First Steps

The first time I tested out Godot was a few years ago and I tinkered with it for maybe an hour before putting it down. Something about it turned me off but I was not sure what it was. I think my mind was just used to working with Unity and thinking about how it does things, and at the time I was not prepared to rewire my brain a bit. Fast forward to the past few weeks and the creative bug has bitten me once again. Since fully converting to Linux and embracing software alternatives in other avenues of my PC use I thought I would give it another try. I am so glad that I did.

Godot is Awesome

After the initial confusion passed, the flow of Godot became very clear, very quickly. The most confusing thing from the onset was changing what “scenes” meant in my mind. Normally in Unity a scene represents something like a level, and inside the hierarchy you have some objects like prefabs and other things. In Godot all of these things are scenes (at least if you plan on using them more than once). The scene is more of a package for the objects or “Nodes” you want to use.

For example, if I was making a coin that I wanted to pick up with the character, I would create a scene in Godot and place that scene inside the scene for my level. I feel like even typing that sounds confusing but once I wrapped my head around these Godot fundamentals of nodes and scenes it all started to click.

For some reason navigating Godot just feels good. I don’t know what it is but it feels like everything I’m looking for is exactly where I think it will be. The flow of the program itself just feels very natural. Most areas of the program also have search functionality so finding what you are looking for is extremely easy.

GD Script or C#

Godot does have its own language called GD Script but I wanted to use C#. There is two reasons for this choice; firstly, I can practice C# and make games and a lot of that practice is transferable and secondly, I am already fairly familiar with C#. This was an easy answer for me, but I have heard GD Script is fairly easy to pick up and has a similar syntax to Python. Overall I thought that using C# is more of a transferable skill than GD Script which is a limited scope.

Sprite Work

The other great thing about making games is that I will get to practice my sprite work as well. Aseprite is such an amazing program for making pixel art. I’ve decided I will stick to 16x16 pixel art to hopefully keep the animations a bit easier on myself until I am less green behind the ears. Either way it has been a lot of fun even setting up basic placeholder art.

Next Steps

Setting everything up with the mono build of Godot was dead simple and it’s working flawlessly on my current Arch setup. I have started playing around with some 2D platforming systems to get started. I will be starting by setting up a solid player controller, animation controller and state machine. Once these are fully functional and I am happy with them I will probably make a post to discuss them in depth. I think this will be a good way to reinforce everything I learned while creating it as well.

Cheers, Keith