GodotCon Boston 2025 - Building a Godot Plugin with GDExtension

Learn how to write a plugin for Godot using C++, build for distribution as a GDExtension, write unit tests and setup test and build automations via GitHub Actions.

Transcript

1. Building a Godot Plugin with GDExtension GodotCon Boston 2025 1
3. Who am I? - Games and tools developer - Worked with Unity, Unreal and Godot - Built a lot of what I work on as open source projects - Currently building my own game engine - And a multi-engine tool for building rhythm games (Unity, Unreal, Godot, MonoGame, SDL, etc) 3
4. Outline of Workshop 1. Prerequisites (macOS / Windows / Linux) 2. Building an empty plugin 3. Loading a simple header library in the plugin 4. Extending a node with custom logic 5. Getters and setters 6. Signals 7. Convert data 8. Automation via GitHub Actions 4
5. Prerequisites (macOS / Windows / Linux) 5
6. Prerequisites - Godot 4.3+ - VS Code (or equivalent text editor) - Git - Python - Scons 6
7. Prerequisites (macOS) - Git (https://git-scm.com/) - Brew (https://brew.sh/) - Python - brew install python - Scons - brew install scons 7
8. Prerequisites (Windows) - Git (https://git-scm.com/) - Visual Studio (https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/) - With Desktop development with C++ - Python (https://www.python.org/) - Check off add to ENV variable - Scons - python -m pip install scons 8
9. Prerequisites (Linux) - git - sudo apt install git - python - sudo apt install python3 - scons - sudo apt install scons - vim - sudo apt install vim 9
10. Setup the repo 10
11. Steps 1. Create a new directory and set up a git repo with git init 2. Create a README.md file 3. Add the godotengine/godot-cpp as a submodule git submodule add https://github.com/godotengine/godot-cpp.git a. Navigate into the godot-cpp/ directory b. Checkout the tag for the minimum version of Godot you want to support git checkout godot-4.4-stable Remember: Commit after each step 11
12. Building with scons for the first time 12
13. Building an empty plugin 13
14. Loading a simple header library in the plugin 14
15. Extending a node with custom logic 15
16. Getters and setters 16
17. Signals 17
18. Convert data 18
19. Automation via GitHub Actions 19
20. Questions? 20