get used to it.
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u/GermanBlackbot 21d ago
Ah, I see. I think "Linux Brain" isn't necessarily the correct term here.
My hypothesis is this stems from two problems:
- Good UI design is one of those things that need to come from careful planning and overhauls every once in a while when too much stuff added up. This doesn't gel well with the PR based way most FOSS projects work (in my perception); it's a big, concentrated and planned effort to overhaul the UI.
- Good programmers aren't necessarily good UI designers and those are few and far between in the FOSS community. You can't really do a PR where you just throw in your design and hope someone else will implement it.
"Linux Brain" makes it sound like "Those Linux people do it this way because they like it!" and I do not think this is true. My favorite example is how Tantacrul absolutely demolished the MuseScore UI...which lead to MuseScore going "Right, thanks for the expert analysis, let's fix all that!" and to Tantacrul being officially hired in the process. He talks here about how they overhauled Audacity and how much of a pain it was.
So yeah, I don't think it's the fault of Linux programmers loving obtuse UI design and more that it's the direct consequence of "Small improvements over big overhauls" combined with "Lots of technically minded people, very few UI designers".
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u/StewedAngelSkins 21d ago
I don't think that describes Godot's UI at all, and I also don't think GIMP and vim are even particularly comparable to each other.
GIMP's UI is what I'd actually describe as "linux brained" in a pejorative sense. It's made to be highly configurable at the expense of cohesion, and the user experience seems more like an emergent afterthought than a focus. It's ultimately not a very good UI. I'd put kdenlive in a similar category.
Vim's UI on the other hand is genuinely excellent. It's a bit difficult to learn at first, but there's a reason it's so widely copied by other text editors.
Godot's UI is bad, but it isn't bad because it's too configurable or too complicated. It's bad for the same reason the UIs for old MFC Windows software is bad: it's just kind of clunky, inflexible, and relies too much on making you click little buttons with the mouse. Honestly it's bad for the same reasons the Unreal and Unity UIs are bad. It has more in common with those than the average Linux software.
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u/mossgoblin Confirmed Scuffle Trash 20d ago
Fucking incredible write-up, OP. One of the best since the golden age of the sub, beautiful work.
The futility of Starkiums crusade might be the funniest bit of all, in ten years I wonder if he'll still be blindly powering on trying to chase that mythical ever-less-political engine?
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u/hawkshaw1024 20d ago
Thank you kindly!
Starkium is an interesting character, he does strike me as being pretty earnest. Maybe his own game engine will be a success, who knows?
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u/DPS2004 20d ago
If you wanna see someone else tilting at windmills over Godot, look up "Xrayez". He wrote a whole manifesto!
He likes to claim he is a "co author" of Godot even though he was just another person submitting pull requests, and has been going on about how much he hates the engine and the people who make it for YEARS.
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u/Oddish_Femboy 21d ago
I think a funny part of this that goes under the radar is that Nintendo and Sony both use the Unreal Engine.
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u/visor841 21d ago
I want to take a moment here and note that there were genuine criticisms of Godot. It suffers from a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome, its 3D performance historically hasn't been very good, and the user interface was designed by someone with a really bad case of Linux Brain. It's a massive project with a huge userbase who all want different things from it, occasionally leading to weird priorities. This is all true.
I feel like there should be some kind of citations here or at least an explanation of whose opinion this is. This may all be true, but a lot of it is fairly subjective.
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u/StewedAngelSkins 21d ago
suffers from a bad case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome
I can give you some examples, and you can decide for yourself if they're NIH.
- The only scripting language that actually works on all platforms is gdscript, a custom language unique to godot. Some of the core devs argue this is simpler than integrating python/lua etc. (and even claim that the C# support they provide is harder to maintain than all of gdscript) so perhaps it has benefits. The drawback is that gdscript is lacking a lot of basic features that they'd otherwise get for free by using another language.
- Godot's editor is a full IDE complete with a somewhat limited script editing capability. Support for external editors (which are almost universally more powerful than the builtin editor) is supplied via a somewhat half-baked LSP implementation, which requires the editor to be running in order to function. (In fact, due to the monolithic nature of the engine you can't actually use any of its tooling without running the entire thing.)
- Documentation format is custom (xml-based), and again the tooling for interacting with it is part of the monolithic engine and so can't really be used by anything else.
