Guide to the Godot game engine

This book will teach you about the free and open source Godot engine. Godot, like Unreal, Unity and other common game engines, has an active community. However, Godot is free, less demanding on operating systems, so you can use it on older hardware, and you can "export" your game to various systems, including mobile, in a single mouse click. It may be free, but it's not lacking in any way.

Godot was named after the play, Waiting for Godot, as it represents a never-ending wish to add more features, which would make it closer to a exhaustive product.

A screenshot of Godot's user interface from version 3.1.
A screenshot of a 2D platformer in the editor.
A screenshot of a 3D project.
A test 4.0 mini-project
The GDScript workspace in an example game.

Note:

Godot is constantly being updated. If any information is incorrect or outdated, please correct it. Godot 4.x should not be the only focus of the book, since other people still use Godot 3.x as well.

Any code snippets should default to the Godot 4.2+ syntax, unless the page is about an earlier version.

Wikipedia has related information at Godot (game engine)

A printable version of Guide to the Godot game engine is available. (edit it)

Getting started [edit]

Installation

What is a node?

Programming

Resources and importing

Making it work

Making it look good

Advanced help

Miscellaneous

Authors and contributors

Print version

To do:

Finish/add incomplete chapters
Proofread
Expand the GDScript section (last thing to be done)

Introduction

What even is Godot?

Godot is, like explained above, an open-source game engine. The advantage of being open-source is Anybody can edit its source code! If it doesn't do quite what you need it to do, just crack it open and see what new tools you can make. If it's good enough, you can even submit the code to be part of the next official update! Another advantage is what you make (be it an app or a game or a plugin) is completely yours! No strings attached, no royalties, no limitation of license... Exactly how game development should be!

However, console-specific code cannot be compiled with open-source code. You need to pay somebody else who can compile it for you, and this can be costly. Then-again, most engines have the same issue. And several games made with this engine have been released onto a console.

In addition, Godot's API is not like most game engines, where you can find things like "entities" and "props". Everything is done with nodes, Godot's building blocks, which can be put together in many ways to get your entity or prop. Each node may also have a script. While highly flexible, it has some performance cost.

Godot's "Create New Node" popup showing a part of the node family.

Godot has many nodes, but this book is not the place to list each and every one. That's what Godot's official class reference is for. This book will focus on what Godot is, help you achieve your goals and provide helpful links for those who want more info can go to.

What inspired me to start this book?

I was shocked that Wikibooks had no Godot guides. It had guides for Ada, LolGraphics, C++, C#, HTML, JavaScript and more, but not one on either Godot or a game engine (not that I could find anyway).

Godot guides out there had very little I didn't know, and some were books that cost... money. Well, a wiki's belief is that all information should be free.