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  • Godot course for an experienced (non-gamedev) programmer?

Searched the forums for that topic, several similar questions but none quite the same as mine on the first page of results.

Are there any Godot courses for an experienced programmers not from gamedev industry? What I find is usually some very basic course, where too much time is spend on explaining what a variable is, too little time on the "nodes" model, and none time whatsoever on what is consensus code style.

My ideal course would:

  • Have a very short 10 minute lecture on basics of GDScript, most of the time spent on specifics not present in most of the other languages ("single file = single class", onready, $vars, etc.). All code shown should strictly follow some code style convention (and that convention should be briefly commented on).
  • Have several lectures (probably main volume of content) on different "reference" or "exemplar" architectures of games of different genres (e.g. 2D platformer, FPS, board game, turn-based strategy). With the accent on where to put which file and how to design scenes/nodes and classes rather than on some visual or gameplay aspects.
  • Have several lectures on shaders, showing what typical tasks there are and how to solve them with some or another shader.
  • Have a number of lectures which would overview asset creation/utilization, asset stores, asset conversion and asset creation (mentioning several typical instruments for "indie" gamedev, even with the reservation that there are innumerable number of programs to draw, compose and model).
  • Have each lecture contain short notes (maybe in the text, not video itself) on what will be changed with Godot 4.0

Is there something close to this, at which I could throw my money, or I should start doing it old-school way with documentation and practice? 🙂

GDScript is pretty well explained in the documentation. I think the rest is just using it. It'll take a bit more than 10 minutes, though.
Game design is a vast field. But there are examples for a platformer, fps and a board game in the documentation. So that's covered there.
Shaders in Godot, can't say anything there since I only did GLSL until now. Quite generally, when working with the embarrassing parallelism it is important to understand the render pipeline, its stages and what can be programmed and what's done automagically. A pretty good overview, certainly transferable to Godot, is D. Wolff, OpenGL 4 Shading Language Cookbook, 3rd edition. Packtpub 2018. A must for a shader programmer, covers all the basic stuff (compute lacks a bit), but from a lower level pov. Also good for Vulkan.
For asset creation, there are (besides others) the GIMP and Blender. I am tempted to say one can't do everything, maybe a programmer can team up with an artist for these things ?

Since Godot 4.0 is on the brink of becoming feature f.f.f.frozen, one could maybe start there right away.

Just my 2 cents ...

gdquest.com is one to look at if you have not already.

Davidepsece.com has some great tutorials on 2d rpgs (even though I would not start with this). GDQuest, as said, is a good one, as is KidsCanCode.

However, I honestly can say the best way to learn it - and object-oriented programming - is to just build simple games so you can understand how all the moving parts work. Build a pong clone, build a mario clone, etc etc or whatever game you loved as a kid. Don't worry about making them pretty at first. Get some free assets (like [(https://opengameart.org/]) and play with them until you understand Bodies, Areas, Raycasts and get them doing what you want. A lot of programming is several simple building blocks built into large functional shapes.

And to add: this community rocks. It's been very welcoming and there's plenty of help here. Even if it's a newbie question. 😃

For assets, I use:

  • Audacity (audio editing - free)
  • Pixelorama (Great 2d pixel art program made in Godot, also free)
  • GIMP (for non-pixel and deeper art editing - also free)
  • Inkscape for PNGs of vectorizing hand-drawn art and scans (almost replacing GIMP these days - also free)
  • Github for backing up code/assets and keeping my versions correct between machines (MUST HAVE)

As for pixel art, Medium [ has some great tutorials, as does LoSpec. [https://lospec.com/pixel-art-tutorials]

Nerdzmasterz I have used one on Zenva and it was pretty worthless. (So much that they apparently made it free now). I don't feel awful about it because it was a humble bundle but the stuff it taught me you could easily learn from the docs and a little elbow grease.

Be wary on a lot of these online academy courses. I have even seen some charge for tutorials that you can do for free if you just search the Internet that have obviously been lifted/adapted for monetization.

      SnapCracklins No doubt. I came across a few worthless ones, but I was too beginner at the time to really understand anything. It was GameDev TV and Awesome Tuts that got me out of that rut. By that time, I only knew how to print text on the screen, do simple math, and maybe move simple objects around using vectors.My guess is that it is the most frustrating part of programming, at least it was for me.