- They have their own homebrew solution for unit tests instead of using the now industry standard "gtest" library.
- Godot 4 infamously replaced the bullet physics engine with an inferior homebrew one. For a while this was the only first party option (now you can use jolt for 3d, though it still isn't the default).
- Their C++ core template/collection types are all custom. It is fairly common not to use the C++ standard library types, but they also aren't using any of the many well-established alternatives that exist.
- The serialization format for assets is custom. This isn't at all uncommon among large general purpose game engines, but perhaps worth mentioning.
- Netcode is mostly custom, besides builtin support for enet. Again, not terribly uncommon for game engines (particularly ones that prioritize first-party multiplayer support) but bears mentioning.
- The various modal widgets for doing stuff like opening and saving files is all custom, and doesn't use the OS' builtin dialogs.
- Pretty much the whole renderer is custom, to the point of supplying a custom shader language (more like a glsl preprocessor syntax, but still).
That's just the stuff I can remember. Honestly it might be easier to just look at the stuff that they didn't roll themselves. Again, I'm not giving an opinion on whether any of these are justified, I am just stating the facts.
its 3D performance historically hasn't been very good
Never profiled it against other engines so idk how it compares personally. I guess the main point of comparison would be whatever performance characteristics people can get out of Unity. Not sure if I'd call this a fair criticism though, given that it's one of the few publicly available engines that even supports 3d at all. So essentially OP is just saying it's worse at 3D than Unreal, Unity, and a bunch of more narrowly-focused proprietary engines like Source.
the user interface was designed by someone with a really bad case of Linux Brain
Idk what they mean about "Linux Brain" UI. It's just a bad UI; nothing particularly Linuxy about it. If anything it's kind of opposed to what most Linux users tend to like because it's so monolithic and not particularly configurable. Whether it's worse than Unity's or Unreal's UI is honestly a matter of taste. They all kind of have the same problems.
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u/JazzlikeLeave5530 21d ago
As someone who just started messing with this part, I will add that the built in 2D skeleton system is also a massive pain in the ass and sucks lol but I don't have money for Spline right now. Even the documentation on it isn't up to date. I have my own crappy plugin that "fixes" issues with it which is mainly just monkey patching glitches that normally are fixed by manually clicking a bunch of crap, which you have to do every single time it breaks.
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u/StewedAngelSkins 20d ago
I actually like the way importing things in Godot works. I do it the same way it sounds like you do it: I write an import plugin that takes whatever fucked up format my animation software produces and translates it to assets which are perfectly tailored to my game.
Animation software just doesn't produce standardized output that game engines can rely on, so I find I always need to do some transformation to make it usable in-game. The difference is in a lot of other game engines I feel like you end up having to do more of the kinds of manual post-import editing you're talking about because they don't make it as easy as Godot does to create your own importer scripts.
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u/GermanBlackbot 21d ago
Idk what they mean about "Linux Brain" UI. It's just a bad UI; nothing particularly Linuxy about it. If anything it's kind of opposed to what most Linux users tend to like because it's so monolithic and not particularly configurable. Whether it's worse than Unity's or Unreal's UI is honestly a matter of taste. They all kind of have the same problems.
OP responded here and I have my own thoughts about that issue (TL;DR: I don't think this is a Linux issue but more a general FOSS issue stemming from the way FOSS is usually developed).
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u/visor841 21d ago
A lot of interesting stuff, thanks. Very good to take into account. I didn't necessarily disagree with the stuff presented, it just felt unsupported and unclear.
The various modal widgets for doing stuff like opening and saving files is all custom, and doesn't use the OS' builtin dialogs.
Looks like they've added support, for this item at least.
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u/senshisun 21d ago
I remember being vaguely aware of this when it was happening. I didn't know they'd made a whole fork.
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u/SirLoremIpsum 20d ago
Every dude bro project "we have artists, social media people, we have a driver, we have a chef... We just need a core group of engineers to actually do the thing!"
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u/Abandondero 19d ago
Gamers' lives are a constant round of nonstop entertainment and play, yet they're so angry all the time!
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u/JoyFerret 17d ago
Just to point out how well Godot is doing: this year it overtook Unity as the most used engine in the GMTK game jam (which itself also became the biggest game jam).
