GodotCon is a convention organized by the Godot Foundation for the Godot community to meet in person and exchange knowledge. GodotCon Boston took place took place about 1-2 weeks ago on 2025-05-05 to 2025-05-07.
It was quite the expensive convention for me to attend, since GodotCon's timing of being right before PAX meant hotel prices were higher. But, I felt that I could particularly benefit from this convention as a person who has been streaming Godot development on Twitch for the better part of two years now. It was also the first GodotCon taking place in North America. Since it was taking place right before PAX, there were also a lot of other game development events happening at the same time such as the Boston Indies "Pre-PAX demo night", at the nearby MIT Open Space. However, I wasn't quite able to take advantage of every single event while I was there, since I didn't have enough energy after showcasing on the floor all day.
The event had workshops on the first day and the showcase and talks on the last two days. It was a difficult affair for me to showcase this time. This is because I've taken a hiatus from no signal development due to my move to the California Bay Area and I've since been quite busy and stressed. It was odd to showcase my game when I'm not actively working on the game and my mental health has been significantly harder to manage lately. As I'm in a temporary housing situation, I don't have any of my stuff either. In fact, my setup was very stripped down:
Leading up to the event I had to take some time to prepare the game since I made some refactors since the last showing at the ATX Game Makers Showcase (which, unfortunately, I forgot to write about in my blog) before going on haitus. So, I spent about a week fixing bugs introduced by those refactors as well as improving controller support based on feedback from ATX Game Makers.
The showcase was in a part of the space at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (NERD) known as The Garage. There were about a dozen or so developers showcasing, including me. So, how did the game do?
plays
During the event, I logged 27 plays on the first day and 16 on the second, for a total of 43 plays. Only one person finished the demo. This more or less met my expectations and there isn't much to note here, though it's notable that the number of plays on the first day is the second-most number of plays I've had in a single day -- more than 2D Con's 25 but less than Fantastic Arcade's 33.
| event | plays |
|---|---|
| STAPLE! Austin | 19 |
| Delta H Con | 3 |
| 2D Con | 39 |
| San Japan | 44 |
| Steam Next Fest | 434 |
| Fantastic Arcade | 33 |
| Toronto Game | 17 |
| ATX Game Makers | 26 |
| GodotCon Boston | 43 |
Although the event was mostly attended by game developers, the feedback I got back from attendees as well as which parts of the game people had trouble with were surprisingly similar to other conventions I went to. What was different, however, was that more people on average seemed to understand more easily how the game worked and were also more likely to compliment me on various design aspects of the game, like how well the new player experience was designed.
other notes
Near the close of the event, one of the organizers came around to all of the showcases to ask if there's anything we wanted to suggest could be done better. I mentioned that the layout of the space wasn't very conducive, as it was hard for attendees to go from booth to booth, especially when it got really crowded:
Unfortunately, it sounds like the host of the space didn't want anything to be moved around, so they were stuck with the layout as-is. And I certainly got a lot of people checking out my game anyhow, so maybe it wasn't all that bad.
I was also unable to attend the event as a normal attendee for the majority of the event, since I needed to look after my table and my stuff for the entire event. While I did manage to get other devs doing the showcase to look after my stuff from time to time, I found that the talks were too basic for my taste.
Overall, I had a good time anyway. The showcase was good and I was able to make a lot of connections with other people in the community. Right now, I'm considering taking a break from job hunting to finish the game, even if just to put a newly completed project on my resume so I can at least point to what I've been doing all this time since my last employment. I'm not 100% sure how quickly I can get the game done though, so I'm not sure if I'll be committing all my time to that or not.