Install Godot on Debian 12 and BCI RPG Dev Environment Setup

Trying to avoid using Snap, Flatpak, and other package manager battles, sticking with either using tarballs or apt installs (preferred).

One of my long ongoing open source projects is the Brain Computer Interface Role-Playing Game (BCI RPG) project. Its roots started in the 1990s, and started to develop early proof of concept in the early 2000s, and for the past few years has been getting regular weekly updates by the community.

This project allows users to use just their brain/thoughts to interact with the online turn-based cooperative social role-playing game with any genre or game system

This is still very much in early alpha development, but we're starting to be able to deliver some working demos now.

However, installing the Godot development tools isn't as smooth as I would prefer it to be. Currently we're using the latest 3.5 branch of Godot, because 4.x wasn't quite stable enough yet. We'll upgrade to 4.x as it continues to stabilize.

For now, these instructions focus on getting the Godot Developer environment up and running, downloading and getting our BCIRPG working, especially for new volunteers helping with the project, as well as a reminder for myself.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like the Godot community wants to spend time supporting apt packages or repos officially. The last updated version in the Debian 12 repo is only 3.2.3. So probably the best option for those wanting to install and maintain it through apt, is through conversion from their tarballs into apt packages.

Open command line, update your apt cache.

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade (if needed)