Helge Maus 2024
9. January 2024

Let’s talk about 2024

9. January 2024 By admin

Dear Followers,

Today is officially my second day at work and I would therefore like to wish you all a healthy, successful and happy year 2024. I wish you many creative thoughts and projects.

I would also like to thank my dear Patreons, for their support and loyalty. Their constant support means a lot to me and it motivates me to stay on track with my vision:

I want to give indies an opportunity to learn and develop creatively.
I want artists to be able to make a living from their creativity, no matter where they live and without having to sell themselves, their lives and their families into the big machine of the 3D, VFX and games industry.

I would therefore like to present to you a plan for the first half of 2024.

In addition to further publications about Blender, free tutorials and technical articles, I would also like to spend more time with you as a community. I hope that the pixeltrain Discord Server can become a platform for this, but I’m also looking for other ideas.

The pixeltrain Academy is developing, but I would like to find other platforms for mutual exchange.

For example, live events like the View Conference in Turin, which kindly gives me the opportunity every year to talk about open-source tools like Blender and Godot and to offer training sessions for indies. If you have any further ideas on this, I would be happy to talk about them.

Here are the two big topic areas I want to focus on this year:

Blender for Production

Blender is now widespread in the 3D, animation, VFX and games industries and is already widely accepted. Therefore, having in-depth Blender production knowledge can now be a ticket to a professional career entry.

But Blender is also the all-round solution for artists who work on indie projects, set up indie studios or simply work on their private projects.

I would like to help here and provide suitable training material.

Godot Game Development for Indies

The second big area I want to focus on is game design and development with Godot. Again, it is FOSS – Free Open Source software. For the same reasons I chose Blender.

Godot is available to everyone free of charge, but is also open source. Therefore, there are no license changes, restrictions or anything similar to worry about. And we saw a lot of this in the games sector last year. It has been shown that only „free of charge“ can be very dangerous, Unity, Unreal and others have shown this clearly this year and have threatened the existence of many projects in development and the artists behind them.

Godot is already a capable 2D and 3D (more and more) game engine with a constant and community-driven development cycle.

Godot has its own, highly effective scripting language with GD Script, which is also easy to learn for beginners. Anyone who comes from professional game development, for example from Unity, can also work in C#. Many free add-ons (plugins) extend Godot, similar to what we know from Blender.

The created games or applications can be exported for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and, with the help of third-party providers, also on consoles such as XBOX, Playstation and Nintendo Switch.

Game design and development is the consistent development of telling stories and building new user experiences. In addition to the 2D and 3D environment, audio and interactivity give artists further opportunities for expression.

I am currently in the process of transferring, adapting and expanding my long-standing Unity training concepts to Godot. Therefore, I hope that I will soon be able to present you new tutorials, publications and training courses on Godot.

In addition to these projects, I continue to train Blender in company training, one-to-ones and for some training providers in order to be able to pay my bills.

I look forward to your feedback and am excited to see what this new year brings us.

Thank you and best regards

Helge

P.S. If you want to support me and get ad-free tutorials, discount vouchers and more, please consider to become a Patreon. Thanks 🙂

Godot Game Engine - Cooperation with Google and The Forge
15. December 2023

Godot Game Engine – Cooperation with Google and The Forge

15. December 2023 By admin

Yesterday a new partnership between Google, The Forge and the Godot Foundation was announced on the Godot Blog. The goal is to optimize and expand Godot’s mobile engine for Vulkan-enabled devices, i.e. Android devices. However, changes and enhancements in this area will also be useful for other mobile devices as the Godot code will be optimized.

From the announcement and the social media posts from Godot Foundation Members you can read that Goole Engineering and the developers at The Forge are optimizing the code base in cooperation with Godot contributors.

I’m very happy about that, because this principle has also worked very well at the development of Blender, for example when you see the collaboration with Apple (Metal Backend), AMD, Intel or NVIDEA.

This commitment makes the open-source product better and more valuable for all users.

So, great news in my opinion 🙂

Helge

More information here:
https://godotengine.org/article/collaboration-with-google-forge-2023/

Link to my (free) Patron article:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/godot-game-with-94709607?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

1. December 2023

Godot 4.2 released!

1. December 2023 By admin

Godot is an open-source general purpose game engine aiming at helping you develop both 2D and 3D games. It’s powerful, fast, light and easy to learn.

The new version Godot 4.2 has been available since yesterday after an active beta phase.

This update is important because the Godot 4.x branch was a very big step towards modernization, performance and feature expansion. Many workflows between Godot 3.x and Godot 4.x were deliberately broken in order to prepare Godot for the future and to further advance it as an alternative to commercial game engines.

With this very large shift, there were of course some problems/bugs to be fixed, but also features to be completed. This path is not yet complete with this update, but game engines never are. That’s why the quick and regular updates of the version 4 branch are so important. The team now has a constant update cycle and quick response to critical bugs.

But be careful, this time too there were some critical and breaking changes between 4.1 and 4.2! Therefore, test existing projects intensively before upgrading them!

I have already done small test projects with Godot 4.2 in the beta phase and I am becoming more and more enthusiastic about Godot.

For me, Godot is now the complete Unity replacement for the things that I like to implement:
Be it 2D micro games, interactive 3D scenes from Blender and perhaps in the future a complete 3D experience of a stylized level. Let’s see.

Here is the official announcement:
https://godotengine.org/article/godot-4-2-arrives-in-style/

Download:
https://godotengine.org/download

If you have any questions or experiences to share, please let me know.

Helge

P.S. If you want to can also follow these articles me on my (free) Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/godot-4-2-93878014?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

4. October 2023

Godot 4.1.2 – New Maintenance update

4. October 2023 By admin

Due to the new status that Godot has now acquired as a free open source 2D & 3D game engine for many newcomers, I would like to give you more news and information about this great project on my Patreon and blog.

As some of you have read here in the past, I discovered Godot some time ago and have spent a lot of time there since then. The Godot project reminds me a lot of Blender a few years ago, so I’m happy that it’s getting so much more attention now.

After starting with it, I found myself opening Unity no more …

Here is the link to the article with an initial overview:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/84258291

I hope that I will have time in the future to make a short introduction for you.

But now the current news,

Helge

Godot 4.1 is celebrating its 3 month anniversary this week, and that means Godot 4.2 is entering the beta testing phase shortly after. This development cycle has been packed with bugfixes and other improvements. As always, we take the safest of these contributions and we compile them into a patch release for the current stable version of the engine.

Such is the case of Godot 4.1.2, which is officially available starting today! Engine contributors provided fixes for almost every area of the engine.

More information:

https://godotengine.org/article/maintenance-release-godot-4-1-2/

27. June 2023

Godot Game Engine – Let’s support FOSS

27. June 2023 By admin

One thing I really love about working with FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) is that there are so many different ways to help and collaborate with each other. Anyone can use the software immediately, no matter what their budget or where they are in their creative career.

However, I am just as happy to give something back to the projects so that others can benefit as well and not just a small number of investors or senior management.

This “giving back” can have many different faces: 
Actively developing, writing documentation, teaching :-), doing PR and also giving something financially (in the personal possibilities). Even small amounts give the projects more planning security.

Godot as a free game engine is one of those projects that I’ve grown fond of. Glad to be here on this list now too.

👉 https://godotengine.org

Perhaps you will also find such a project that inspires you?

Helge

#3d #godot #gamedev #gamedevelopment #games #godotengine #gamedesigner #indiedev #gamedevelopers #pixeltrain#helgemaus