Hello there! I’m sorry if this is the wrong tag but I debated for quite a while to make this either a help or general tag. Also sorry if this post already exists but I couldn’t find it
Anyways my question is how long does it take to learn godot to the point you could make not like huge full on indie games but decent small games just for you and your friends. So like the scale of web games.
I have a minor background in python, but as summer approaches I want to know if i have the time to learn this as a side project and be able to make something I’m proud of at the end of summer.
I’ve been able to in that amount of time. There’s plenty of tutorials around that will help you out too.
I think it’s quite likely especially since you have a minor background in python. But it would help if you clarify what you mean by decent small games. Give some examples like maybe 3 levels of the original super mario, pong, tetris etc…
I’ve tried other frameworks like libGDX (Java) or Bevy (Rust). I also suffered for a long time with Unity’s deprecated APIs, its awful documentation, and the fact that they don’t seem to know where they’re going (DOTs, Monobehavior, etc.).
Godot, on the other hand, seems incredibly easy to learn. GDScript, moreover, is a very simple language. With Godot, I haven’t had to wrestle with the engine and I just focus on trying to make my game. I highly recommend it for learning.
I’ve barely looked at Unreal. It might make sense if you like doing visual programming with nodes, which isn’t my case.
with prior years of coding & modding experience it took me about a week-two to learn GDScript’s basics, and now after 8 months i’m after making my first game, tho it had terrible graphics it was mechanically good. I’d say if you know how to think like a coder - in few months you’ll get to a point where making small games is possible, but you’ll encounter a lot of small problems you’ll fix in hours or days, after few years these small problems will dissapear as you’ll learn everything about engine at some point that’ll be ever needed
in short - few months
Making games is more about creation than imitation. Sure, YouTube
is full of great game development tutorials, but they rarely solve
the real problem — which is how to actually design and build a
game from scratch.
Most YouTubers skip over the most important part: their thinking
process. How did they decide on the game design? Why did they
choose that data structure over another? These are the questions
you have to dig into yourself.
In conclusion, those videos are absolutely worth watching — but
only after you’ve done your own deep thinking first.
In fact, I failed to achieve all of the above either 
Like something along the scale of the simple flash games you see on the web. Classics like run and maybe fireboy and watergirl at the high end of scale.
So like bigger than pong but not like an indie game at all if that makes sense.
depends on what you wanna do.
I take it as a rule of thumb that whatever i already know from some other software takes a day or two to relearn in godot.
I mean that on a per-task basis: importing a rigged 3D model, writing state machine logic, tracking 3D positions and rotations, loading map chunks or stages, so on and so forth. It’s quick if you already know the idea behind it and just want to do it on the engine, but if you don’t know the concepts themselves then it can take extra time, anywhere between 3 hours and 2 months.
Definitely. I think the main challenge of Godot is that it’s massive, but if you focus on 2D graphics and fairly simple content, I’d say it’s probably easier to make Flash games in than Flash was 
Take a look at Godot plugins too, there are many available, for just about any purpose.
You can easily learn Godot in some weeks if you focus on what type of game you wanna make