This was a great video. I've done nothing in Godot yet but I watched the video all the way through and I'm super motivated to try it out this week. Perfect timing as I've been wanting to pick it up and start learning how to build games.
There is this one game that I've been making for about 10 years now. I make it in one engine get annoyed with it and stop, then make It again in a different engine.
Apparently Unity was actually not that easy to use so possibly my frustrations with it were actually from that rather than anything else. I was going to try Unreal and I may still do that but it's nice to have a open source engine so it'd be worth trying in that one too.
He stopped making videos 3 years ago and said open source progress in gamedev has restored his enthusiasm. So he might be willing to share his videos on principle.
You don't need a YouTube account to be able to watch YouTube you can just follow the link. Although honestly I don't understand the hate for YT. I mean sure the ads are annoying but ad blockers exist and still work, despite all of Google's machinations.
Just skimmed the video, it's pretty good! Provides a good crash course for people to just start making a platformer, it definitely skims some important topics like physics layers or how to properly use tilemaps, but I expect follow up videos to start explaining things more.
Not entirely through the whole video yet but so far it seems easy enough to follow without much if any background knowledge.
Some of those Godot tools, especially the 2D related ones shown, are something I wish RPG Maker would've expanded upon instead of adding the whole Ruby scripting thing, which to me always felt going against the whole spirit & point of the engine. Maybe visual programming can, in the future, become some sort of slightly advanced substitute / replacement for those struggling with learning programming languages.
I feel like this is the one thing really "holding Godot back," from what I've heard from non-programmers getting started in gamedev.
I'm a programmer by trade, so I'm more than happy to write code, but a nice visual scripting language would really open it up to newbies. Hell, my first language was GameMaker's drag & drop system, so I can definitely appreciate the utility.
I don't understand the irreverence of this guy. His tutorials have always been notorious for being terrible practices that don't scale at all if you try to make anything bigger than a small one level game.
If he was giving professional software advice I think him giving mediocre software advice would be a bad thing. However this is a video designed for people with little to no experience, and the terminology/technology should reflect that.
There is a saying, don't let perfect be the enemy of good, and I think that applies here. just getting a project started and done is a good thing, even if your software practices are bad, those come with more practice anyway. When you are learning a new skill you start with small pieces and then add onto it over time.I wouldn't start teaching someone micro optimizations or design patterns before I teach them how a for loop works.
Now you can make an argument to just learn best practices from the start, and generally I agree with that, however some people get overwhelmed with all the concepts at once and so I see no real issue in learning one way first then learning a better way second.
For Unreal I can recommend a good one. But I haven't used Godot in almost a year, so not really. I'm waiting for them to implement some of the landscape streaming features necessary for larger games before I dip my toe back into Godot. Kind of a waiting game at this point bcz I don't know enough about engine dev to implement it myself sadly.