My first steps with GDScript and Godot

This has nothing to do with work — it’s the “for personal enjoyment” part I mention in my profile. I’d been wanting to try game development for a while, more out of curiosity than any plan to release anything, and I had to decide where to start.

Why Godot and not Unity

I looked at Unity first, like everyone does. But as soon as I opened the editor I felt the same thing as the first time I opened Angular for a small project: too many pieces for what I wanted to do, which was basically move a square around the screen and have it collide with another square. Godot is much lighter to get into, the editor weighs a handful of megabytes and boots in seconds, and for a hobby squeezed into spare evening hours, that matters more than I expected.

GDScript felt like coming home

I expected to have to learn a whole new language from scratch. Instead, GDScript has a syntax so close to Python that, coming from years with JavaScript and PHP, within a weekend I was already writing scripts without checking the docs every other line. Indentation as block structure (instead of braces) took me a couple of days to get used to, especially coming from languages where whitespace doesn’t matter at all.

The first dumb bug

My first prototype was literally a character moving around a 2D room with the arrow keys. The first real bug was a silly one: the character accelerated without limit every time you held down a key, because it was adding velocity every frame without checking a maximum. Anyone with experience in games would have laughed, but it made me suddenly understand why the physics loop (_physics_process) is a completely different beast from the event loop I’m used to on the web.

I don’t have any concrete plan with this, beyond continuing to learn. But if I ever combine this with what I’m learning about Rust and get around to Unreal in C++, I’ll report back on how it goes.