Thread by @LillyByteGames

1/ You know what.. people want to know why I resigned as a Godot mod and why I've "seemingly" turned on Godot after years of loving the engine? There are few things I am passionate about, but this is one of them... and I'm gonna flame it the fuck up here. #godotengine

2/ I am tired of getting shit on by "Godot bros" whose only experience with Godot is what they see/hear in their limited experience of being fresh and new to the Godot train, and not yet had the curtain pulled away from their eyes to Godot's reality.

3/ Let me tell you the story of how I found Godot, and the journey of how I went from a bright eyed and bushy tailed Godot lover to the person who both loves and hates Godot with a seething passion...
... and let this story be a herald and warning before you invest your life.

4/ It started with me back in 2016/2017, when I was developing games on Twitch; I was using a framework that wasn't quite cutting the muster. I found Godot, and it seemed like a good fit for my project. So, I switched and started tinkering away... so far, so good.

5/ I was streaming regularly on Twitch then, about 6+ hours/day building my game. I hadn't yet joined the Godot community, and Godot's 3D was seemingy fine for the initial stages of my project. Everything was going grand...

6/ Then one day, as I was streaming on Twitch. The original admin of the Godot discord found my Godot stream... and they did an at-everyone on the Godot server and my Twitch channel was flooded with hundreds of Godot users pouring in...

7/ This was my first interaction with the Godot community, or anyone else in the Godot community. Everyone seemed friendly enough, so I joined the Godot discord server. I found a happy place, and a place that I could call home.

8/ I started streaming less on Twitch, and spending much more time in the Godot discord voice chat... where I spent much of my time streaming my own game dev there and helping other users find their way with Godot. In this era, I was in the honey moon phase with Godot.

9/ In this time period, I spent just as much time helping other people with their Godot projects as I did with mine. I was on the Godot discord 8-12 hours/day, consistently... I pretty much stopped streaming to Twitch because of the time I was spending on Discord.

10/ In the Godot discord community, I found a very good circle of friends... who are still my closest dev circle of friends to this day. Then one day, the voice mod needed to be replaced, and well, they were looking for a diversity mod and I was there half a day anyway...

11/ So, I joined the Godot discord mod team... and not to toot my own horn, but I was a goddamn good mod. I never abused my power, I was especially careful with personalities I disliked, and usually let other mods handle those.

12/ At this point, I was spending more time helping other people with Godot than I was working on my own projects... but, I was still working on small games for fun, taking commission work here and there for 3D models, and occasionally working on my bigger projects.

13/ As time went on, I started seeing cracks in Godot... while the fundamentals were broken, the more advanced tools that barely existed in Godot were really broken. This was not only a problem for me, but a problem for a lot of users I was trying to help.

14/ Myself, Duroxxigar, and others in voice chat would help people the best we could... but, in a lot of cases there were no work arounds in Godot except for "build it yourself". So, I started being more vocal about Godot's issues...

15/ While I'm not technical enough to make engine PRs myself, many in voice chat were; and they would make PRs to Godot... and we would tell them how to do it, and look hopefully at the fixes that "would be coming in the future"....

16/ Except those PRs never ever got merged... PRs sat for years, untouched. When people coming in wanting to add feature PRs to Godot asked us how long it takes for things to get merged... we were honest. It could be years, because it could be.

17/ We watched as PRs grew stale, ignored, untouched... I complained about this specifically, and I was told: There's no guarantee PRs will ever get looked at or merged.

18/ This translated into: You could spend months or a year+ on a PR just to have it not even looked at. Or worse, outright rejected because Juan would often say, "No, I plan on doing this myself eventually..."

19/ This is around the time when I started getting a little more aggressive with Godot's problems. Okay... PR fixes are pretty much getting ignored unless you're in Juan's "Boy's Club"... and if not, you are spending your time, effort, and life on a gamble.

20/ So, here we are now, about 2019ish with an engine that has fundamental broken problems... and people with solutions to those problems are being rejected for the dumbest fucking reasons... one of which is "their personality isn't the right fit for Godot".

21/ "Their personality isn't a right fit for Godot?" What the fuck.... Bish, it's code. I don't give two shits what their personality is like if the code works. Let them fix the goddamn problems you are not fixing... or add the goddamn features you are not adding.

22/ So, there we are... this is where I start to see the first true light of Godot. If you are not a part of the "Godot Cult Insiders" your time is wasted. We weren't the only people to see this either...

