Godot runs the games. The rest now has a name

Open one of our games and you find Godot 4. Look at how it gets made and you find something else: a pipeline that writes the code, fixes it, tests it in a real browser, saves every version and ships it — to the site, to itch.io and into the desktop packages.

That pipeline now has a name, MicroGames Engine, and a page of its own.

Why not a graphics engine of our own

Writing a rendering engine takes years, and the result would be a worse version of something that already exists and is open source. Godot draws, computes physics, reads input and plays audio. It does it well, and for the kind of games we make here it does it better than we would.

The problem we had was not drawing. It was doing everything else without every step depending on someone remembering it.

What it adds, concretely

• The document becomes work. The design document is broken into tasks, and a task counts as done only when a verifier — which can only read — finds it in the code. “It compiles” is not enough.
• Whoever writes is not whoever fixes. When the export or the startup test fails, the error goes to a separate fixer that makes the smallest possible change: up to five attempts, then the problem stops and stays on record.
• Five checks before release: it compiles, it starts, it is coherent, it loads, it shows. The last one is decided by a real browser, not by the code.
• Played every night. An automated player opens every game and takes from it the poster and the clip on the site, throwing away frozen screens.
• Every version stays. Sources are saved at every release, and any version can be exported again.
• One export, four destinations: browser, Windows, macOS and Linux.

The numbers, with a date

On 13 September the database said: 142 milestones done, 50 tasks verified in the code, 211 versions saved, 27 desktop packages ready to download. On the engine page the same numbers are counted at every visit: by the time you read this, they are already different.

Where it is still thin

A page about checks has to say where the checks are missing, too.

• It only talks to Godot. Project scaffolding, agent instructions, export and tests are written for it. A second engine means an adapter for each of those parts, not a switch.
• The desktop packages are not signed, and when a new version ships they are not re-exported on their own.
• Music already has its own module, but no step of the pipeline calls it today.

What we take away

• Naming a layer is how you see its edges. As long as it was “the scaffolding”, nobody could say where it ended.
• An engine is not measured by the features it lists but by what it refuses: a task does not count until someone who did not write it finds it in the code.