Do I need Godot installed to use Stage Engine?

You do not install Godot. You do not download an engine, choose a version, run a project manager or point the app at anything on your disk. You install Stage Engine, and a copy of Godot is inside it. That copy is what opens your project and what runs your game when you press play.

The same goes for the pieces people normally get sent away to fetch. To turn a project into a build somebody else can run, Godot needs export templates that match its exact version, and in a plain install that is a dialog you have to go and satisfy yourself at the worst possible moment. Here the app deals with it. You do not pick files, match version strings or find a download page.

The version moves when the app updates. There is nothing to keep in sync, nothing to upgrade separately and no combination of versions that can drift apart.

A folder. Inside it is an ordinary Godot project: the project file, the scenes, the GDScript that Director 1 wrote, and the art and audio your game uses. It is not an export, not a database and not a bundle only this app can open.

It behaves like any other folder of work you own. Copy it to another machine, put it on a backup drive, hand it to someone who is helping you. Nothing has to phone anywhere to unlock it, and none of it is hidden inside the application.

You can look at any of it. The code is plain text and you can open it in any text editor and read it. Nothing asks you to, and the design assumes you will not, but the door is not locked.

Nothing collides. Stage Engine uses the copy inside itself and leaves your install alone, along with its version, its editor settings and its project list. Having Godot already is neither a requirement nor a problem.

You can open the project folder in your own Godot and work on it there. Two practical notes if you do. Use a Godot version at least as new as the one the app ships, because a project saved by a newer version does not reliably open in an older one. And once you change things there, those changes are yours to keep track of.

That door being open matters more than it sounds. It is the difference between a game you are building and a document trapped in the program that made it.

Because the alternative is the workflow where you install an engine, then install a tool, and then discover the tool assumed a different version, a different renderer or a different project layout. That is where most "install the addon" experiences actually fall over, and they fall over on your machine rather than on the machine of the person who wrote it.

Bundling removes the variables. There is one Godot version here, one project shape and one set of things present in the world. When Director 1 writes GDScript it is writing against something it can see, in a version it knows. That accounts for a large share of the difference between generated code that runs and generated code that refers to something which is not there.

The cost is honest enough: a bigger download, and an app that updates as a whole rather than in pieces. That is the trade, and it is the one we picked deliberately.

Godot being local is exactly what makes playing local. Press play and the game runs on your machine, at your framerate, using your memory. Nothing streams, nothing renders on a server and there is no queue between you and the thing you just changed.

Building is the other half. Director 1, asset generation and world data all come over the network, so you need an internet connection while you are making the game. There is no offline mode and none is coming. The line worth remembering is that building needs the connection and playing what you built does not.