I just finished the Complete Godot 4 Game Developer 2D course and I can’t help but feel disappointed.
A bit of context: a couple of years back I went through the Complete Unity 3D course (and some of that 2D one as well) and I was really impressed by the quality and breadth of material covered. Not only was it a really great learning experience, the amount covered, together with some additional experience I gathered through a handful of game jams, actually was enough to land me a job as a game developer - and I’ve stuck to it since. That course really was enough to get started with a career in game dev.
I’ve also dabbled quite a bit with Godot over the last 2 years. My forte is still 3D stuff, though, and I always wanted to expand my skills towards 2D gamedev as well. Thus I was really excited when I saw that GameDev.tv offered a Godot 2D course - and under the same “Complete” moniker.
Now, you can certainly argue about what “complete” means in the context of something as huge as modern game engines. The Unity courses certainly don’t cover nearly everything that engine has to offer, especially when it comes to the more advanced topics.
However, those courses did provide a very solid foundation from which one could reasonably tackle most topics one would encounter going forward.
And that’s where this course really left a sour note with me. I’m certainly no beginner, in neither gamedev in general nor in Godot, so I did expect there to be some repetition when it came to the basics. I just also expected there to be something else beyond those basics, however.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to be overly critical here. For what it’s worth I think Kaan is actually pretty good at explaining stuff and his approach is clear and methodical. (Though I seem to remember having seen the majority of what’s covered here on his YT channel before. So there’s that too.)
But this course really just scratches the bare surface of 2D game dev. Like, even still at the basics level there’s so much missing:
- BUILDING AND PUBLISHING THE GAME ! !
- Input reading with the proper _input() function and callbacks
- Mouse interactions beyond a single clickable button
- Menu navigation and UI beyond a single clickable button
- Raycasting
- Physics
- Pausing games & non-realtime games
- Saving and Loading
- Materials (not to even mention shaders)
- Arrays vs Lists vs Queues
- Animations and Animations players beyond just changing sprite frames
- Screen space vs world vs local coordinate systems
Do ALL of these have to be covered for this course to be a “Complete Godot 4 Game Developer”? Maybe not. But some of them are really important and not knowing them will stifle rather than encourage a young developer.
For me personally this isn’t such a big deal - but I’m also an experienced developer. However, if I had come to this course in the same way I came to the Complete Unity Courses back in the day, I would have been completely lost tackling anything even of the scale of a small jam game.