Claire Blackshaw: Shipping Godot VR and Porting to PSVR2: A Partial Post Mortem

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TLDR: Written version of the talk I gave at Develop Brighton 2026. Yes Godot can ship commercial VR, we paid roughly £80k in early adopter tax to do it. War stories from rebuilding Godot's core, the community PS5/PSVR2 port with George Marques and André Ewald, why I ended up writing a whole new render server for 4.7, and a call to arms for platform holders and render programmers. Nothing in here is PlayStation NDA material, sorry.

Extended talk recording this article is based on.

I gave this talk at Develop Brighton this week and wanted to share a more public version. A bit slower, no conference clock, and this written companion for the folks who prefer reading to watching. Nothing in this talk is NDA'd about PlayStation, sorry about that. There are juicier behind the scenes details but those live in partner spaces where I'm allowed to share them.

This was originally meant to be a post mortem. Then a bunch of stuff happened, which means it is now a partial post mortem. You'll see why.

Who Am I

I'm Claire and I've been doing this since the PS2 days. I contribute to Godot, mostly on the OpenXR side and increasingly some render stuff here and there. I've shipped a wide range of games and I've been doing VR since 2013. I joined Sony to work on PSVR networking and my team there did significant metaverse work: social VR chat, hand gestures, all that stuff came out of us. Most recently I shipped Dreams and Substance 3D Modeler, and now I'm working on Augmental Puzzles.

Up Front: Godot Works

Some of this talk is going to come across a bit negative and I want to say up front that it is not meant to be. Godot works for many many teams. If you're making a 2D game it's kind of a no-brainer, and for most simpler 3D games it's very reliable.

Some honest caveats though. If you're doing an open world or streaming heavy game, leaning on lots of character animation, or going for a very realistic art style, Unreal is probably a better fit. If you're an out-the-gate VR dev, especially standalone, you might prefer Unity because the renderer is a bit more capable. Godot has an asset library but at the moment it's free only, which will change in future, but it means the ecosystem isn't as well serviced as the others. And on console porting there are plenty of studios providing the service, but the community port side is less mature.

Can Godot Ship Commercial VR?

Yes. We did however pay about £80k in early adopter tax. That is pure engine work we had to do that we would not have had to do shipping on Unity. It does not mean every studio starting a VR game in Godot needs to pay that much. If you started now I don't think it would be that high, but I do think there would still be a tax. And that number does not include the PlayStation and PSVR2 work. That's a whole other set of numbers.

We're in early access, so yay, it works. I broke the whole £80k down in my GodotCon writeup if you want the itemised version.

The Games That Got Us Here

Augmental wasn't our first Godot VR game. It's the game we ended up at.

Digging VR. An archaeological modeller-style digging game. Blocked by missing render features, which I've written about before. I didn't want to write an engine, I wanted to make a game, so we shelved it. Funny thing: the features exist now. We just couldn't wait.

Rune Magic. Stopped for gameplay reasons. Clean cancel before the sunk-cost trap closed. Not Godot's fault, that's just gamedev.

Magic Shop. A physics title based on my wife's first trilogy of books. We ran into physics trouble on early Jolt and solved it with custom physics responses, then cancelled it when our funding was cut. This was why I left Adobe to get back into games, and then, well, anyone in the VR industry can tell you what September 2024 looked like. I covered the business side in VR Biz: The Funding Cliff.

The Pivot: Augmental Puzzles

While I was at Adobe I worked with Logitech, Apple and many others. With Logitech it was the MX Ink pen. I got support for it into Godot, which was relatively painless, and made a little drawing demo. When it was done I sat there thinking about what to do next and went: well, I really want a place to do sudoku in VR. It doesn't exist. Holy shit, we can make that pretty quickly. Let's get it out the door.

Speed of Godot

This is what I always say to people when they ask me about Godot: the speed of getting things up and running really is a strength. It's a joy to work with. We had the core game of sudoku up and playable in about two days, and the full menu flow with basically all the components of the game out in a week. Everything was still scratch graphics, but it was there.

One of the nice things early on was composition layers, which get you really high quality 2D layers quite cheaply. They worked really well for us...