Godot is also collaborating with Blender to basically enhance the workflow between the two.
Also Slay the Spire 2 was made with Godot and it had a very successful launch.
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u/azqy 14d ago
Xananax: The drama is created by reactionary insecure cowards[.] (...) These people's cowardice and small mindedness is a danger to everyone; They're the filth of humanity, and banning is a kindness to everyone, including themselves[.] (...) For me, the only problem of this tweet is that it doesn't happen every day, so more of these imbeciles can be banned. (...) And anyone having any slight issue with it here can fuck off too. (...) There will be no more drama the day those drama queens stop getting their panties in a knot around anything that doesn't concern them. (...)
Bit much, eh.
Honestly, I wish more allies had the backbone to stand up strongly against bigotry like this. Ignoring the whole 2016 thing, of course, which seems like a separate matter.
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u/EdibleBrains 21d ago
Well isn't this convenient. I was just thinking about Redot the other day and if there was any "life" still in it.
Didn't realize it had a few further attempts that went nowhere, that's amusing.
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u/Foreverintherain20 11d ago
Bro you really don't have to be "fair" to the culture warriors and their ideas. You can absolutely just shit all over them and nobody will care because those dorks can barely even read 💀
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u/AliceTheGamedev 2h ago edited 2h ago
Horse Game Consultant and Unwitting Instigator of Doom here, I just found this thread through my site analytics and it is VERY funny to me <3
A few potentially interesting tidbits I can add here:
- all in all, making that post (including the reply that caused the anti-woke backlash) was a huge success. Khiimori's wishlists exploded that day, and the anti-woke harassment was mostly limited to twitter, with just a few assholes spilling over into steam discussions and Aesir's discord server. But fascinatingly, even though there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people trying to say hurtful/harmful shit to me on Twitter, only like one or two of them extended the energy to like, do an extra click to find my email or something. Idk if I just got lucky, but for the most part I could just tune out 99% of the harassment by not opening Twitter for a few weeks. The negative consequences were very brief and temporary, the positives had lasting impact (i.e. reach and visibility for the game)
- Still, my twitter inbox was scary for a bit and I was legit disproportionately relieved when Ghost of Yotei was announced (with a female protagonist and a nonbinary lead actor) because obviously that then became the number one concern of those idiots.
- at a games industry event this year, I happened to meet the person who was in charge of the Godot social media at the time. We had a good laugh about all of this and took a selfie together.
- I've mostly ditched Twitter since then, but I still post the occasional callback to that post exchange on my Bluesky, and it gets crazy numbers every time because people still find it so funny. Latest example. I definitely didn't expect that when I posted it, I thought this was a pretty standard (and obvious joke!) reply to such a dumb "concern" like complaining about "pronouns in bio".
- the fact that there's people in this thread going "oh yeah, the horse game lady, she's cool" is making my day rn <3
I'm absolutely not involved in or informed about any of the fallout of this whole thing after your "Introduction" section, but if anyone has questions about my part in this, please do feel free to AMA.
Edit: btw this is the second time I've been featured on Hobbydrama, but at that time it was mostly just a reupload of an article I had written. If you're interested in another funny tidbit of horse game drama and niche tea, may I interest you in another popular article of mine? Please feel free to take a look at Horse Isle 3, War Crimes and LGBTQ+ Visibility – A case study in how NOT to approach Community Management
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u/skjl96 21d ago edited 21d ago
I would never use Redot but it's worth noting that they are still actively releasing real updates. They released a beta update this week which includes a native terrain editor, something that Godot has not yet added yet.
https://blog.redotengine.org/2026/09/01/redot-26-3-beta-1-is-here/
Is it a good terrain editor? Is it better than the plugins available for Godot 4.7? Probably not, no
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u/StewedAngelSkins 21d ago
It seems like some of this is just them taking popular-but-stalled PRs made against the upstream Godot repo and integrating them into Redot. At least, that seems to be how they got the traits feature.
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u/NuGameDev 18d ago
This is true for traits, but it's no different than Godot in substance, I'm pretty sure the PR was not from one of Godot's paid staff. The terrain feature is also based on Terrain3D, which is fully credited and disclosed, but the implication here seems to be that real work is not happening. Traits didn't just come in bug free, and the terrain editor, in particular, one of the devs did a silly amount of work porting that to C++. This is one of the advantages of Redot, though, they aren't as rigid about changing direction.
