Book Image

Godot 4 Game Development Projects - Second Edition

By : Chris Bradfield
5 (1)
Book Image

Godot 4 Game Development Projects - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Chris Bradfield

Overview of this book

Godot 4.0 is one of the most sought-after open-source game engines, and if you’re enthusiastic about exploring its features, then this book is for you. Written by an author with over twenty-five years of experience, the Godot 4 Game Development Projects introduces the Godot game engine and its feature-rich 4.0 version. With an array of new capabilities, Godot 4.0 is a strong alternative to expensive commercial game engines. If you’re a beginner, this book will help you learn game development techniques, while experienced developers will understand how to use this powerful and customizable tool to bring their creative visions to life. This updated edition consists of five projects with an emphasis on the 3D capabilities of the engine that will help you build on your foundation-level skills through small-scale game projects. Along the way, you’ll gain insights into Godot’s inner workings and discover game development techniques that you can apply to your projects. Using a step-by-step approach and practical examples, this book covers everything from the absolute basics to sophisticated game physics, animations, and much more. By the time you complete the final project, you’ll have a strong foundation for future success with Godot 4.0 and you’ll be well on your way to developing a variety of games.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Creating the UI

Creating a UI for your game can be very complex, or at least time-consuming. Precisely placing individual elements and ensuring they work across different-sized screens and devices is the least interesting part of game development for many programmers. Godot provides a wide variety of Control nodes to assist in this process. Learning how to use the various Control nodes will help lessen the pain of creating a polished UI.

For this game, you don’t need a very complex UI. The game needs to provide the following information and interactions:

  • Start button
  • Status message (such as “Get Ready” or “Game Over”)
  • Score
  • Lives counter

Here is a preview of what you will make:

Figure 3.18: UI layout

Figure 3.18: UI layout

Create a new scene and add a CanvasLayer node with the name HUD as the root node. You’ll build the UI on this layer using the Control node’s layout features.

Layout

Godot...