Section 1: Getting to know Godot
Meet Godot and our game
Godot is a game engine: a program that gives you rendering, physics, input, audio and an editor, so you can focus on making your game instead of writing all of that from scratch. It is free and open source under the MIT licence, which means you keep full ownership of your game and pay no royalties.
Godot 4 brought a new renderer, better physics, a much improved GDScript and many workflow improvements. This course uses the current stable Godot 4 release. Everything we do works in recent 4.x versions.
Our game: Moss
Moss is a small 2D platformer. The player:
- runs and jumps across platforms
- collects seeds to open the exit door
- avoids thorns and two kinds of enemies
- respawns at checkpoints
- progresses through four short levels
It is deliberately small. A finished small game teaches you far more than an abandoned big one, and every system we build is one you will reuse in future projects.
How Godot is organised
Godot has a simple model:
- A node is a building block with one job: a sprite draws an image, a collision shape defines a hitbox, a timer counts down, a camera follows something.
- Nodes are arranged in a tree. A player might be a body node with a sprite, a collision shape and an animation player as children.
- A tree of nodes saved to a file is a scene. Scenes can be placed inside other scenes as many times as you like. A level scene contains player and enemy scenes.
- Nodes communicate with signals: a node announces that something happened, such as "body entered" or "timer finished", and other nodes react.
If you understand those four ideas, you understand how most Godot games are structured.
How the course works
Each lesson builds one piece of the game. I keep lessons short and show every click in the editor. Placeholder art and sounds are in the project files, and you can replace them with your own art later.
Download Godot from the official website. It is a single program with no installer on most systems. Choose the standard version, not the .NET version, because we use GDScript. Then open the course starter project.