Game developers are having a great time lately at Apple. While the company has been working hard to offer powerful machines capable of competing with modern consoles and PCs, it hasn’t forgotten the studios. With iPadOS 18, the port of the Godot engine will soon be available on the App Store. Enough to create games from the tablet.
What is Godot?
The “Godot Engine” is a feature-rich cross-platform game engine that allows you to create 2D and 3D games from a unified interface. It provides a comprehensive set of common tools, so users can focus on creating games without having to reinvent the wheel. Games can be exported with a single click to a number of platforms, including major desktop platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows), mobile platforms (Android, iOS), as well as web platforms and consoles.
An alternative for gamers
While Apple’s Swift Playgrounds already offers a gateway to developing games and apps on iPad, even allowing for publishing on the App Store since 2021, development options remain limited. Fortunately, a dedicated gaming alternative is in the works.
Godot, a free and open-source game engine, is already well established on macOS. While it’s not as popular as Unreal Engine or Unity, it’s been used in dozens of recent games, such as Brotato, Deponia, Sonic Colors: UltimateAnd Buckshot Roulette.
The developers of The Terminal are currently working on a project to port Godot to a new platform. Godot for iPadas the name suggests, is an adapted version of this game creation tool for the iPad.
In a blog post dated August 31, Miguel de Icaza explains some of the thinking behind porting Godot to the iPad, including how the engine’s interface needs to be modified to be usable on an iPad screen. Many of the changes made to the project over the summer are apparently influenced by Apple’s design choices for Final Cut Pro on the iPad.
The app itself is beautiful and a pleasure to use, and not being a UI designer, I didn’t immediately understand what made it so enjoyable. A few things were more or less obvious, like Final Cut Pro’s controls for selecting values.
[…]
I fell in love with these drag controls. The one above allows you to change values within a fixed range, but some editors would scroll the values, and I spent a few weeks reimplementing them to get similar behavior.
It also involved implementing a color scheme and font sizes for labels and values, “tastefully grouping and fleshing out elements,” and making some necessary changes to how data is organized for the user.
Changes have also been made to the way windows are integrated, as well as to the toolbars. Rather than massive rows of options, the iPad version adopts a more refined and simplified interface, while providing access to the same settings. This ergonomic work was essential for the port to be adopted by users.
Still, Godot for iPad isn’t available for download yet. Next steps in its development include a scene selector, enabling and disabling panels on a small screen, and “some fifty-nine other small bugs that need to be fixed,” the developers say.
Currently, it is hoped that a TestFlight version of Godot for iPad will be delivered later this month. In the meantime, check out the Godot source code on Github.