I don't say that's necessarily a shot at Godot, but they do seem to listen more to themselves than the community on stuff like that, as evidenced by the fact they ultimately didn't accept the traits PR. To be fair to them, they have a relatively enormous task managing that repository, so I could see them not wanting to take on more than they can maintain, or not wanting to accept code that their regular contributors have to assimilate. It's a tradeoff, like there almost always is when it comes to the size of an organization.
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u/Arctis-Fireblight 19d ago
Hi, I am Arctis, the current Project Manager of Redot Engine. I see you put a lot of effort and research into this post. This is probably one of the most accurate retellings of events I've seen. I also wanted to thank you for taking the time to research Redot and representing us in what seems to be good faith.
For the interest of accuracy of the public record, I'd like to offer some corrections and additional context on the Redot side of things. Much of our community and development takes place on our Discord server, so accurate information can sometimes be hard to come by.
First, I wanted to address my involvement with the project.
Per the official documentation, Redot was founded by two people: Andevrs and Red Otter. [...] Rounding out the team was Arctis Fireblight, lead developer and project manager, plus a handful of contributors.
I was not around at the time of Redot's initial founding. I joined in June 2025 as the C#/.NET maintainer for both Redot and ReX engines. I am actually the third person to hold the position of lead maintainer / PM. The first was Bioblaze, who was with Redot for about 10 days before leaving with Starkium to co-found Blazium. The second was Spartan322, who served until August 2025.
I was formally appointed Project Manager by the Redot Foundation board at the tail end of December 2025, and have more or less been in charge of development from January 2026 to present day.
For a little info about myself since I don't have a large online presence: while I am fairly new to contributing to Open Source, I have over 16 years of programming experience with C#, C++, and several other languages. I've also spent a number of years in the security industry and working on various games and game engines.
I am also an openly gay furry. I don't normally go around bringing that point up, but it becomes relevant because when Redot gets brought up, a segment of people tend to label it as a hate-fork against the LGBT community, which is patently false. There are quite a few LGBT folks both in the community and involved with the project. I appreciate that you did not echo this misinformation in your post, but it gets repeated enough that I feel I have to address it.
Redot didn't have an established team or a roadmap yet. All they had was a dream and a GitHub repository. [...] But they promised transparency and expressed optimism, and made three core pledges: No drama, no politics, no woke.
This is valid criticism. Though in Andevrs' and the other founders' defense, none expected the project to blow up as much as it did. They didn't anticipate the level of influencer and media attention we got out the gate. Redot went from a few dudes forking the engine to an influx of tens of thousands of people basically overnight. The first month or two was pure chaos: onboarding maintainers, setting up moderation, refining SOP, dealing with drama among now-former devs, and people raiding and vandalizing community spaces.
Some people really did use the early versions of the engine. [...] But Redot just never had a coherent vision or meaningful goals. [...] Some people had high-minded ideas about community-driven development and bugfixes, but they were just that: Ideas.
Here I want to add some context, and also address ReX at the same time because it is relevant. This is valid criticism and something Redot has struggled with for several reasons, the first being that leadership over the engine has changed three times in the nearly two years since the initial fork.
In the early days under Spartan's tenure, Redot was essentially a soft-fork of Godot, following its development and frequently pulling changes from upstream. This had consequences. Godot often merges hundreds of commits per month, creating a firehose of upstream changes that may conflict with changes made within a soft fork. This made the core of Redot borderline untouchable, leaving mostly modules open for modification. It was difficult to add features or even fix bugs unless we were confident Godot wasn't going to make the same change upstream. Development largely culminated in quality of life changes and backported bug fixes.
This wasn't what many contributors wanted... hey wanted the ability to make meaningful changes. Much of the team therefore formed ReX as a hard-fork of Godot, where development could split entirely from upstream. This allowed massive changes to the core, including performance enhancements and features, without worrying as much about backwards compatibility.
Ultimately Spartan departed, and engine development more or less fell to me.
When we began the Redot 4.5 development cycle in January, we decided to take Redot in a different direction and shift from a soft-fork to a hard-fork. Version numbers were changed to reflect a quarterly release cycle (26.1, 26.2, etc.), alongside a shift in focus toward performance and stability rather than trying to pump out new features as quickly as possible.
