About GDScript

GDScript's syntax is very closely modeled on the Python language. If you are familiar with Python already, you will find GDScript very familiar. If you are comfortable with another dynamic language, such as JavaScript, you should find it relatively easy to learn. Python is very often recommended as a good beginner language, and GDScript shares that user-friendliness.

This book assumes you have at least some programming experience already. If you've never coded before, you may find it a little more difficult. Learning a game engine is a large task on its own; learning to code at the same time means you've taken on a major challenge. If you find yourself struggling with the code in this book, you may find that working through an introductory Python lesson will help you grasp the basics.

Like Python, GDScript is a dynamically typed language, meaning you do not need to declare a variable's type when creating it, and it uses whitespace (indentation) to denote code blocks. Overall, the result of using GDScript for your game's logic is that you write less code, which means faster development and fewer mistakes to fix.

To give you an idea of what GDScript looks like, here is a small script that causes a sprite to move from left to right across the screen at a given speed:

extends Sprite

var speed = 200

func _ready():
    position = Vector2(100, 100)

func _process(delta):
    position.x += speed * delta
    if position.x > 500:
        position.x = 0

Don't worry if this doesn't make sense to you yet. In the following chapters, you'll be writing lots of code, which will be accompanied by explanations of how it all works.