Godot Projects - Notes

[HobbyPirates]

Making a post to help remind myself of how far I’ve gotten this time and to keep it up. Maybe someone else can take some notes to help their journey too. If you have a minute, I appreciate you being a part of my journey.

I jumped into the Godot 3D beginner course as I’ve spent the last couple of years getting comfortable with Blender now and would like to try and use the skills to get into making assets for my own games. I did portions of the Unity and Unreal courses in the past but really struggled with the programs and coding.

Godot has really felt like a dream this time around as it has been clicking with me a lot easier than either program before. The teacher Bramwell might be my favorite since Grant. He has made the journey feel so great along the way and Corey K(teaching assistant in forums) has been insanely helpful anytime I’ve felt stuck.

I was able to complete all three demos from the Godot 3D course:
Boost:

I was able to bring in my own rocket/spaceship from an old animation I made last year, and my own model for the moving hazards.

‘Barbarian Blaster’ I turned into ‘Dragon Rampage’:

I was able to bring in my own models for the towers, make the unicorns work instead of the turret guns, and bring in my own animated enemy models for the dragons. It was challenging but taught me some of the limitations/rules for starting to bring in rigged and animated characters myself. Creating a second level and code for the game to auto continue felt great.

Robo Rampage/FPS Demo:

This section covered a lot more and so I followed closer to the exact steps. I did add a shift-sprint ability, but I wasn’t able to make the gun move when aiming like I tried and wanted to do. The player is able to go from a menu upon opening the game to either level 1 or the sandbox, and if they die, they can go back to the menu or reload the selected level. The interactivity to go between menus and the levels is not something we actually covered, so this felt great to be able to implement.

Alongside 3D Godot course I found two other free amazing resources. The Godot Docs offer great written walk throughs for making ‘your first game’ as it is listed.

Follow it here if you’d like to:
Your first 3D game — Godot Engine (stable) documentation in English

This was one of my first times doing a written lesson actually, and I think it felt great. I did already complete the Project Boost and first level of the Tower defense sections, so it wasn’t my very first game, but I think it was a great reinforcement of everything I had learned.

Finally there is a free lesson playlist being made on Youtube right now for 3D platformers. Following along with this, but trying to use my own assets everywhere I can. This lesson playlist really lets my previous time in blender feel like it is shining.

You could check out the playlist here:
Godot 4 3D Platformer Lesson #1: Let’s Get Started!

I took a robot my husband made a year or two ago and gave it a basic rig and got him into a 3D platformer. I threw together quick assets for the blocks in game, used an old coin asset for an animation I had done, and created an ‘invader’ enemy for the game. Sadly, the playlist isn’t completed, and I already want to implement somethings differently as well, but it has been an amazing lesson to go through and an amazing learning experience.

Now trying to move on to the next steps to continue a Godot journey I’ve stepped into the 2.5 RPG and the 3D RPG Godot courses.

The 2.5 RPG course uses C# instead, which I hoped could help bridge me to Unity in the future again as well, but it’s been very challenging. The 3D rpg course feels amazing, not sure if it’s just Bramwell being the teacher again or my comfortability, but I am excited to learn from him and hope he does more lessons in the future.

Thank you so much to the teachers, assistants, and gamedev in general as always. I let C# and godot updates/crashes get to me a little the other day, but I’ve made more progress this time then I have the last three times trying to learn coding. I hope everyone keeps up their determination as well.

[CoreyKnecht]

@HobbyPirates

teaching assistant in forums) has been insanely helpful anytime I’ve felt stuck.

^v^

@HobbyPirates

The 2.5 RPG course uses C# instead, which I hoped could help bridge me to Unity in the future again as well

I thought I’d add here, just in case you haven’t noticed this yet, that C# in Godot and C# in Unity aren’t going to translate all that closely because of the engine-specific stuff sprinkled throughout the code. That said, you will definitely learn strategies and tactics in there that you could bring to Unity if you wanted to. With enough effort, it’s definitely also possible to refactor something from one engine to the other (I’m actually doing that now, following a Unity course using GDScript, largely to see what can be translated before you have to implement raw ideas from scratch).

Persistence is the key to learning dev stuff, and the fact that you fell off the bandwagon a few times in the past makes this showcase even nicer to see!

[OboShape]

Awesome, good to read and see how far you have came along and how your pulling from different resources and making these games your own.

Brilliant to get an idea on your learning style and how it’s really working , look forward to see how you progress.

Daz

[HobbyPirates]

Progress check for myself

Completed a 2D version of Asteroids following a youtube tutorial:

Still utilizing resources like SVGRepo for the 2D assets, I actually created my own sound effects with Reaper for the firing and take damage effects on this demo. I’d like to add music as I know how to get it to load but challenging myself to try and make songs without thinking they’re too repetitive or boring has been hard(very fun though). I’m not able to find the specific tutorial I used for this, but there are multiple available on Youtube.

