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

by Chris Bradfield

Learn to create interactive cross-platform games such as a 3D Minigolf, a 2D Arcade classic, and much more with the all-new Godot Engine 4.0.

245 pages, Paperback

Published August 11, 2023

Reviews

[Ricardo Shimoda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a good introduction to the Godot game engine by creating 5 different mini-games, which can be expanded as much and as far as the reader wants to, touching several common aspects of 2D and 3D games - animations, synchronization, scripting, basic physics, dynamic instantiation, signals, global variables, state machines, shaders, and exporting the game to other platforms.

That said, it's quite a small, easy to read book and it definitely serves as an entrance door to tackle other common game development topics (asset workflow, pathing, AI, debugging, performance optimization, to name a few) - getting the reader more excited to pursue more on their own.

Finally, it's important to say that, just like any other ever-evolving platform, Godot has some bugs here and there so using it require some flexibility from the reader (eventually changing the initial version of the editor used) - I used 4.2 (stable) and had no problems

[Harry Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book to get you started in Godot 4, giving a great tour around the most important features of the engine via five different project examples (plus a section at the end covering some extra little bits).

I liked the variety of the projects, each one feeling sufficiently fresh and also like a step up from the previous one without the difficulty curve becoming too steep. The author also drip-feeds you some independence as each project goes on, referencing that we're just repeating something we've done before as a nice check that the knowledge is being retained.

It isn't without issue though, there are a few references throughout the book to an appendix for more information on certain topics which as far as I can tell doesn't exist, and also some minor mistakes throughout the book that you might not catch if you're not paying attention which would leave you then having to spend unnecessary time debugging.

My biggest gripe is that, like a lot of educational content, it does sometimes say things like "this isn't the proper way to do this, but it's good enough here" without ever explaining how to do it properly or why this implementation is wrong, but that's so common in this genre that it's hard to hold it against this book in particular.

Overall a really good introduction to Godot and I feel both more knowledgeable and motivated to keep going with more ambitious projects having read it.