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Sacramento WANFest Summer 2020
Jul
24

WANFest Godot Workshop

Prerequisites

An interest in making games! This workshop is for anyone that has ever wanted to create their own game, but wasn’t sure where to start. No prior programming knowledge is assumed or expected.

What You’ll Learn

During the workshop, you’ll make an arcade game using the Godot Engine, focusing on basic movements and interactions. By the end, you will have made a fully playable game and know how to share that game via an itch.io game page. While making the game, you’ll learn basic project structure techniques in Godot using nodes and scenes that will help you design your next game!

About Godot

The Godot Engine is open source, lightweight, and often easier for people to pick up compared to other engines like Unity and Unreal, making it a good choice for beginner game developers, while still having multi-platform support. While Godot supports several languages, the language most often used, and the language covered in this workshop, is gdscript, a Python-like scripting language.

Technical Set-up/Installations

Prior to the workshop, it is recommended that you download the Godot Engine, preferably through Steam. You can alternatively download the engine through the main Godot website. Downloading through Steam makes it easier to receive updates down the line, and much easier to look at demo projects. The Godot Engine is fairly lightweight, so starting a download at the beginning of the workshop should still give enough time to catch up.

Additional Resources

Joining a local meetup is a great way to meet others and get advice! Many groups have events listed on Meetup.com, which is a great way to find your own local group, but often most communication is through Discord. For Sacramento locals, check out the Sacramento Developer Collective Discord

Level Up!: The Guide to Great Video Game Design by Scott Rogers is a fantastic and approachable book often used in video game design courses.

Creating pixel art

  • Piskel (free to use / not as full featured)
  • Aseprite (widely used pixel art editor, also available through Steam)

Acquiring art assets: If you want to use existing art assets in future games, Itch.io has a large number of assets, from free to paid, that can work well in any project.

All upcoming game jams (hosted on Itch.io):
Itch.io Upcoming Jam (highly recommended to start with a longer one, 7+ days, for your first game jam)

Godot-specific