About Chickensoft

Mission

Chickensoft is a volunteer organization dedicated to empowering developers who use the open source Godot game engine with the C# programming language. As an organization, Chickensoft provides and maintains open source tools for game developers. We believe that the future of game development tooling will be built on open source technologies. Our packages will always be free, open source, and maintained out in the open.

Community

The Chickensoft Discord is home to many Godot + C# enthusiasts and is moderated by experienced Godot contributors and enthusiasts. We strive to create a welcoming, accepting, and safe-for-work community. The Discord also has dedicated channels for the Chickensoft open source projects, offering a place to get immediate support or alert us of critical issues.

Principles

We believe in the following principles:

  • Critical game development tools should be well-supported and open source.

    Open source tools are often better quality than proprietary tools as they can outlive the companies that create them. Since the code is public, developers can fix critical bugs that are blocking them (instead of waiting on a company's support ticket for years).

  • Critical game development tools should be free to use.

    Information wants to be free — and we believe this applies especially so to core development tools. Like the Godot project, our code is licensed under the MIT license — allowing modification and redistribution.

  • Critical game development tools should be led by the community.

    When a single company is responsible for the development of a core tool, that company becomes a single point of failure.

For more on our technical point of view, see our Technical Philosophy.

Governance

Chickensoft is a team effort administered by Joanna and Mark. We are incredibly grateful to our core maintainers, developers, and moderators. Everyone — including the administrators — are volunteers.

We are currently not a legally recognized organization. If we get to the point where we would like to offer merchandise or accept donations, we will establish ourselves as a non-profit or function within the bounds of an existing software conservancy/sponsorship. Currently, administrators have final say on which packages should be created/maintained/deprecated and how the community is moderated. If you feel that something is unfair, feel free to reach out with complaints — we try to be as reasonable as possible.

History

Joanna May created Chickensoft as a home for her game development projects in 2021. After meeting and engaging with other Godot C# developers in various spaces, she realized there was no single C#-centric Godot game development community. She repurposed the Chickensoft Discord (which had been sitting empty) as a place to discuss Godot and C#.

Chickensoft got its first membership surge when Joanna wrote a blog called It's time to make that indie C# game in Godot in 2022. The blog did well on Hacker News and led to the first hundred or so community members. Over the years, Chickensoft has grown steadily — with major spikes in new members whenever Unity makes controversial announcements.

Since Godot's scene tree structure resembles the same tree-like structure found in modern declarative UI frameworks (like React, Flutter, Vue, etc), Joanna created a number of packages and ported many of the architectural learnings from those spaces to Godot, attempting to adapt them for the more imperative game engine environment. This ultimately culminated in the Enjoyable Game Architecture. For those interested in the complete technical background and history of Chickensoft, Joanna's talk at a game developer meetup is available online.