Hey everyone!
I always feel awkward advertising my own content, but seeing the recent surge of people complaining about the lack of high quality Godot tutorials, I was hoping to re-surface my YouTube channel, The GameDev Tavern. It currently contains more than 70 hours of high quality tutorial content that is completely free, fully open source, uses handcrafted code / music / art (distributed under CC-0 + MIT for unlimited reuse) and leverages 25+ years of experience of software engineering best practice. It currently has four published series, with more to come:
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Godot 101 (18H) is Harvard’s CS-50 adapted for Godot. It focuses on the core programming fundamentals: functions, variables, conditionals, etc. and elementary data structures: arrays, vectors, dictionaries, etc. It is truly meant people who have never written a single line of code. Throughout this series, viewers will create 4 different games that increase in scope and difficulty. The series is full of code theory and coding challenges that viewers can complete to ensure that the foundations become rock solid. Watch at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNR-4ZAXZpCA
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Fists of Fury (12H) is meant for Godot Beginners and creates an entire beat-em-up from scratch. It assumes basic understanding of GDScript, and focuses on mastering various node types, collision detection, basic state machine, etc. It introduces a few important concepts such as the observer pattern, single responsibility principles, and basic OOP. Watch at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNNbuBNHHbNGtZjygmnJ2fBvp6JmDNkAm
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Super Soccer (18H) is meant for Godot Beginner-Intermediate level, and creates a complete arcade soccer game. It explores new concepts such as steering behaviors (to create natural-looking CPU movement), shaders (to create variety in players), proper node-based state machines, local multiplayer, etc. It teaches version control (Git). It starts from physics equations on a whiteboard before being turned into code to calculate trajectories and gameplay mechanics. Watch at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNNbuBNHHbNEEQJE5od1dyNE_pqIANIww
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Goblins’ Den (21H) is meant for Godot Intermediate levels who want to hop into 3D. This series builds upon the concepts from the first 3 series and adds concepts like 3d lighting, ragdoll physics, etc. but is also unique as it drills into the entire graphics pipeline. Through the series, viewers will actually create all of the art: every single pixel, texture, 3d mesh, armature, animation, etc - going back and forth between Godot, Blender and Aseprite to fully master the entire end-to-end flow. Watch at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT26e2jOwbdg
So… What sets my tutorials apart from the other tutorials?
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All tutorials are completely free on Youtube
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Every episode focuses on the why: every single problem has multiple solutions with tradeoffs that are discussed. Every single line of code is handwritten and fully explained.
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Episodes are filled with code challenges for the viewer to complete as they go from one episode to the next, ensuring they can re-apply learnings to their own games.
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Code is open source on Github, with checkpoints that can be downloaded at every episode.
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Rather than using generic asset packs, all the art and music is handcrafted for each tutorial to create interesting-looking games that are fun to play – and then released under Creative Commons for your own unlimited use.
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25+ years of best-practice software industry experience, spanning from writing efficient C++/assembly code that powers the A350 aircraft to writing the millions of lines that powers Gmail/Chat for the past 10 years at Google. I live and breathe good architecture and clean code on a daily basis.
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A Discord server for live support with a growing community (250+ members) to help folks get unblocked right away and answer questions
OK but why do this for free? What’s the catch?
Game development is what made me fall in love with coding 35 years ago on my 486sx33 (yes I’m that old…). It has always fueled my passion for computers, and I have been incredibly lucky to have a very successful career as a result. Throughout this journey, I have been surrounded by the most generous and passionate mentors who have continuously invested their time to fuel my passion. As the coding world is rapidly changing with AI, this is my way of giving back to the community, a small human touch that can hopefully spark the same flame in others that got me to where I am today.
Note: all YouTube Ad proceeds are donated back to the Godot Foundation (currently on the Titanium tier: https://fund.godotengine.org/#membership)
Hope these tutorials are useful to some of you!
Best,
Nicolas @ The GameDev Tavern
) I know that the amount of effort, dedication, and time is huge.