The French Wild Wits team is happy to announce the release of Crown Gambit on Steam!
In this hand-drawn gritty medieval story, three paladins fight their way through a tormented capital…
The game is made with Godot 4.4 .NET, using ink as narrative framework (260k+ words !!), Wwise as audio middleware, and a few other amazing plugins.
Feel free to ask anything about the game !
Get it on Steam (demo available) :
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2447980/Crown_Gambit/
Hello François, congrats for the release ! 
I have yet to the play the game so I haven’t much to ask about it, but I mostly have one question about tech and your organization. You have a team of a certain size for an indie game : how was it to use Godot 4 as a team, in terms of collaboration ? Have you met particular strengths (available features, iteration speed, easy tooling…) or pain points (stability, missing features, split the work together…) with the engine ?
And no problem if you prefer talking about the game itself 
Hi !
I’m VERY happy to talk about Godot 
Regarding collaboration, honestly I mostly have good things to say about Godot 4 :
On the pain points we’ve noticed that :
Did you have any particular context in mind when you asked about collaboration features?
About collaboration, I was thinking about potential merging difficulties (but you answered with Godot being git-friendly thanks to text files) and working between different professions. For example, can an artist (2D, VFX…) work autonomously and safely ? Or should programmers provide guidance and/or safe-guards ?
the team likes to use it, even the less tech-savvy. the learning curve is great. people are coming to me spontaneously asking “I want to do this, can you please teach me ?” and that is the most important thing I believe in a studio.
Awesome
the UID system can sometimes be a bit finicky, and requires processes and explanations for the team
I’ve always been confronted to version control issues with .meta files when using Unity in teams (equivalent to Godot’s .uid files), some things never change
As a final question, how did you feel about Godot .NET ? Could you have coded this game in GDScript, or would it have been a nightmare without C# features ? (type safety, interfaces, perf…)
Oh the game is completely written in Gdscript. We only use C# for some of the plugins we use (ink narrative framework, and a SRT subtitle manager). And with Gdscript typing + custom resources as strong data structures, we have never drowned in programming nightmare.
Regarding non-programmers autonomy, I’ve found that it depends on each person, but Godot provides everything to create an either very safe but strict environment, or a wonderful sandbox
Hi there!
Congratulations for the release
It’s really cool to see projects of that quality made with Godot. Also very interesting to know that it’s been fully made with GDScript, I’ve never used it too much as I quickly moved to C# when learning Godot, thinking that it would be a better fit for large/team projects, but I guess I should give the langage another try! Got to admit I’m probably biased by my Unity experience too
opening large projects with a lot of textures (4000+ in Crown Gambit!!) is sluggish sometimes.
Out of curiosity, is it something you’ve tried to work on? Or have you just accepted your fate of waiting a few moments on each project opening (which could be fine if it was not that long)?
(I missed my chance this year, but looking forward to next Game Camp France to talk about Godot with you! 
)
We definitely worked on it, found out about a some third-party stuff messing with the import and adding unecessary extra time. Optimizing the game in general by reducing the assets resolution also helped.
Looking forward to talking about Godot next GameCamp absolutely!
That’s awesome, congratz on your achievement @francois.delataste !
I already bought the Deluxe edition, looking forward to playing your title 
Hope you don’t mind asking a couple more questions!
How big is your team (and what split dev/art etc.) and how long did it take you to develop the game?
Does Godot Team help you promote the games in any way?
What are some features you would love to see added to Godot that would make the gamedev process better/easier?
About project getting sluggish with too many assets : a strategy on Unity is to split (if possible) the code project and the data project. Not sure that’s something possible or viable with Godot
Thanks for all your answers @francois.delataste
Super interesting to see a game of this scale programmed in GDScript, it’s quite reassuring as people often complain about the scalibility of the language
I’m happy to answer!
How big is your team (and what split dev/art etc.) and how long did it take you to develop the game?
The team is about 20 people total over a period of 2 years, but we were never 20 working at the same time (more like 12). The distribution is roughly :
So programming is quite marginal actually! However 80% of the team uses Godot on a daily basis.
Does Godot Team help you promote the games in any way?
No. And I would not expect them to.
What are some features you would love to see added to Godot that would make the gamedev process better/easier?
In our situation, I would have liked more access to some APIs of the engine that are featured in the editor but not accessible in GDscript (like “View Owners” for instance, or “List all resources in a scene”, UID management, imported resource management, etc), for streamlining the optimization process. Things that currently require C++ knowledge and engine recompilation or GDExtension.
But I’m also happy that Godot is not bloated with features that only benefit a few users, so I’m not advocating for these changes mainstream.
To give a few stats about the project (thanks to this tool)
Crown Gambit: wrapped
Total lines: 85637
Biggest file: crown-gambit/wwise/GeneratedSoundBanks/wwise_ids.gd (1820 lines)
Tool scripts: 64 | Process scripts: 7311602 variables (9451 were explicitly typed, so 81%)
3342 @export calls
1310 connected signals (out of 338 defined)Scenes (.tscn): 1335
Assets (.tres): 2943Your top 3 most used file formats:
#1: png (4102)
#2: tres (2946)
#3: res (1351)
