Godot is a game engine that is both free and open source, meaning it's a great option for budding, first-time developers. The kind of people who, thanks to their youth and/or inexperience, may not have learned things the hard way.
By that I mean look at this statistic:
1 in 5 Godot users are not prepared for the day something unfortunate happens.
— Stein Makes Games (@steinmakesgames.bsky.social) 2025-07-13T08:00:57.688Z
I've seen a lot of developers respond to this with either some form of "oof" or some shade of "by God, what are you doing?", and I understand the sentiment. Not using version control is akin to writing up a Word doc without autosave turned on, only worse, because you risk losing so much more work. It opens these projects up to the possibility of absolute catastrophe.
And yet...I do not want to admonish these 19.1% of people. Particularly the 13% who know what version control means and refuse to engage in the practice anyway. Rather than view this 13% as reckless, I want to salute their bravery.
See, I've spent my entire career writing in the CMS (Content Management System), which is the media's equivalent. That means I open up the platform we publish stories on--in Aftermath's case as of July 2025, a modified version of Wordpress--and write all my stories straight into it. No Notes app, no Google Docs, no Word–I write drafts and outlines straight into the CMS, edit it from there then eventually hit publish.
Writers often gasp at this as audibly as game developers have at that 19.1% of respondents to that survey, because it's risky. CMS autosave functionality is questionable at best, there are no grammar checkups, it makes it harder to share and edit your work; when it comes to reasons not to do it, the list goes on forever.
But I don't care. The cowardly shall not see heaven. If this is the platform I publish my writing on then I want to be able to tailor it to that platform--its length, its appearance, everything--from the very beginning of my writing, and if that's dicey behaviour then so be it. Let me live a little.
Same goes for this 13%! Modern life is so full of handrails and automation and supervision and authority over our platforms and actions that who are we to look at their position and assume they're in line to learn a lesson. Maybe they know what they're doing is bad and do it anyway, because the danger of losing their work is a slow-burning thrill, one of the few avenues left where they can exercise any kind of control over their lives on the internet.
Or maybe they're just idiots. They can, like me, be both at the same time.