23/ Over the years, we had AAA engineers; more than a couple, come into the voice chat and talk to us about Godot and their concerns. They were seeing what they were seeing... they wanted to invest their time in Godot, but them seeing PRs sit uselessly in the void put them off.

24/ This became a theme, not only with AAA engineers, but other skilled people who wanted to contribute to the engine. Also with people we wanted to help contribute to the engine. Rejection often came as "Not a right fit", "I'll do it later", "Godot doesn't need art tools."

25/ The "belief" I had in Godot being community driven was an absolute lie. The discovery that Godot is "community driven" is a lie. Okay, fine... Godot started hiring more devs... maybe things will be okay, maybe things will improve....

26/ However, as happens with Godot... all good things turn to sadness. Most of the money they get in funding is attached to the condition that specific features be implemented... basically, "pay 2 win" contribution. I mean, in the end, it makes sense... Godot needs funding.

27/ But the degree to which this happened again and again and again, while capable and experienced engineers and their PRs or ideas were getting rejected over and over for the dumbest of fuckwit ideas was also getting common.

28/ Juan's "Godot philosophy" was killing Godot... and definitely killing my bright eyed and bushy tailed vision of where Godot could go. So, I got again more vocal about Juan's constant "It's my engine, I'll do it my way" take while claiming it is "community dirven".

29/ Sure, if you have a small fix for something that exists... there's a high likely hood that PR will get merged. But, a full on feature? Good... fucking... luck. Everyone skilled enough to want to contribute without sucking Godot Jesus's dick shyed away from wanting to.

30/ But still... I had hope for the engine, despite ALL the shenigans and bullshittery I saw, heard, and experience. I continued to help people with Godot, to work around the problems, to explain what can and cannot be done with Godot.

31/ The difference between me and someone else: I was honest with people about the engine's capabilities... what was missing, what was working, what could be realistically done with the engine without a professional team of engineers to build parts of the engine for you.

32/ Again, I'm not a technical person... so I wanted to somehow get artists involved in the development process of Godot to help refine the tools... to make them more artist friendly and give artists functional tools. There are PRs/suggestions where I teamed up with devs to do it

33/ Once again, good improvements on existing tools rejected because of Juan's stupid philosophies or that he just didn't "understand why a gamedev would need that tool." It got repeatitive... it got tiring.

34/ So, at this point what I am I supposed to do to help improve this engine? I tried being nice... I tried teaming up with developers to bring meaningful improvements to the existing tools... I tried bridging between artist and programmer....

35/ Every meaningful avenue I tried to take to improve Godot was shot down by Juan's philsophy of "I don't understand why this is needed" or "I'll do it myself later" or "This will come in a later version"... and it never fucking did, ever.

36/ So, let's go even further down the line to the other cracks that started to appear in my love for Godot... these super huge crevices not withstanding....

37/ The next biggest crack I saw was on the mod team. There was a contributer who was on the Godot discord spewing heavy anti-LGBTQ non-sense. The admins of the server were besides themselves in what to do... for anyone else, they would have banned outright....

38/ For this situation, because this person was a contributor, they were just refusing to deal with the situation. So, you know who had to step up do the right goddamn thing? Yours truly... because nobody else would do it.

39/ So, yup... hello new crack in my love for Godot. You can't stand up and do what's right when the right needs to be done... even if/when it's hard... that's a problem, and that's not my only experience with that... because hold onto your hats until later.

40/ Not long after, I think I was finally at my wits end with Godot... I had spent years and thousands of hours helping people in the Godot community... developing shit with Godot, sacrificing my life, my time... to the betterment of Godot for fucking nothing.

41/ So, 4.x alpha drops... like, about 4-5 years after it was initially supposed to, mostly, because Juan kept adding or changing stupid features nobody wanted or needing because he felt like it that day....

42/ And surprise surprise... the renderer, while faster than OpenGLES3 still has significant issues. 2017... 2018... 2019... 2020... 2021... 2022... for... this? What... the... fuck... All the Godot philosophy preachiness... for this?

43/ So, anyway... an argument ensues in the Godot mod chat channel; and it's a bit of a doozey, we're all a bit passionate in the there sometimes; we all love Godot in our ways, so it got heated because I wanted Godot to be more... and then... well, all hell breaks loose.

44/ pycbouh goes into full fucking gaslight mode because his fee-fees got hurt, starts swearing and cursing on people and making arguments nobody is making and arguing against imaginary arguments [a constant thing for him really]...

45/ Remi goes on a rant about how Godot is Juan's engine and want the community wants/need isn't important... and that, that alone is was a sword in itself. The community I spent fucking years helping, years building, isn't important? what... the... fuck...

