Backstitch is a currently active project exploring collaboration and version control within the Godot game engine. This work has been undertaken in partnership with the Endless OS Foundation, who use Godot as part of a game development curriculum for young students.

Historically, they used Git as a collaboration tool, which was a challenge for early learners. The command line and text diffs are confusing, and the versioning tools are not integrated with the editor.

Endless wanted something more approachable, like the version control tools we’ve built in Patchwork. We were excited by this opportunity to expand our work on universal version control to games. Together we have created a collaboration plugin that runs inside the Godot editor, which Endless are now using with their students.

With this set of capabilities a classroom group can experiment with variations of a lesson, a mentor can review the branches and offer help or feedback, and then work can be landed back on the main project.

More recently, Backstitch has been opened up as a public alpha, and several indie games have already been developed by teams using our plugin to collaborate.

• Visit the Backstitch website for more on the Godot plugin and the community around it.
• Read the Backstitch lab notebook to learn about the design thinking behind the project.
• Watch Lilith’s talk Beyond Git: Real-Time Version Control for Godot