We Released A Game In The Godot Engine And It Was Great
But why was it great?
Fresh with the experiences of releasing tower defence Rift Riff on Steam, Adriaan and Franz dive into the benefit of open-source; the capabilities, features and performance of the Godot Engine; how five different game dev disciplines adapted Godot to their workflows; and what support currently exists for multi-platform, SDKs, plugins and storefront integrations.
Speaker Bio
Adriaan de Jongh is a Dutch game designer best known for his work on the indie game hit Hidden Folks, a black & white interactive searching game. Adriaan is also known for designing experimental games that move people out of the normal space of video games by challenging players to dance together, touch hands, or share other social interactions.
At the age of eighteen, Adriaan taught himself to code. He co-founded Game Oven in 2011 and designed and marketed all the experimental games the studio released for almost four years. After Game Oven closed, Adriaan collaborated with different people for different projects, gaining more experience in programming, business, and marketing. This led to the release of Hidden Folks in 2017, which was received overwhelmingly positive by players and critics and has allowed Adriaan to continue to work on various projects. Adriaan is currently making the tower defense game Rift Riff.
Beside making and selling games, Adriaan actively contributed to the Dutch and international game developer community. Among his initiatives are: Midgame Fund, a group of Dutch game developers reinvesting their success in other Dutch games; docontract.com, a free plain-English agreement generator for game developers; and the Dutch Game Industry Directory, a directory that aims to list all games and companies in the Netherlands. Adriaan was board member of the Dutch Games Association and has been part of many juries and committees, such as the Creative Industries NL’s Digital Culture Fund advisory committee, the Flanders Audiovisual Fund advisory committee, and the Independent Games Festival’s Nuovo jury. Adriaan is also a sponsor of the Godot Foundation.
Games Adriaan worked on:
Rift Riff (2025)
Secret Shuffle (2022)
wurdweb (2021)
Hidden Folks (2017)
Schakelaar (work for hire, 2017)
Jelly Reef (Game Oven, 2014)
Bounden (Game Oven, 2014)
Friendstrap (Game Oven, 2013)
Bam fu (Game Oven, 2013)
Planet Challenge (work for hire, 2013)
Fingle (Game Oven, 2012)
Speaker Bio
Self-taught freelance video game technical designer and programmer specifically with the Godot Engine. Franz comes from a 10-year career in Wind Power engineering, but after being laid-off and re-examining what makes him happy, he radically shifted both industry and profession.
Games Franz worked on:
Currently working on Rift Riff, a 2D-pixel art tower defence game.
