Are you still searching for a platform to develop your 2D/3D game projects on? Are you looking for a well-documented game engine with an active community? Are you tired of using PyGame yet? Well, let me introduce you to Godot. What is Godot? Godot is a free open-source game engine that supports 2D / 3D game developments.
To understand how Godot works at a fundamental level, you have to learn about its four essential concepts: scenes, nodes, scene trees, and signals. In Godot, you can think of a game as a tree of nodes that you can assemble together into scenes or think of a game as it can be broken down into reusable scenes. What is a scene? A scene can be a map, a building, a character, a rock, or just everything that you see in the game. A scene can also be a child of other scenes and it should contain one or more nodes. Node is the basic/smallest building block in a trees’ arrangement. You take the advantage of Godot’s built-in library of base node types to create more powerful and functional nodes for your project. The scene tree is where all your game’s scenes come together. It should give one a basic overall of all the components in your game. And are you wondering how your game interacts with users? Here is where the signal comes in. A node can emit signals when some event happens and it’s how nodes communicate with each other.
Unlike PyGame, Godot provided you with an extensive editor for you to develop/execute your project plan. Once you opened up the editor, the first thing you see is the viewport that features the main scene as shown in the image below. At the top left, the scene tab will show all the relevant. And at the bottom panel, you have an output console, debugger, audio mixer, and animation editor that you can interact with. nodes. At the bottom left, The FileSystem gives you a list of all the project files. At the top right, the inspector allows you to update the properties of a chosen node. If you click on the play bottom at the top right, an interactive game window show pops up as shown in the image above.
This is not a tutorial article for Godot but is meant to give a basic intuition on how it works as a game engine. Now you have a basic knowledge of Godot, do you think it’s worth a try? I highly recommend you just download the Godot and give your projects a shoot. You might be surprised on something that’s so complicated in PyGame can be done effortlessly in Godot.
