Hello and welcome! Today you will not be receiving a Godot tutorial. Hopefully, at this point you weren’t expecting one either.
If you have ever watched a Godot tutorial before, you probably know how it goes. You are led from basic foundations up to a completed project, and you either copy what they’re doing on the screen or you make a few minor adjustments along the way. It’s a great way to become familiar with your tools.
But there’s an even better way to become familiar with your tools: use them!
The hard part of gamedev is always, in my opinion, the ideas. There’s a saying that ideas are cheap, but then again, so is water. Good ideas, much like drinkable water, are in the minority compared to all the things you could be thinking about if you wanted to.
Tutorials are great at lifting this burden because the tutorial-master already has a handle on what you should be making, and therefore he can work out what the structure of the project should look like. But engine tutorials are limited, and they are simply not able to actually teach you how to gamedev.
A tutorial project is just a placeholder. It’s only there to create problems that the engine can be used to solve, like a game that needs a character controller, or collision, or making a working “play” button. When you’re left on your own, it’s up to you to create those problems, and then it’s up to you to solve them.
If you are stuck in tutorial hell, I have good news for you: you have to start doing the fun part. Which is the creative part: the ideas, the story, and the lore. Then once you have a project in mind, start shooting for it! I mean, what’s the worst that can happen?
There’s a nice saying that is if you shoot for the moon and miss, you’ll still end up among the stars. Sadly because of the way distances work this isn’t actually true, but it does look that way if you’re observing from the Earth.
Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more surprisingly motivational content. I think I even motivated myself when I was writing the script. Goodbye!
