The game is still undergoing the rewrite initiated in 2024... however, we went back even deeper.
With prototyping new things, the vision has shifted a bit, somewhat broadening our scope: Liblast is now divided into Liblast Framework and Liblast (the game).
We have decided to split the core technology from the game data even further for the sake of maintainability, but also to make it easy to re-use what we're creating for future projects. Liblast Framework is envisioned as a Godot add-on, so it'll be easy to install from Godot's Asset Library and build your game on top of it.
Our work here is MIT-licensed so that the wide game dev community and Godot ecosystem can benefit from it.
The goal of the framework is to provide a complete set of integrated, efficient and powerful high-level components that can be used to build 1st person shooters (possibly other types of games too!).
Liblast (the game) is the main drive for all the features, and will be a proper showcase of the framework. We hope it'll become useful to other aspiring game developers.
The split has started when I was contacted by Yank Scally, who is developing Bless - a tool that turns Blender into a proper level editor (for Godot). Scally got in touch, looking for a game to test his editor with. One thing led to another and he has become a core contributor to Liblast.
Scally's work helped me look back and see a wider picture of what we're making here and what it could be.
At the start of 2025 we've welcomed back a past contributor after an extensive break: nebunez With his contributions we've now rejuvenated a weekly work cycle, and are now adapting to a more structured development process.
This is all helped by our recent shift from Rocket.Chat to Zulip as our main communication platform. Zulip has graciously agreed to sponsor Liblast with their standard hosting plan, which takes off a burden of self-hosting and lets us focus better on our work instead.
Also - in 2024 we've said goodbye to a long-term core contributor, Yo Soy Freeman. I'm grateful for his contributions and wish him great success with his work!
I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project since 2020, who has been a part of it, and also everyone who has donated to the project here on Open Collective. Thanks to you we have means to rent server space, pay for the prestigious* libla.st domain and also look into the future of possibly publishing the game on Steam to attract a wider audience.
*it's not expensive, it's just one of a kind
I am very grateful to be able to work together with such amazing people, and I am extremely excited for Liblast in 2025. We're planning to make a 1.0 release before the end of the year.
Finishing Liblast in 2025 is an ambitious goal, but having (hopefully) learned from my successes and failures, with new and old blood joining the team and Godot getting better and better by the month - I believe we can do this!
Thank you for your trust! I know that things have been slow. I have not been making frequent updates here, but we're doing much more frequent ones on our Mastodon profile.
- unfa,co-founder and lead of the Liblast project
PS: due to the proliferation of LLMs, while writing this update, I felt that my writing is going to be compared to that of a machine. It was making me uncomfortable, and I have redrafted parts driven by that discomfort. Believe me - every word you're reading here has come directly from my brain through a physical keyboard into the text field.
