Rift Riff: Thoughts from an indie game designer's first foray into Godot

This week I was lucky enough to have a quick chat with Adriaan de Jongh. A Dutch game designer best known for Hidden Folks (2017), Secret Shuffle (2022) and most recently Rift Riff (2025).

Adriaan is a seasoned indie developer now with 11 releases to his name. However, up until recently his weapon of choice for development was C# and Unity having spent the previous 13 years working with the engine. That was until he started exploring Godot in 2023 to create a new test project which eventually grew into Rift Riff.

After around a year and half of development and with support from collaborators Sim Kaart (art and game design), Franz LaZerte (programming and game design), Matthijs Koster (music and sound design) and Professional Panda (enemy wave design). Rift Riff released for PC on the 9th May 2025, and it's currently enjoying a very positive response on Steam with 98% of players from 105 reviews (at the time of writing) recommending the game. Putting the release's critical response on a similar trajectory to other Godot-powered darlings like The Case of the Golden Idol (2022) and Brotato (2023).

this pride I feel for having released an overwhelmingly positive game made using Godot is 100% irrational. Godot is so obviously feature packed! shouldn't surprise anyone; yes, releasing a game in Godot is not only 'doable' but an opportunity to create .,~'something good'~,. #godotengine #gamedev

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— Adriaan (@adriaan.games) May 14, 2025 at 9:12 AM

Chatting through Bluesky (follow me @jaredrigby.co.uk), I asked Adriaan about his experiences working with Godot and why he choose to make the switch away from Unity.

Jared: Congrats on the release of Rift Riff. I've just picked up a copy and I'm excited to dive into it this weekend!

Jared: Firstly, why Godot (or why leave Unity)?

Adriaan: I started looking for alternatives to Unity when they announced their pay-per-install b****** and found Godot. It seemed like the most feature complete alternative – even in 2023 already, and it has improved a lot since. It seemed like it did everything I needed it to do, so I started with a small project and was both charmed and energized to stick with it. Both the engine itself as well as the FOSS part of Godot intrigued me. That small project turned into Rift Riff, by the way ;)

Jared: The runtime license shenanigans is a common theme with the majority of developers I speak with to be honest! It's probably the main reason I moved over too.

Jared: Comparing it with your experiences in Unity (ignoring the licensing issues) how does it compare purely from the developer perspective? Any things that it excelled at compared with Unity? Similarly, any places where the engine has room to improve?

Adriaan: Godot is a tool just like Unity is. They both have their quirks. At this point, I wouldn't say one is particularly better than the other; just different. Though I will say that I suspect (because I haven't done this myself in Godot just yet, only in Unity) that Unity has a simpler process to export projects to console platforms.

Adriaan: I think I elaborate quite a lot on that in this thread:

I moved from 13 years of C# in Unity to GDScript in Godot about 1,5 years ago and the change in programming language in particular wasn’t a very big deal. here’s a thread on my experience as a professional multiplatform game dev. 🧵 #gamedev #unity #godot

— Adriaan (@adriaan.games) April 2, 2025 at 8:36 PM

Jared: Yeah, because of Godot's licensing they're not able to include any support for exporting to consoles directly in the engine. I believe that's part of why W4 games was formed.

Adriaan: I'm very aware ;)

Adriaan: And W4 seems to have their s*** together. From the outside, their solution looks solid. And not very expensive compared to Unity. So overall, potentially a really good deal.

Jared: Did you hit any roadblocks in terms of external integrations (e.g. Steam SDK integration)? Did you make use of any community tools to help with this or build everything in-house?

Adriaan: Currently using GodotSteam for Steam integration and it was very, very smooth.

Jared: I've used GodotSteam myself, it's great :)

Adriaan: Other than that we use the popular AsepriteWizard. No other plugins.

Adriaan: I'm currently looking into integration plugins with other stores that seem a lot less well maintained – like iOS and Android plugins. But you'll have to ask me in a month how that will fare. I will say that I really like that there's seemingly many options, and that they are all open source, meaning that if stuff changes I can potentially fix it myself or hire someone to fix it.

Jared: I saw this tool [ShipThis] if you're looking to build/deploy for Google Play and Android.

Jared: Last question from my end, what advice would you give to a studio considering Godot for their next project?

Adriaan: My advice is to try it! Godot can probably already do what you need it to do.

Jared: Amazing, thank you so much for your time!

Rift Riff is available now on Steam. If you'd like to follow Adriaan, his personal website is Games by Adriaan and he's on Bluesky @adriaan.games