Godot 4 Game Development Projects: Build five cross-platform 2D and 3D games using one of the most powerful open source game engines 2nd Edition

Enjoying it a lot so far.

I've been writing various types of software for 10 years and was interested in learning Godot for 2D games. This book turned out to be informative and easy to follow and gave me the knowledge I was seeking. I learn best by example, and this project focused book was excellent in that regard.If you have zero programming experience, I would recommend learning something like Python before diving into this book. The book teaches with GDScript, which is Godot's Python-like programming language.There are some minor mistakes in the book, but an errata is currently being kept up-to-date on the github repository for the book. I opened a few issues for things I discovered, and the author added those things to the errata. Keep this in mind if you end up getting stuck on something and are 100% sure you followed the directions in the book.I use Unreal for 3D games, so I have not yet gone through the chapters of this book for 3D games. I wouldn't expect a drastic drop in quality, but for the purposes of this review I can't give any insight on the 3D chapters.

I very rarely write reviews for things, but I felt compelled to do so for this book based on my experience.I had an amazing experience with this book for the first 3 chapters. There were some errors and things just plain missing in those chapters, but I was able to debug and provide solutions for those things. For example, some lines of code were omitted and score keeping was completely left out from Chapter 3. I have since found that errata is helpfully published on the GitHub repository. Overall I had a lot of fun working through the first 3 chapters.Chapter 4 is where I decided to give up and move on to other resources. I found the lack of guidance on level design and truly understanding and using tile maps and tile sets downright frustrating. Perhaps this chapter would be more approachable if I had prior game development experience. The author very much glosses over level design and it went from a poor explanation of the concept to just "now design your level". Referencing the finished project from the GitHub repository did not provide much assistance either.If you are new to game development, I think the first 3 chapters are a helpful introduction and they have definitely furthered my interest in both Godot and game development. However, I had to bail after Chapter 4 in search of better material.Perhaps I will return to the book after learning more from other resources.

simple and easy introduction to godot and gdscript.

When learning a new engine it can be difficult to transition from follow along, "code with me" style courses to developing games on your own. This is a great book for beginners who have gone through some introductory content and are looking for more in depth projects to sink their teeth in to.Although I've only read through the book so far I am pretty confident that once you have completed all of these projects you will have a very solid foundation to start forging your own path to develop your own ideas. All of the projects within have patterns and recipes that could easily be utilized for game jams or commercial games.The only thing I wish this book had more of was more screenshots for context. It takes a little bit more energy to understand what is being referred to without screenshots. It would also have been helpful for the code blocks contained within to follow a similar color pattern that the GDScript editor has (like a dark background, green text for some classes, blue text for functions, etc). It would have made the code a lot easier to parse through when you are reading and analyzing it.Despite the above, this is a solid book with a great set of projects to work on. Definitely worth checking out if you are someone who prefers learning through text instead of through video.

As a hobbyist Godot game dev, I was worried the early chapters of this book would be boring for me because of the beginner-friendly nature of the book. What I instead found while reading through the first few chapters was that a lot of the online Godot tutorials out there are great for code, but not as much for planning - this book has helped me to really think through what nodes I use. I've also learned about incredibly useful things I had no idea existed, even as early as the first project, such as MarginContainer nodes.There are the occasional errors in the chapters I've read such as typos in function names or missing images, but the book itself does link to where such errors can be reported and I'll certainly be doing my part to report those errors when I have the time to finish working through the book's projects.All in all, while I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, I'm already pleased with what I've seen & even more excited about the upcoming chapters based on the promised topics - in particular, I'm super excited to get to the chapter with procedural generation!

My husband is really big into game development. He has used Unity and Unreal Engine for a while now, settling on Unreal Engine to be his game engine of choice. Especially after the news that Unity dropped about a month ago now. However he came across this book and started to use Godot for the first time because of this book. He is now a firm believer in Godot and believes that it could be used to create really great AAA games soon. With the help from this book and the projects that you build throughout, you can become proficient in Godot. While you might not make the next Call of Duty or Fortnite with Godot, nothing will stop you from making a great 2D platformer that could rival a certain plumber and his brother.