At GDC 2019 Epic Games announced their $100M Epic MegaGrant program supporting among other things, open source efforts in the world of game development. Prior winners have included Blender, Godot and ArmorPaint. Today, the open source cross platform sprite tool Laigter has joined that list! If you are a regular of GameFromScratch, Laigter may sound familiar as we featured it in the Summer of 2019.
I spoke via email and Twitter with the author Azagaya about his experiences with the Epic MegaGrant program and on the future of Laigter:
I applied to the Epic Games MegaGrant project in April 2019. About three month later, i recieved an e-mail from them, stating they would
need more time for reviewing the tool. This year I received another e-mail stating that my project was approved for the MegaGrant! It was a
couple month ago, but I didn’t make it public until I revived the official badge from them.The process was very simple. For the application, I just had to fill in an online form. They reviewed the project without any question or
notification. Once approved, they sent me two forms (one for taxes and another one for banking information), and a digitally signed letter. I
filled all the forms and signed the letter and send all the documents back to them, and that was all. People from Epic were always very
gentle, and helped me a lot if I did not understand something from the forms. They answered all my e-mails soon, and in a very friendly way.The only problems I had were with my bank, because strict regulations exists in my country about receiving money from another country.
The process overall is really simple, and people from epics helps you in everything you need.
As to the near future of Laigter:
– Ability to preview animations with lighting. For now, only framed based animations are going to be supported.
– Brush for painting textures. You will be able to use textures from sites like https://3dtextures.me/ to paint textures into your sprites.
– Toon lighting preview.
– Theming support (dark and light themes for now)
– Ability to change display language in runtine (now, the language from your system is selected, if available)
Laigter is available on Itch.io and is open source under the GPL v3 license on Github. Check out Laigter in action in the video below. Congratulations on the Epic MegaGrant win!