KeiruaProd

Recently, I’ve been playing around with Godot, a popular game engine.

Due to Unity’s recent cough community issues cough, a lot of developpers have migrated to using Godot and the general quality of the app and the surrounding tools is improving a lot quickly.

Even though some professionnals will stay on Unreal and Unity for practical reasons for now (publishing on the console store is not native with godot, and the 3D pipeline does not go as far what Unreal offers) that’s a great, easy tool for game maker hobbyists that can go a long way.

Getting started

It was hard to find good resources, but there are plenty of great people sharing cool stuff. Interestingly, most of the following links are youtube videos. In the realm of videogame making, I’ve found that I often prefer that to writen article (he says in a blogpost)

• The official Godot tutorial.
• Your first 2D Game from Zero, from GDQuest.
• How to make a video Game, by Brackeys. This one is a must. A lot of cool tricks

If I were to start over, here is what I’d do:

• redo the official tutorial. You’ll learn to navigate the interface, create different kinds of nodes, get a general feel for how to do things with a broad overview of some major features.
• follow along GDQuest’s video. This video solves most problem using code, you’ll learn more things.
• redo everything from Brackey’s tutorial. You’ll learn some new components, like the AnimationPlayer or the Raycaster, and how to solve a few problems with a better use of the existing components, rather than writing code.

It’s important not to simply watch the videos but to code the games at the same time. This takes only a few hours. Once you are done, you’ll have coded 2 prototypes and a playable game, and used different approach (code first, and component first). Those 2 approaches are complementary. At first I was more comfortable with doing everything with code, but it turns out that using all the nodes cleverly is really powerful. The Killzone trick in Brackeys’ game is in particular super nice and was an Ha-ha moment for me about component composition.

Full game thematic builds

I’ve picked the previous 2 because they are semi-short (+/-1h long). There are other detailled videos with different kind of games, but it can be longer:

There also are long playlist with extensive details about how to make complex games:

• platformer by Heartbeast (really high quality content !)
• space shooter, still by Heartbeast
• survival game
• bullet hell.

Godot’s built-in features

Then, it’s time to go deeper. There are many cool built-in features and it takes a bit of time to learning them.

• The manual is amazing. You’ll learn godot’s APIs, asset pipeline, and some general game math and tricks. Read it when you need to.
• The particle systems
• Dealing with User Interfaces using Godot’s components (or longer, but better)
• Godot’s Shaders
• GDScript language syntax. It’s very similar to Python, but there are some differences and it’s a custom scripting language.
• It’s also worth noting that GDQuest has a looot of videos and articles about very specific topics, it’s worth taking the time to explore them.
• Pathfinding
• Dive deeper into the Camera2D
• 2D lighting with tilemaps

Yeah, I’ve liked many DevWorm and Godotneers videos.

Plugins

One of the cool thing about Godot is that it can easily be extended through external plugins.

• using Dialogic to setup complex dialogues in a game
• Gaea for procedural generation.
• StateCharts for state management (or a quick DIY alternative) -BulletUpHell looks like a great component for making Dannaku on simpler space shooters

Code organization

I’ve watched a lot of devlogs, and at first people are very messy (especially in game jams). In order to build bigger games where it’s easy to add or remove features, a good organization is necessary. Building independant components that communicate using signals is a great way to do so.

• Making components in order to structure a game into manageable parts
• Using composition

Tools

Not really Godot-related, but here are some popular tools that can be used on top of it to build games.

• Krita tutorials.
• Bosca Ceoil is a small music sequencer
• godot-sfxr is a Godot Plugin that ports sfxr directly inside Godot for quick sound effects.
• AseSprite is a popular sprite editing tool, often used for pixel art. Not free, but that’s $20.
• ldtk is a tilemap editor.

Assets

In terms of assets, well that’s not a programmer’s strong suit but today there are many available ressources today to DIY or to reuse quality things:

• Asset packs, like the great Sprout lands
• The Dark series looks great took, and at ~$55 that may be worth the investment.

Game development tricks

How and also, there are thousands of fun tricks :

• Minimap with fog of war
• Using lights to create a parchement effect
• 2D normal maps for pixel art games
• A water shader for water in 2D rpg with tilemaps (pretty cool !). They also have a nice fire transition shader (using a noise texture with colors), where they experiment with the orientation
• 2D reflection in mirrors. À la Pokemon.
• Rolling 3D dices.
• Hit flash effect
• Input menu and Save settings
• Moving platforms (almost as a component)
• Particle systems effects using textures
• Improve your visuals demonstrates some nice techniques and Game feel techniques. A demo, unrelated to godot but to game dev in general.