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Development — Aiden · EDEN REVERIE

From Godot to PixiJS: our hardest call

Some decisions you make with a cool head. Others leave a knot in your stomach. This was one of the second kind.

The heart of EDEN REVERIE first beat inside Godot. And I want to start with the only thing that truly matters to say: Godot is wonderful.

Thank you, Godot

Godot gave us a whole engine, free and open source. No licenses, no fine print, no tolls. A beautiful editor, a huge and generous community, and a philosophy we share to the bone: build in the open, for everyone.

With Godot we stood up the entire turn-based combat —attacks, limit breaks, skills, enemy AI— in record time. And it ran beautifully. Nothing, absolutely nothing that comes next is its fault. Godot did its job, and did it more than well. It taught us what game we wanted to be.

If we ever start something new, Godot will be on the table on day one. We owe it that.

So why change?

Because EDEN REVERIE was born, first and foremost, for the browser. We dream of you opening it on your phone, with nothing to install, in two seconds. And there we ran into three realities that aren't flaws in Godot, but the edges of our specific case:

  • Weight. The web export bundles the whole engine into WebAssembly: about 49 MB. PixiJS is around 400 KB. To open instantly on a mobile connection, that difference decides everything.
  • Iteration. Every web change meant exporting. With Vite it's hitting F5. Repeated a thousand times a day, that minute became the entire project.
  • The HD-2D look. The post-processing filters we were after came out more naturally on the path we chose for the web.

Web first, lightweight, instant iteration. That's what this game asked for. And sometimes the perfect tool isn't the best one — it's the one that fits what you're building.

It hurt. And we did it anyway.

Throwing away months of work that worked to rewrite it from scratch is one of the hardest things there is. We didn't do it happily; we did it with respect. We kept all of Godot's code, intact, the way you keep something you truly loved.

Because moving forward isn't always leaving behind what's worthless. Sometimes it's letting go, tenderly, of what was worth it — only because the road went another way.

Thank you for everything, Godot. Truly.

— Aiden, on behalf of the whole EDEN REVERIE team