Basics of Godot

In this blog post I want to cover some of the basics of using the Godot game engine. For those that are new to the engine please follow the below steps to get the engine for your particular Operating System. The screenshots below will help you in what you should be looking for.

Steps For Installing Godot

  1. First we will head to Godot Website where we will click on the big download button. Download Latest Button

  2. Clicking this link will take us to the download page for our operating system. Download Page

  3. Now we will click the big blue download button. Make sure you don’t click the .NET one. We aren’t going to be covering C# in this article.

  4. You will see a Godot file or app depending on your platform, you can leave it in the Downloads directory if you want or you can create a short cut to it on the Desktop.

  5. Start the game engine up.

Once we start the engine we will see the following screen. Project Screen Whether you are on macOS, Windows or a supported version of Linux, the screen should look similar. The purpose of this screen is to manage your current projects with Godot. If this is your first time using Godot do not worry that yours is empty. That just means you haven’t created a project yet. If you would like to test that this screen is working properly, once you finish creating the project we are going to create in the next section, close out of the engine and then open it back up. Your newly created project should show up in the list verifying that the project management screen is working properly.

Creating A Project

Now that the engine is installed and the project management screen is open, we can get started on creating our first game. You can follow the below steps in order to create a game in Godot.

  1. Click the Create button.
  2. Fill out the following fields
    • Project Name: This is the name of your project. Doesn’t have to be the actual name you will share with the world when you release it but the name of the project you want to store on your system locally
    • Project Path: This is where you are storing the game locally. For instance on my mac I usually like to keep a folder on my Desktop called GodotProject. So the path would be /Users/jonathan/Desktop/GodotProjects where is the folder the project will be stored in. If you leave the Create Folder slider enabled Godot will automatically create a folder for you in the directory that you have chosen to store the project.
    • Then you will select the Renderer: This helps determine the quality of the game. For instance Forward+ will be for advanced
  3. Click on the create button

Example Game

In this section we will go through the steps to create the typical Hello World program that most developers go through when they first start learning a new language or framework. The below steps will walk us through creating this game.

  1. We need to create a game scene by clicking on the 2D Scene on the left. Game Project Window

  2. We need to add a new node to the scene. Click the + button in the top left Plus Button

  3. In the search box that appears type in label and click create

  4. We can follow the same steps to add a button. For the button before clicking the + button to add a new node make sure your 2D Scene node is the one selected.

  5. We can now save the scene, before we save it though we need to rename our 2D Scene to be something else. I chose Main for my name. Now when we press the save button the name will be based on the name of our 2D Scene node. In my case it will be main.tscn