Source status: what is open here, and what you can take with you

When people ask whether a tool is open source they usually mean one of three questions, and the answers are different.

The first is about the engine — the thing that draws frames and runs physics. Here that is Godot, which is open source, developed in the open, and used by games that ship. Stage Engine bundles a copy of it, and that copy is what runs your game when you press play.

The second is about the tool on top. Stage Engine — the builder, Director 1, the capability layer that makes a world operable — is our own product and is not open source. That is the honest answer and there is no point dressing it up.

The third is the one that actually decides whether you should trust a tool with a year of your life: what happens to your work if the company goes away. That answer is better than the second one suggests.

Not an export, not a conversion, not a file format that happens to be close. When you build in Stage Engine the thing on your disk is an ordinary Godot project folder: scenes, resources and GDScript files, laid out the way Godot lays them out.

That means stock Godot can open it. If you stopped using Stage Engine tomorrow, the project would still open, still run, and still be editable by anyone who works in Godot. Nothing important is stored in a format only we can read.

It also means the code is readable. Everything Director 1 writes is GDScript in your project. You are not expected to read it, but it is there, which is what makes this checkable rather than a claim.

Because it is the product. Godot already exists and is excellent; we are not rebuilding it. What Stage Engine adds is the layer that lets someone who does not write code build a world by hand and have the behaviour written for them, and that layer is the thing being sold.

The pricing follows from that: free to download with a free plan, Indie at $10 a month, Pro at $50. The paid plans buy more usage, not a different engine. The engine is the same open source Godot at every tier.

A lot of what makes a Stage Engine world work is open source software that already existed and is very good. Terrain, sky, water and behaviour systems in the Godot ecosystem have had years of work by people who are not us, and the sensible thing is to use them.

What we build is the layer that makes them operable by someone who does not write code, plus Director 1 on top. That is a deliberately narrow piece of work, and narrow is the point: rebuilding an engine would be a worse use of the same time.

It also means the software underneath your game is not a private stack you have to take on faith. The engine is open, the ecosystem is open, and your project is a folder of files you can read.

You can leave. That is the single most useful property, and it is the one closed editors usually cannot offer. A project that only opens in the tool that made it is a bet on the company, and it is a bet nobody should be asked to make in their first week.

You can also bring someone in. If your game reaches the point where it wants a programmer, they do not need to learn our tool. They open a Godot project, which many people already know how to do.

And you can keep the game running. The game runs locally on the bundled Godot rather than streaming from anywhere, so a build you have made plays on your machine without us being involved.