Using Godot Docs I remade the ‘dodge the creeps’ 2D game they have a tutorial on:

Your first 2D game — Godot Engine (stable) documentation in English

This didn’t take long, and I really just wanted another project to get more familiar with the 2D workflow of Godot. I work in 2D and 3D art so getting familiar with both styles in development is ideal.

Progressing the 3D RPG Course here on Game Dev, I am on chapter 65 out of 100:

This has been a lot of fun, and I can’t wait to be able to create my own models and themes while being able to use and refactor the scripts I’ll have finished at the end of this for those future projects.
I tried to pull the Knight model into blender and create a little ‘dance’ animation to see if I could add it to the game, but the reimporting process became confusing. I think starting from scratch on the character and trying to apply the script to it will be easier with the work we’ve done so far, but I know there are methods to adding animations to existing characters. I’ll need to learn that pipeline a little better before potentially breaking my in-progress projects.

I have found I enjoy going through the games/scripts I’ve completed and adding the #notes for myself inside of my code after the fact.
It gives me a reason to go back to these projects, reread, and re-understand what the code was doing and then provide notes now on why I did it and what it is doing still. Finding that reinforcing lessons and code I have written this way has made it more enjoyable and understandable for myself. I’m able to focus on my lessons during them and reinforce them later while I am relaxing by writing notes after the fact.

Hopefully this will also make refactoring/changing scripts so they can be applied to new future projects easier.

I’ve not made any further progress on the RPG 2.5 C# Demo yet, and think it’ll likely be easier to do once the RPG3D course it completed. I look forward to picking it back up though, and I’ve left it in an easy-to-understand spot.

Thank you for following with me.

[CoreyKnecht]

Looking good!

Have you heard of the 20 Games Challenge? It might give you some ideas =)

https://20_games_challenge.gitlab.io/challenge/

[HobbyPirates]

This is a really amazing resource and provides such a nice path for getting confident, thank you so much for this.

I have not seen this before, but it’ll be one of my main lists for progressing along with the Gamedev courses. I am a huge fan of clearing a check list but really struggle creating my own checklists, so I love to see this.

[CoreyKnecht]

Cheers; I thought you might like this, given what you’ve already done to challenge yourself outside of the courses. It’ll be interesting to see what you do with this ^v^

[OboShape]

nice, made a note of that myself.
used to do the 1GameAMonth when it was running, but this sounds a good challenge.

[CoreyKnecht]

Oh neat, it’s basically a no-rules game jam with a “preface from the author” for each topic =)

If anyone reading is curious, all the topics are archived here, so feel free to read through at your leisure and see if inspiration strikes: Stream #1GAM | Listen to podcast episodes online for free on SoundCloud

[HobbyPirates]

Continuing Godot Notes since I’ve reached a great point of sharing.

Start to say I finished the 3D RPG Course ~!

As with all of the Gamedev coding courses I find I’m a little conflicted personally as I want more of course, but for what the course offered and what I learned it was one of my favorites. Despite wanting more, it still covered so much I will likely find myself referring to the videos again in the future since I particularly love RPG features in games.

The course was so long I found myself also wanting to work on some smaller projects so I could finish some things. Grabbing the resource for the 20 Games Challenge Corey K directed me to was perfect for this.

Flappy Pegasus to start
I want to expand on this one with a few more ideas. I’d like to figure out how to get good looking and working Parallax effect and have it so when the player reaches a certain score, they can unlock the ability to turn into something else and change the environment.

Two player Pong
I’ve already learned more since ‘finishing’ this and want to expand on its sound, vfx, and menus a little more - but it is a playable two(or self) pong game!

Break Out/Brick Break
I am really proud of how this one managed to turn out so far. I’m not sure how much further I’ll expand on it, but I know I’d like to refine it a little more. The coolest parts are the fact you can choose the player paddle color in the menu for your games, it has sound effects for most things, and learning to generate in the different colors/spaces for bricks in each level was something I was really thrilled learning.

Really the best part of the Pong and Break Out games are actually that I finally managed to learn exporting to Itch.io!
Play Pong Versus or Break Out here

Which is also why I am encouraged to refine them further for the best player experiences in the future I am so thrilled to be where I am with Godot. Thank you to everyone who helps along the way.

I am actually going to try and take on the Plug Ins course for Godot next since I want to further expand the 3D RPG Demo and eventually upload it to Itch.io as well. The dialogue plug in was mentioned, so that course should help me get ready to use it and others.

Thanks for being with me on my journey.