Beckett 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.

Currently, they use Git as a colloration tool, which is a challenge for early learners. The command line and text diffs are confusing, and the versioning tools are not integrated with the editor:

Instead, they wanted something more approachable, like the version control tools we’ve built with Patchwork. We were excited by the opportunity to expand our work on universal version control to games, and together we are creating a collaboration plugin that runs on top of a forked version of the Godot editor:

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

We’re excited to share more about this project as it progresses in our lab notebook.