We are happy to announce that we will be organizing a Game Development devroom at FOSDEM 2020! The event will take place on 1st and 2nd of February at the usual venue in Brussels, Belgium. The devroom will last for a full day (most likely Saturday, but not set in stone yet).

Note: While this CFP is published on Godot’s blog, we want to outline that this FOSDEM devroom will be about Free and Open Source Game Development at large, and not focused on Godot Engine. We will assess all proposals independently of the engine or framework used, as long as it is free and open source.

About the Game Development devroom

Open source is often neglected in the game industry—and the reverse is also true: game development is often neglected in open source. We want to present that it is possible to combine the two. In particular, Godot being an open source game engine is a proof of that.

We want to present open source tools to make games. That not only include engines but also asset-making tools. There are many industry-grade open source tools which are growing in use in the gamedev world. Software as Blender, Krita, GIMP, Ardour, LMMS, etc. can be applied to any kind of game.

More importantly, we want to present games made with those tools. We want to hear the benefits, the insights, the hurdles, the challenges, the sleepless nights and everything. Real examples are always a great inspiration for other game developers, even (or maybe especially) when things don’t go perfectly. Talking about changing tools is welcome too (either from proprietary to open source, or between FOSS solutions), as we can hear a perspective about the differences between them.

Also, we want to hear about open source games. What are the issues with those and the benefits, and whether it can be a viable business model.

Call for participation

This is the point where we ask you to participate. Even though we from Godot are organizing the room, we want to hear from people using other engines and tools as well. There’s no discrimination, we want to hear experiences from everybody (even if are you moving out of Godot for some reason).

We ask you to submit the proposals through FOSDEM’s pentabarf system at https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM20. If you already have an account, please use the same as they show speakers’ participation across the editions. We’ll be using that system to organize the schedule. Please take your time to fill up the fields, especially the descriptions, as that will be shown on FOSDEM website and booklets.

The topic can be anything related to open source together with game development, be it tools or games.

The time slot for presentations is 25 min including questions (if you think your topic would fit better in a longer time slot, feel free to contact us to discuss it – see email below). We also plan a 1-hour session in the middle of the day to have several lightning talks of 10 min each, so you can apply for this too if you prefer this format.

Please submit the proposal at the latest on December 1st. FOSDEM has a hard limit on December 14th, but we want some leeway to properly arrange the schedule. We can’t guarantee participation after our deadline.

If you have any doubts or want to volunteer to help us organizing (manning the camera, helping speaker transitions, moderating audience questions, etc.) you can let us know by sending a message to contact at godotengine dot org.

Audience

We naturally want people to watch the presentations. Entrance to FOSDEM is free and doesn’t require registration. If you want to meet fellow game developers in the open source world, this is the opportunity.

Note that barring any technical difficulties, the talks should be recorded and made available under a Creative Commons license on the FOSDEM website shortly after the event.

See you all in Brussels!