A Godot game's Intel Vulkan crash diagnosed and fixed

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When the Steam demo of the Godot game Shelf-Made Tycoon went public, some PCs with Intel graphics crashed on their very first launch, and Windows crash records named igvk64.dll, Intel's Vulkan driver.

Claude Code first built the obvious fix: after a launch that died during start-up, restart on lower graphics settings. It dropped that before it shipped, because the game loads Vulkan at the lowest settings just as at the highest; the developer later confirmed vulkan-1.dll loads either way. Godot's own fallback to OpenGL doesn't help, because it only steps in when no graphics API starts, and on an Iris Xe Vulkan starts fine.

The shipped fix checks the GPU vendor on Windows and, on Intel, restarts the game on Godot's Compatibility renderer, which uses OpenGL and never touches Vulkan, at the cost of plainer lighting. The developer has no Intel chip, so has only seen the restart with the renderer set by hand.