I have been trying to spend time learning how to make a game in godot.

I am fairly good at programming, but designing and implementing a game escapes me. My only experience is from one semester of a game design course (where I couldn’t get my laptop to play with unity right so I didn’t get to do much beyond write a boids program in C) and another project where I didn’t do any of the core implementation on the game itself, just background stuff like a Leaderboard.

So maybe jumping into godot isn’t the best idea. But it does seem like a neat tool to learn. It’s open source, and the editor is one of the easiest to use I’ve ever seen, the core editing and debug capability is embedded in a single application. No annoying installers, environments or dependency hell.

I have struggled seeing where to start. GDScript is similar in syntax to python, and aside from some odd naming conventions (match instead of switch, why) it seems fairly self-explanatory. I can remember the basics of game design in theory, but I’m not interesting in formally making anything right now, so it seems like it would be most fun to just jump in and try to build something.

The 2D game tutorial on the godot docs site is pretty good, but I’ve found a template platformer that seems easier to get started with. I think I learn better by having something mostly finished that I can tinker with. Drawing pixel art is kind of amusing, though I’m really bad at it. I now have a very small platformer with a character that can climb up vines. Neat. Now where do I go from here.