I've been thinking of something that I could say to try and break the ice but I think I'll just go ahead and do it all right now that's out of the way hello everyone it's been a while I hope you've all been well the last time we uploaded a video was over 3 years ago and I think it's safe to say that a lot has happened since then both in the world and in The Game Dev industry personally I've been taking a break from video games and to be honest I wasn't really planning on making
any new videos anytime soon I think for a while that some of the harsh realities of the video game industry had taken away some of the joy that I used to feel when making games from the lack of unionization in Tria to the real challenge of keeping an indie game Studio afloat I think there's an ever increasing pressure on developers as someone who started in the Game Dev space very young with simple and probably naive ideas of what it means to make video games these reties simply took it out of me for a while but
recently that changed a bit not because I discovered some cure that will magically make these issues disappear because unfortunately I haven't and they won't but simply because I saw something that made me excited about making games again in fact you could say that it's been a game Cher pun intended and I know that a lot of you feel the same I'm of course talking about open source let me explain I've long been a huge fan of blender if you don't know blender is an incredibly powerful and now very popular 3D Graphics tool it has capabilities
in modeling sculpting UV mapping hugely powerful rendering and the list just goes on and the thing about blender is that it's 100% free when I started using blender it was still pretty small and not even close to comparing to the mighty industry standard Autodesk Suite but since then it has become a huge contender in the world of 3D Graphics preferred by many professionals as well but how can something that is free ever compete with a hugely complicated software suite that cost thousands of dollars in subscription fees well at least part of the answer is that
blender is what we call free and open Source software also known as Foss this means that instead of a company owning and controlling the software with a private codebase the software is publicly owned and has a public and open code base that anyone can access and contribute to if you don't like something about the software or you would like to add a feature to it you can simply download a copy of it and modify it to suit your needs and then if you like the result you can reupload it to see if other people would
find it useful too perhaps merging your changes into the main program one of the great benefits of this is that it helps ensure that the software development is driven by the needs of the people who use it it's a hugely Democratic way of organizing development on top of this open source makes it possible to utilize volunteer work and donations to fund development this means that the software is free from ties to any single entity and makes it possible for anyone to use it without having to pay subscription fees or owing Away part of their revenue
and open source is actually not as niche as you might think Linux for example went from a small hobbyist tool in the early '90s to powering Enterprise server systems also so many of the completely mainstream products of our time are built on top of Linux such as software for cars televisions and all Android phones it also Powers most of the internet and the world stock exchanges so open source is already an integral part of the digital world we live in today now I mentioned that I started making games when I was still very young but
looking back it feels like the industry was as well in just the past decade thirdparty engines like unity and unreal have become huge and Industry standard a big difference from before where game studios would develop and use their own in-house engines also Indie development has gone from something that very few people even knew about to a huge Community where hobbyists and professionals alike publish successful game titles largely because of how accessible these third party Indians have become and the game industry as a whole has become the largest entertainment industry in the world World far surpassing
music and movies put together now this is a lot of change and not in a lot of time and while huge growth like this of course creates issues I think it's important to remember that it also brings a lot of positives perhaps most importantly making games has never been more accessible than it is now and also large open source projects like a modern game engine require a lot of manpower to develop something that wouldn't have been possible with the small Game Dev communities of just 10 years ago in in fact just before taking a break
from gamedev I was aware of a few open- Source initiatives but I didn't think that they were viable alternatives to commercial engines but holy wow A lot has happened since to convince me otherwise and huge props to the Game Dev Community for making that happen first of all a bunch of new engines have popped up and just like with blender previously Niche software is starting to gain massive followings with many contributing their time and donating to hire full-time developers the largest example of this this being Gau gdau is a free and fully open- Source game
engine that a lot of developers have recently turned to and the timing really couldn't be better for this gdau has actually been around for a while but in March last year gdau 4 was released which was a huge rewrite of the engine in my eyes making it a great choice for a lot of game projects and of course Gau is now riding on a wave of new users developers and a huge influx of donations to the Gau Development Fund I've been turning around with it for the past few few months and I've been well loving
it while many parts of the engan of course have a ways to go it is overall much further than I was expecting and perhaps more importantly for me it forced me to learn new things and reminded me of why I fell in love with making games in the first place now as for the title of this video I'm of course in no position to predict the future of the huge industry that now is game development but I do think that part of making that future the best that it can be is to realize just that
game development is huge now and while this of course brings a lot of negatives it also means that there are more game developers than ever before who all share a love for the same thing and that perhaps a part of this future is software that is open source democratically owned and Community funded now I want to be totally clear here I'm by no means encouraging you to stop using third party engines like Unity Onre or game maker nor am I saying that you should all use Kau or any other open source engine for for that
matter I've been using Unity for many years and made well over 400 videos on it so it's safe to say that I like the software in the end the game engine is a tool and you have to use the tool that is right for you and your project all I hope to do with this video is to inform you that there are many engines out there and hopefully to inspire you to think of the possibilities of what can be achieved through different ways of organizing software at GDC last year one of the co-founders of the
Gau engine Juan netki gave a talk titled Gau as an open open ecosystem with a lot of sharp observations about open source in The Game Dev industry it goes into detail about how open source can be beneficial for the industry as a whole and I highly recommend you check it out so in the spirit of Open Source we'll be releasing some new videos on Gau I've been hard at work learning the engine and while I'm no expert yet and things are a bit different this time around there's no team there are no Patron supporters we
aren't in an office in fact we're recording this from our home I with the help of Sophia have done our best to create a couple of videos on the most essential parts of gdau the first video will be a Mega tutorial on making your very first gaming gdau and should be out next week the second one will be a complete overview of the GD script language and will be out within a month we really can't wait to share them with you and we thought that since so many things are different this time around we might
as well try something new so the new videos will be in Danish [Music] hello everyone and Welcome to our first video on Gau