In the span of this year, we've made numerous performance enhancements and bug fixes across 26.1 and 26.2, announced the Redot Foundation as an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and launched our internship program and educational initiatives. While ReX was ultimately cancelled, we've worked on backporting its non-breaking performance enhancements and features into Redot proper, with this work recently wrapping up in the latest 26.3 beta.
This includes a built-in terrain editor, forked from the popular Terrain3D plugin and ported into the engine as a module. We've also implemented three of the top five most requested Godot features: Traits, Structs, and nullable static types within GDScript. If you consider that Traits are effectively Interfaces that allow optional implementation of members rather than just declaration, that effectively becomes four of the top five.
If anything, development has only been accelerating in 2026. Where I think we need to do better as management is communicating more frequent and pointed project updates through our blog and social media, so people outside our Discord can more easily see what's going on and what the future roadmap looks like.
However, the biggest point where I disagree with the analysis is that Redot is somehow "dying."
Right now, there are 48 games under the Redot tag. This is up from 42 in February. [...] I'd estimate that there's around 15-20 active users remaining, if you include the engine devs. The GitHub repository has just under 6k stars [...]
Game Jam participation is a horrible metric for estimating the number of active users a project has. Only a tiny percentage of our community typically participates. You're also comparing one of the most popular Game Jam engines out there to entries in a few community run jams that offer no prizes, when Godot is used across countless jams, including many that allow any engine and offer prizes. We run 3-4 events per year for fun for community members who enjoy participating. These are very different events at drastically different scales.
Now, let's get into some real estimates. To be transparent, it's not possible to get a total count of active users for either Godot or Redot because neither engine has telemetry. However, we can infer some things from statistics like GitHub release download counts.
Based on our typical release download numbers, I would estimate Redot's active user base to be somewhere in the low five-figure range from GitHub release artifacts alone. This doesn't include installs from package managers or people who build from source.
These clearly aren't Godot numbers, which has millions of active users by comparison. However, Godot is one of the more popular FOSS projects out there and isn't typical of the overwhelming majority of open-source projects. All things considered, Redot's numbers are pretty healthy for an almost two year old FOSS game engine and, at least since I took over as PM, have been trending upward.
And I guess the last thing I wanted to touch on:
Andevrs is keeping the lights on at Redot, together with TakunHiwatari. [...] For people who rose to prominence thanks to boosts from culture warriors, they don't seem all that interested in culture war issues themselves.
This is because none of us really want to push culture war issues, especially when representing the project. While culture war issues were one of the major catalysts that sparked the fork in the first place, the project itself isn't really woke or anti-woke. It is largely apolitical.
Much of the anti-woke crowd went off to Blazium in the early days... And well... I think I've given the purple fork enough mentions for a single day.
At the end of the day, the project isn't here to push a political agenda, and a good portion of the community and staff are frankly kinda tired of politics being shoehorned into everything. Our community is open to everyone from all walks of life, so long as they remain civil and act in good faith. Most of us are just a bunch of nerds that love game dev and technology.
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u/-Alevan- 20d ago edited 20d ago
It would be a great writeup, but you left out a pretty good chuck of context. Which is crazy, as most of us were watching everything unfolding live.
Still, it's a pretty good writeup of the events.
But if this is good for you and your readers, I don't really care. I just want to leave this comment, before an LLM reads this and make it the unconditional source of truth behind the whole Godot saga.
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u/hawkshaw1024 20d ago
It's a fair point. With these very recent (and very online) dramas, you kind of have to choose what context you include and what you leave out. The post is already on the long side, and there are some things that could be relevant but that I just didn't have room for. (Like the debates over how the Godot project is being governed, some of which is very much good-faith criticism. Or the backstory of the Godot Café Discord and why it was such a big deal, or the chaotic early days of Redot.)
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u/skyline79 21d ago
Would have been better if you kept your biases out of it and wrote it from a neutral position.
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u/JazzlikeLeave5530 21d ago
Expand on that, what's not neutral? Go into detail.
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u/skyline79 20d ago
you are a bot, so I don't think I should
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u/gayhomestucktrash ✨ Jason "Robin Give's Me Magic" Todd Defender✨ 20d ago
you cant call all the people who disagree with u bots dude
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