Learning Godot

Day 6: Finished the multiplayer series, then went through about a third of it at double speed taking notes the entire time. It’s a lot to go over, so the repetition helps, and writing it down on top of that extra helps. Otherwise, it’s the exact same tutorial series, so there’s not much new here. Practice makes perfect and all that jazz.

As a side note, The Algorithms have clearly picked up that I’m interested on this stuff, so I’m starting to salt in some random other informational videos over time. Not enough to really make worth accounting, but development is starting to occupy more of my time, even outside my forced three hours per day. That’s neat!

A two-day update since I forgot to last time:

Day 4: This one was a little rougher, I only got about an hour and a half in. My sleep was off, I didn’t have my coffee until late, I met with my new therapist for the first time - just a day I didn’t want to do pretty much anything. That said, still went through an hour and a half of multiplayer tutorials, which I wouldn’t be otherwise - I did what I felt I could, so I’ll still take that as a success.

Day 5: Later in the day, but hit the three-hour target again. This multiplayer series is really, really good! My plan for tomorrow is to finish it off (there’s not much of it left,) and then go through all of it again at like 1.5 speed and take notes as I go to review and strengthen my understanding of these concepts.

Day 3: About 5 hours in total! First off, I finished the 2D Demo game again - I’d run into a few issues the previous night when I was running out of steam, where a second into the game running it’d crash. I figured out this morning that my problem was how I’d linked signal emitters to functions, which is a great (if annoying) feature of the editor. There are tools that can link some actions and functions together, which don’t appear “on the page” as a line of code anywhere, so I’d missed it. I’m sure it’s a wonderful feature, I’ll just have to get used to it. (These can also be hard-defined in code, but the tutorial used editor tools; I’m not sure if there’s a functional difference or not, but I just followed instructions.)

After that, rather than jumping straight into the next example project (which is a 3D game,) I looked through their community list of tutorials and found someone who’d made a series on client-server architecture with Godot games (). All of my current project ideas will want multiplayer, and that’s been one of those things plaguing my mind with uncertainty in how to approach it. I’m now a few videos into that series and devouring all of it.

This feels like it’s way ahead of where I should be looking - and I’ve got a lot of engine familiarity to go, to be sure. That said, it immediately excited me, there are some design implications which might inform ways to build my games better, and I love letting ideas and knowledge simmer for a while before actually using it. Now some of my idle thoughts will be about authentication gateways and tokens and APIs, leaving me a bit more prepared and less worried once I get to those parts of the project.

I’ve been meaning to do this for years, but have always been stuck in old habits of spending time. The simple practice of journalling progress and keeping myself accountable to internet strangers has gotten me to put more effort into this in a week than I have most of my life. Thanks!

Day 2: Most of three hours done today; I got sidetracked earlier in the day which is when I’m mentally more focused. I could soldier through the last 15 minutes of the allotted time, but I’d rather rest a bit.

I’m getting back into the meat of the first game tutorial, which I’d actually done two years ago. It felt great to finish back then, the habit just didn’t stick - that’s what we’re here for. Went through the entirety of the first project ‘Your first 2D game,’ which makes a lot more sense now than it did the first time - I think reading and note-taking the documentation is a big factor here.

Mentally, I’m in a much better place this time around, and since the first run through I’ve taken on some wild programming projects (learning React to reverse-engineer two and a half thousand lines of undocumented/uncommented code,) the prospect of diving straight into something foreign is way less intimidating than it used to be.

Day 1: 3 straight hours, starting from the bottom. Spent a fair amount of time compiling the engine (it takes so much work just to be able to do work, ha!) only to find out the repo I cloned is for Godot 4. Syntax has changed from Godot 3, so none of the posted tutorials will compile. Oops! I’ll want Godot 3 so I can follow along and learn by doing. That aside, there was plenty of time to go through their documentation which is excellent. Got through basic structure of the engine (game is a tree structure of scenes which contain a tree of nodes for compartmentalization) and into a little bit of scripting before hitting the compile roadblock.