You can now run the Godot game engine entirely on Android thanks to the Godot 3.5 beta release. This is the entire Godot editor/IDE running directly on Android devices, enabling you to develop, run and debug entirely on a single device, although you will probably want a keyboard and mouse attached.
Details of Godot running on Android from the Godot blog:
Two years ago (!), thebestnom started working on an Android port of the Godot editor. Since the Godot editor is built with Godot itself, it wasn’t too difficult to imagine compiling the editor for Android with some buildsystem changes. But a lot of work was needed to actually make this compiled version work decently on an Android device, with improved mouse and keyboard support, better touch input, as well as being able to run the project on top of the editor like on desktop.
With a lot of testing from interested users, things progressed slowly but steadily, and our Android maintainer Fredia Huya-Kouadio (m4gr3d) put the finishing touches to get this work merged for Godot 3.5. The current version doesn’t have a lot of mobile specific changes, so it’s only really usable on a tablet with keyboard and mouse – but the foundation is there to improve upon, and we’re interested in your feedback and ideas son how to make the Godot experience more mobile friendly!
From now on you’ll find builds of the Android editor as
<godot_version>_android_editor.apkin the download repository. Note that builds are currently not signed, so you will get a warning on install. Give it a try!
This was not the only feature added in Godot 3.5 beta 3. Other new features include:
- new UberShader implementation to make first time shader loading smoother
- Navigation Server updated with RVO2 algorithm implementation
- Physics interpolation for 3D
- new OccluderShapePolygon for 3D occlusion
- improved version control UI implementations
You can learn more about the Godot 3.5 beta release as well as see Google running on my Android device in action in the video below.