Foreword

In December 2014, Godot Engine 1.0 was released. With this first public release, the feature-packed, free, and open source project delivered on its promise of a cross-platform, easy-to-use, and powerful game creation tool.

I fell in love with Godot's high-level features and its permissive license, so I jumped right in, with no prior game development experience. I felt a bit lost when I first opened the editor. I moved on to the online documentation and started reading the well-written, step-by-step introduction. It covered basic concepts, such as scenes and nodes and the GDScript programming language, and it showed how to create a Pong clone, and that was basically it, at that time. There were some more tutorials on advanced features, but there was a gap between them and the first guide. As a complete beginner, I was stuck with the following question: how do I make my first game? Yet, I kept exploring, and with the help of the Godot community, I could eventually build a simple 2D game with a local multiplayer. What a feeling to see your first game on the screen!

Fast-forward to 3 years from then, Godot has grown a lot as a project, a community, and an engine. Godot 3.0 was released in January 2018 after 18 months of work. It brought this free, community-driven project to the level of its proprietary counterparts for 2D and 3D game development. The beginner game developer that I was became a project manager, helping to organize and focus the work of hundreds of contributors revolving around the engine. Working together with people from all around the world improved all areas of the project: engine features, usability, localization, and, of course, documentation.
Thanks to many dedicated contributors, Godot's documentation became one of the most accessible technical resources that I have seen in free and open source projects. This is in great part thanks to Chris Bradfield, the author of this book, who spent countless hours writing new material and reviewing contributions to ensure their accuracy and quality of writing.

With this book, Chris goes one step further and provides a thorough answer to that question (how do I make my first game?), shared by many Godot beginners. Indeed, he goes beyond that, as Godot Engine Game Development Projects will lead you through the creation of five full-featured games—four in 2D and one in 3D. Each game introduces new features and concepts of Godot so that you can learn how and when to use them in your own creations. Advanced users with experience in other game development tools (or even Godot itself) will learn how to use Godot's unique architecture and features to write better, more maintainable code through Chris' showcase of best practices.

From setting up Godot for the first time on your computer to publishing your own games to a wide range of platforms, Chris runs you through all the steps in a concise yet thorough way. After the first lesson, you should already be able to see how straightforward and accessible game development can be with a tool such as Godot, even if you had no prior experience in game creation. You will also feel a great sense of accomplishment seeing your own creation playing on your computer or smartphone, with the power to implement new gameplay elements with just a few lines of code.
I wish you a lot of fun on your game development journey, and a warm welcome to the Godot community.

Rémi Verschelde

Godot Engine – Project Manager