Introducing... Quiver!

Wow.

It’s finally time.

After seven months of hard work, I’m pleased – well pleased isn’t the right word – ecstatic to show you Quiver. Quiver is a community and an ecosystem of tools for indie developers that are building amazing games with Godot, the premiere open source game engine.

My Story

Let me start by introducing myself. Hi, I’m Amit. I’ve teamed up with an extremely talented group of developers, artists, and educators to create Quiver. I’m a professional game developer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-game developer/entrepreneur. I got my start in game development contributing to open source game and graphics engines in the early 2000s. My graduate research involved using virtual reality, way before VR was cool. In fact, VR was so decidely uncool that I was the only graduate student in the entire department doing research with VR (everyone else was working on the Semantic Web - ha, suckers!). Back then, the devices were so primitive and dangerous, in a way that only old-timey science can be. The VR hardware at the time gave me intense headaches, so I could only use them in short bursts. I was risking my life for science, which is I think what graduate students are mainly for.

After grad school, I went on to work on a product that should have turned into Steam, but instead failed. Then I worked at a studio on some Nintendo DS games that also failed. Then I worked on a big-budget AAA title for consoles that was a huge hit, selling millions of copies and earning widespread critical acclaim. Just kidding, the game was terrible and it failed. See a pattern? I left the game industry since I wanted to control my destiny and if I was going to work on something that was going to fail, at least it would be on my own terms.

I jumped into the startup world, founding a health-tech and then an edtech startup. I did that for ten years and sold my last startup in 2021. After the sale, I took a few months off to figure out my next steps. On a whim, I picked up Godot and I was blown away. There never existed a powerful open source tool to create complete games when I was last in the industry. As I was working on my own projects, I started wondering…where can I share what I’m building? Where are the assets for Godot? Where are the tools and templates that would make creating games with Godot even easier? The ecosystem was lacking and then the idea of Quiver started forming in my mind.

What is Quiver?

Quiver is several things:

• A community for indie developers to share their projects and get feedback
• Tutorials to help devs get the most out of Godot
• Game templates to help developers save months of development time
• A library of art and other assets for prototyping and creating production-quality games
• (Eventually) a publishing service to elevate the best games that come out of our community

You can find these individual pieces spread out across the web, but by putting them all together, I believe we can create something truly special.

Why make Quiver?

So Godot is great. Open source. Easy to learn. Easy to use. It has some rough edges, but it’s getting better every day. But for Godot to really spread its wings, it needs to fill in the missing pieces that other engines provide. It needs code and assets that help indie developers efficiently make their dream games. We all have great ideas in our heads – we just a need a little help getting them on to the screen.

There’s also another reason behind Quiver. I love the idea of helping makers. I want to see more artistic creations in the world. And if I’m being totally honest, I want to see different things in the world. The game industry today is…not great. Loot boxes, pay-to-win, NFTs, the same ideas recycled endlessly - it’s all very tiring. Maybe I’m just getting old (what do you kids know about gaming on an Atari 2600?? Pitfall for life, baby!), but I think there should be more inspiring games out there. And I think that inspiration is going to come from people like you, indie developers with an idea and a prayer.

Now it’s your turn

If you’re wondering what to do next, how about checking out Quiver’s introductory Godot 4 tutorial? Or taking a look at some of our open source game templates for Godot 4? You can also win some cash prizes in our first game jam.

Well now you’ve offically spent way too much time goofing around on our blog. Go and build some cool stuff and then show the community what you’ve got!

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