46/ At this point... that's when Xan comes in and tells me, "You're being low and dishonest"; and to Xan's credit, I don't think he understood what was happening at the moment, so I don't blame him...

47/ So, here I am... in the midst of this firestorm... pycbouh trying to gaslight the fuck out of me, while Dazz is trying to calm him down and getting cursed out by pycbouh too... Remi is telling me the community don't mean shit... and I just say FUCK IT....

48/ I resign as Godot mod, I'm done. I'm just fucking done. I spent years promoting Godot, trying to help Godot, and being a literally fucking crusader for the engine... hell, on Twitch I was literally called "the Priestess of Godot"....

49/ Years of my life fucking wasted to come to this kind of goddamn end, and all I wanted was to do MORE with Godot. To improve the tools it had... and not a person would listen to what I had to say. So, to say I became more aggressive recently, you better believe I have.

50/ There is much more to this story, but I will keep it to myself for now; such as how pycbouh repeated his behaviours with other people... yet, still is mod. If I had pulled the shit pyc pulled, I would have been kicked from the mod team... but you know, contributer favortism.

51/ And the sweet fuckin' blessing on this shit was... I was "offered" mod position back IF I would recant the shit I had accused pycbouh of. No. Fucking. Way. I experienced what I experienced, and he did the same shit to someone else... glad I refused that.

52/ So, yeah, Godot leadership can go fuck itself. It wasted my life, it told me that the community I held dearly wasn't important, it told me our issues weren't important, and it tried to coerse me into recanting something that happened.

53/ And the whole "community driven" thing is one big goddamn lie. Godot is driven by Juan's whims of the day and purely Juan's whims of the day.

So, good luck to those who want to contribute anything major to Godot. You gotta suck the Godot Jesus dick or dump a load of money.

54/ That's what Godot is REALLY about.

I still love the Godot community, and I still think fondly of the engine for what it does well, and what it COULD be... but not with Juan in charge.

And Godot bros, go fuck yourself. I've been in the trenches for years, you haven't.

55/ Now, let's add something else on top of this. We have Juan's indecision of what the fuck he wants Godot to be... one moment he says "Godot features will make you want for nothing", the next he's saying, "Why would a gamedev need that?"... then it's "Godot isn't for AAA dev"

56/ Then it's "Godot is a professional engine", then it's "Godot needs more technical barriers so people can learn proper game dev" then it's "Godot needs to be easier for beginners." Like, make up your fucking mind... figure it out...

57/ So, on top of the Inner Godot Cult of PRs... the leader of said cult has no idea what or where Godot stands, or where it should be going. If you don't know where you are, and don't know where you are going... that's called being lost.

58/ And that's where Godot is... it's lost because it's leadership is drifting in the wind with no sails/direction. No idea what it wants the engine to be, no idea where it wants the engine to go... and no willingness to heed experts in their fields because "personality".

59/ And by the gods... I loved the Godot community, and I loved the dream of what Godot could have been.

Yet, I woke up to the hard reality of being told how the Inner Godot Cult sees the community; and now, I can't unsee that truth.

60/ Oh yea... and all that time, effort, and energy I put into actually using Godot, promoting Godot, and helping people worm their way through it's quirks? Didn't fuckin' matter one bit... as far as Juan and the other dickheads were concerned "I wasn't a contributer", so meh.

61/ Yup, not a contributer. Despite all the community building I did, the amazing voice community I had spent years building up in the Godot discord, the countless hours I put into helping people... yeah, not a contributer to the engine at all, not one little fucking bit, nope.

62/ So, when they say on the website "contributing code is not the only way you can contribute to Godot"... it's just goddamn lie; something else they say that they do not believe.

So, am I upset and angry with Godot? You better fucking believe I am.

63/ Juan is a walking/talking ego writing checks his coding skills can't cash. The leadership is a Godot Jesus dick sucking cult that approves PRs based on how much they know/like you or not. And "fuck you" if you try to explain your experience as an artist using Godot.

64/ Even Remi told me not to listen to Juan because half the stuff he says is bullshit. Like, seriously, we're not supposed to listen to or heed the LEAD DEVELOPER of the engine we use?

It's a clown show... and Juan is center fucking stage to the act.

65/ And thus concludes my Tales of Godot.

If you like the engine, please, use it. It's got some nice features for some games... but temper your expectations, don't invest your life... and definitely don't listen to the clown show that is trying to sell you a broken dream.