Hey Godot community! Hope this is appropriate for the resources section - looking for thoughts on a tool that could help with content workflows.
A bit of background: Over the last 5+ years, myself and a team of engineers have built an engine-agnostic content platform that’s been powering our latest game at Stoic, Towerborne. I’ve been wondering if there’s an opportunity to help Godot teams (especially solo devs and small studios) get access to better content management tools, so I’m exploring whether packaging this up for the community would be valuable.
What it does:
Think of it as a data authoring environment that sits alongside Godot. You define your Schemas (Weapons, Npcs, Quests, etc.) with Properties and relationships, then create Instances with a proper asset browser, bulk editing, relationship tracking, validation, version control integration - all the workflow tools you’d expect.
Then it can:
Track “what uses what” with visual relationship graphs - when you delete that Weapon, you know exactly which LootTable or StoreInventories reference it
Generate GDScript classes/resources automatically from your Schemas
Export to JSON, csv, or custom formats for Godot to consume
Handle localization workflows (extract text to CSV, reimport translations)
Run validation across your entire dataset before builds
And much more…
Questions for the community:
Does this sound useful for Godot projects, or are you handling content management just fine?
What are your biggest pain points with organizing and maintaining game data?
Would adding another tool to your workflow be worth it for these benefits?
Any red flags or concerns about this approach?
I’m genuinely curious about your experiences and whether this would solve real problems. The form this might take (open source, commercial, hybrid) is completely open - just trying to understand if there’s value here first.
Thanks for any thoughts\feedback!
Engine-agnostic to me means using another tool. What I personally like about Godot is that if I use GDScript, all my tools are in one place.
While your tool sounds interesting, the problem I’ve found with Godot tools is very few seem to keep up with Godot versions.
I also like Godot because it is open source and free to use. I do pay for assets sometimes, but I hate the idea of paying for addons to an open source engine. But that’s me.
I have been developping one (not even close to ready though) that uses pseudo-natural language processing to allow designers to write their resources as .md files that double as a wiki. I made a DSP to make DSPs if that makes sense, using earley parsing.
From having thought about this in depth, a content authoring tool is a very, VERY nice thing to have. Mine is a bit on the niche side (basically hacking around to use Obsidian as a game-content-authoring-tool), but if you have something with an accessible UI, that works well, this is invaluable.
So long as these are supported (possibly requiring some programmer tinkering) :
Anyone loading the tool with sufficient game design experience can just change stuff and make new items, quests etc… so long as the mechanics they use are supported already
Having the data and possibly schemas reloadable without changing the game itself
Handling some way to collaborate
Like, the workflow for authoring items and quests should be able to come to
Having the game open and the tool on another screen
Changing data in your tool or having someone tell you to try their changes
Clicking reload or “load X’s version”
and you can continue playing with the new items or changes applied
It also should make updating and maintaining the game fast and easy as far as balance and new content go.
End goal is “no programming while designing” and if you can do that I think many people are in if you can explain it to them - as this is not something people are used to I think ?
For godot i think this means being able to create or patch a folder (and for runtime a dictionary) of resources using a custom ResourceLoader, tied to a custom ImporterPlugin when in-editor
If we need to open the editor for a task like changing the 3rd boss max hp, this is not really a plus ; there are already plugins for viewing resources in a spreadsheet view and it’s not hard to make some validation. The plus is really in the game using a separate content folder that can circumvent the editor for non-programmers or allow no godot experience designers to check their stuff in game. Ideally this even brings basic modding capabilities to a game.