Setting Up the Environment

Game development is becoming more accessible as game engines become more powerful. Tools and pipelines that were only available to big companies and wealthy individuals are now freely available to everyone with a computer. Anyone can feel the satisfaction of creating their own game and having others play it.

This is exactly what we are going to achieve in this book. We will go from knowing absolutely nothing about programming or developing games to creating our very first game and even a little beyond.

During the first part of this book, we will learn all about setting up Godot and programming. This might be a little more abstract, but I’ll try to give clear examples and keep you engaged with exercises and experiments you can do for yourself.

The second part of this book will be way more practical as we will dive neck-deep into creating our very own video game! We’ll learn how to use the Godot editor to create interesting game scenes and scenarios.

In the last part of this book, we’ll take our programming skills to the next level and learn all about advanced topics, such as more powerful concepts, programming patterns, the filesystem, and much more.

But before we get there, nothing is more satisfying than starting a new project! It represents a blank slate with endless possibilities. By the end of this chapter, we’ll have created our very own blank slate and written our first lines of code. But first, I’d like to take some time to introduce the Godot game engine and open-source software in general.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Godot Engine and open-source software
• Downloading the engine from the official website
• Creating our first project
• How to join the community