Hi! Here at Endless OS Foundation we have recently started engaging young learners in the world of Godot; our learning programs aim to develop a broad range of 21st century skills in underserved communities, and game creation provides a fantastic environment for that to happen.
We are looking at different ways to ease first-time game developers into Godot. As part of this we have just published our initial learner-oriented block programming plugin prototype for Godot. It is available via the AssetLib. Here is a demo of how it can be used to build a simple game:
More background and getting started info in the README.
Our aim is to reduce the learning curve faced by learners who are on the early part of their journey towards becoming game developers and are starting to use Godot for the first time. These learners face the challenge of learning to code, while simultaneously having to learn their way around the Godot Editor. In this project, we take a step to smoothen that out for the learners: we allow games to be built with high-level visual programming blocks, instead of GDScript. Tools like Scratch and Makecode have demonstrated that block coding can be much more accessible and intuitive to beginners than textual programming. We envision that learners will use block coding as a stepping stone to learn programming concepts while building their first games, simultaneously getting familiar with the rest of the Godot editor, before later progressing onto learning GDScript.
We are making this initial version available seeking feedback from community members, learners and educators. We will then continue development, incorporating such feedback and improving the technical architecture. Please share your feedback!
The Endless team will be at GodotCon 2024 in Berlin - hope to see you there!
