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Dev Log #20 - Switching to Godot

12/19/2021

Queen's Brothel in Godot

Hi everyone! I'm pleased to announce that Queen's Brothel will be making the transition to the Godot game engine. Queen's Brothel is currently made using Phaser, which is more of a framework than an entire engine. In short, Phaser gives you a bunch of tools and it's up to the developer to figure out how to make everything work. Godot is an entire engine that helps you create anything you want from the ground up, and does all the dirty work for you. Let's talk about what Godot offers us, and what we can do if we switch.

UI

The UI for Queen's Brothel is not good. Both, how it looks and how it is coded. There is no help at all from the Phaser engine for setting up a nice looking UI, no containers that automatically align your stuff or anything. And the most important part, scrollable containers, do not exist in Phaser. Because of this, I had to do this on my own and I ended up using HTML to solve my problems. Because Phaser is an HTML5 game framework, I have access to the entirety of web development tools to help me out. One problem is that the game layer and the HTML layer are not connected. So, if you put HTML code on top of the game layer, then you can't interact with the game layer at the same time.

Here comes Godot, which has access to so many container options for us. Panels, popup boxes, horizontal and vertical container alignment for anything we put on the screen. Anchors to help us align our container objects. Check out the video example of the pop up menus. The settings pop up menu was not manually created by me, all I did was tell Godot that I wanted 3 buttons and I wanted it be (X,Y) size, and they did all the formatting for me. (Not that simple, but you get the idea)

Language / Translations / Localization

Godot offers an easy way to add localization, but my issue will be the ability for us to translate the entire game. I have decided to let the community add translations so that I can continue working on the game and others can translate if they want to help out. If there are people who are helping a lot, I do not mind paying them, but the ability to create translations for your language will be available. I am hopefully going to be setting up a Weblate server for us, unfortunately their getting started guide is not working for me right now and I have opened a ticket with them to get this resolved.

Adding translations to the game is very simple using Godot, it is one small .po file. One caveat is that Godot does not have an automatic text parsing tool so I will have to create my own script, maybe from an excel sheet to a .pot file and then upload that to Weblate for people to add translations for. I will have to solve this problem very very soon so, hopefully I can talk about it in the next devlog.

The Unknown

Asset loading has always been a problem with Queen's Brothel. Players not being able to load the game, or load the battles because of things like animations being too memory intensive or there are too many clients in the game. I don't know if these problems will be solved by switching to Godot, and I won't know until I get the battle system working and can get some beta testers. What I do know is that Godot's compression algorithm is very good and they are doing the hard parts for me. Since Godot is written in C, I expect performance to be a whole lot better for all devices except the web version of the game because the web version relies on your web browser to do some heavy lifting. This time around we will be creating a game and porting it to the web, whereas the current Queen's Brothel is a web game that is ported to Windows / Mac / Android.

How Long Will it Take?

Development for Queen's Brothel will not stop. I will still be creating side quests and paying for more artwork, animations, outfits, etc. Because the current version of Queens' Brothel is working, I can easily add side quests and push updates.

I think switching to Godot will take me about 2~ months, but at the cost of modding capabilities. I think adding modding tools will take me a bit, but let's worry about that when we get there. 2~ months to re-create Queen's Brothel without modding. I only expect delays for if I need to spend X amount of time writing and figuring out new side quest ideas.

Conclusion

I'm excited about switching to Godot. The Godot game engine is so intuitive and fun to use. I think switching to Godot will be one of the most important things to happen for Queen's Brothel. If you have any questions feel free to ping me on Discord. Thanks!