I’m looking for guides, tutorials etc which are aimed at experienced developers who are new to Godot. I’m finding the main tutorials are focused too much on how to use the node editing tools so that you can design a game with minimal coding, which is basically the opposite of the way I want to use Godot. Similarly, the GDScript tutorials are mostly aimed at people who are new to programming altogether. The reference docs look fairly useful from what I’ve seen so far, but I could do with material that’s somewhere in between, an overview of how to get started when you want to write code more than use Godot’s GUI.
For more background, I want to rewrite an old 2D game which scrolls a tile-based map around the player who is always drawn in the centre of the screen. It has hundreds of levels and dozens of graphical themes, which would probably correspond well to TileMaps and TileSets respectively. Transcribing all that data using the GUI would be insane, so a guide to generating TileSets and TileMaps in code would be great.
I’d prefer to use Godot 4 than 3. I did just see a thread with some complaints that TileMaps don’t work so well in Godot 4 compared to 3, but as long as the basics work, I think it will be OK.
If you’re an experienced programmer, you should have the capacity to solve an abstract problem, such as this, and apply your solution to the framework of the engine.
If you’re looking for an overview of how to get started with Godot/GDScript, there’s plenty of information on Godot Docs:
Yes, but is there a programmer’s guide to that framework? Surely that would be a better way to learn than trying to guess what I need to look up in the reference and learning by trial and error.
(Links removed because I’m not allowed to post more than one).
I have looked at those, but Getting Started seems to assume that you want to learn how to use the game design tools in great detail, and then deal with the programming later, starting from a position of no coding experience. The GDScript Overview section is good, but it’s only an overview of the language itself. It isn’t a guide about how to use Godot as a GDScript library/framework.
KidsCanCode looks like it might be helpful though.
There are many demo projects available on Github. Download them and try to understand how everything works, make changes and see what happens. Of course this is a very different way of learning than following a tutorial/guide.
Thanks. Although that’s not exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for now, I see that at least one of the examples is very relevant for a feature we want to add later.