birophilo (u/birophilo)

birophilo commented on Ask HN: What are the best Godot 4 production-grade learning resources? · Posted by u/aecorredor

On a related note: Does anyone know any Godot resources for folks with previous programming experience that focus mostly on the game-specific path?

I have ten years of professional programming experience, I've just never made a game. All the Godot tutorials I can find have extensive explanations of loops, functions and similar basic concepts.

birophilo · 2 years ago

Most of these resources (e.g. the Chris Bradfield book) are targeted at experienced programmers new to game dev. GDQuest has a coding beginner's track and a developer's track, although the usual v3 vs. v4 caveats apply.

birophilo commented on Ask HN: What are the best Godot 4 production-grade learning resources? · Posted by u/aecorredor

aecorredor · 2 years ago

Thanks! Hadn’t heard about the book. Do you feel it’s worth diving into the GDQuest courses even though they are v3? Given the price, I feel like I should wait until they release the v4 versions.

birophilo · 2 years ago

I would get to the point where you can create simple games in Godot 4.0 first before looking at the GDQuest 3.0 courses. At beginner level, the 3 vs. 4 differences will be too confusing. But once you're at the stage where you're looking for intermediate courses, you can try and tackle the GDQuest 3.0 courses in 4.0 if you're brave. Some API changes are superficial enough, others less so - the forum comments have been very helpful to me. The GDQuest team are working on 4.0 material right now, although I think these will be new courses rather than makeovers for the existing ones.

EDIT: I sound like I'm taking sales commission here, but one more recommendation: the Bradfield book is available as a Kindle ebook, but Kindle's code formatting can be pretty tortuous, and incredibly you can't even copy-paste from the Kindle app without some hack or other. But Packt offer the full book as nicely formatted HTML.

birophilo commented on Ask HN: What are the best Godot 4 production-grade learning resources? · Posted by u/aecorredor

birophilo · 2 years ago

I'm on the same road as you, a couple of months ahead.

After watching lots of tutorial videos and scouring the web for resources, here is what I'd recommend, or at least how I would do it over again myself:

First, a note on versions. The Godot ecosystem is in the middle of a big transition from version 3.x to 4.x, which introduces a lot of improvements but also some breaking changes. If you want to make a browser game in the immediate future, stick with Godot 3, as web exports for 4.0 aren't yet functional. For most other things, 4.0 seems to be the place to start.

- Start by going through the official (4.x) docs including the walkthrough games. As with many open source projects, the official docs are underrated. https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/index.html

- Then, the course I found most useful after trying lots of other things is the book "Godot 4 Game Development Projects" by Chris Bradfield. It teaches basic concepts as you build different games such as: 2D platformer, Asteroids, 3D Minigolf etc. The quality of the code examples and the design patterns feel a lot better than some of the video tutorials on YouTube. Not taking anything away from video tutorials - sometimes a visual demo is just the ticket, of course. But a book can introduce concepts comprehensively and benefits from professional editing. This is where it started to click for me.

- Then I would recommend the website GDQuest (gdquest.com). It has free courses and game pattern tutorials in Godot, e.g. state machines, but the best stuff is the premium content, which is not cheap but worth it. It has games courses like RPG's and tower defence. I'm working through their "2D Secrets" course - currently on a Factorio-style (builder simulation) game tutorial and it's the most detailed game walkthrough I've seen in Godot. I'm working on a sim project myself, so it's just right for me. Plus it introduces you to the Entity-Component System design pattern in Godot. Unfortunately it's all in Godot 3.0, but once you're comfortable enough with 4.0 you can start to translate the differences and there are comments on the forums plugging the gaps.

Hadn't heard about Quiver.dev until now but it also looks great!