Being a life long video game fan, it’s no surprise that at some point in my life, I envisioned myself as someone who was creating video games for a living. I even started college with a focus on game development and design and while I never quite got there for a myriad of reasons, it’s always been a field that’s fascinated me. As someone who genuinely enjoys learning new things and a driving passion for video games, I’m kind of shocked that it’s taken me this long to finally sit down and bring a game to life.
I think my curiosity ultimately got piqued during the Unity fiasco and somehow or another, I came across the Godot Engine while reading about all of that. I’ve worked with a few engines in my past and I think the combination of that experience plus the new pricing model Unity was introducing, it stuck out as one that I would potentially tinker around with. But, like most side projects, it sat dormant for several months.
That was, until May of 2024, when a Humble Bundle came across my radar that contained a series of lectures, videos, and tutorials on learning Godot 4 all for the low price of $25. I have a pretty bad habit of buying things that are on sale if there’s even a remote possibility that I would use it because, let’s face it, it’s hard to pass up a good deal. So I took the plunge thinking to myself, even if I never end up building something, I can at least say I gave myself the tools to be successful.
A couple more months go by and I’m sitting on the couch playing Forza Horizon 4 and I just had a moment where I told myself, it’s time. There wasn’t any real ah-ha moment I can point to. Nothing triggered a visceral emotion to immediately jump up and approach this. I can only assume that, because I had an amazing weekend filled with video games, it triggered something deep within my subconscious. 🤷🏼♂️ I don’t know that I’ll ever truly know, but I sat down over the weekend and started watching my first tutorial.
My first thoughts were “Wow, game engines have come a LONG way since I last worked with one.” The last one I worked with was one of the first versions of Torque Game Builder, but it may as well have been chiseling stone tablets with stone tools in comparison to how much simpler Godot seemed. I also realize that I’m coming at it with rose tinted glasses and pumped up emotion and once I actually get in there and start getting my hands dirty, I could be hit with all of the memories of my C++ days when I was originally going through my game dev courses.
I think what’s much different this time is that I now have over a decade of professional software engineering experience and GDScript resembles python in so many ways. While I’m not fully versed in python, I’m familiar enough with it to feel comfortable with the syntax and definitions it uses. I think that alone makes it far more approachable than if I had to dust off my C++ knowledge and get up to speed there. If nothing else, becoming better in a Python-esque language will help me professionally as it is a very common language in my field. If I were trying to break into the video game industry, I’d probably skip Godot altogether and go with Unreal and C++, but I’m just here looking to have a good time.
I’ve got a concept I’m going to be building which I’ve tentatively titled “Worst Poker Clone Ever.” This should help me learn a few of the 2D concepts and some of the basics of the engine. It’s also something that I feel like I could crank out fairly quickly in comparison to, say, a fully fledged JRPG or one of the many other concepts I have hidden away in years worth of notes, text files, brain dumps, etc…
So yeah, let the journey begin and let’s go(dot)!
If you want to follow along with me, I’ve created a public repository for the Worst Poker Clone Ever where I’ll be pushing all of my code and assets to.