Talk about anything: Page 103 - Godot Community Forums

Talk about anything

Nerdzmasterz

Honestly, I would rather show them how to do a text-based game than anything. If they're just starting out, they don't know what an if statement is yet. It's less about the pride in making a nice-looking game, and more about making a functional one. Not that you can't have fun with it, it could be a text-based game where you have to make certain choices in an attempt to stay alive, or have them try to finish a short story with alternate endings. In learning how to understand buttons, variables, and if statements, they then have learned enough to build, say, a mobile game with the player being controlled with buttons.

cybereality

Well 2D is not necessarily easier than 3D. Most game programming is the same, control flow, logic, state machines, input control, etc. The problem with 3D is that you should have some understanding of math. While the engine does the hard work for you (you don't have to calculate yourself) you still need to know the difference between a dot product and a cross product, and when to use them. 2D is easier because it is mostly just addition and subtraction, which a kid can understand.

cybereality

And if you want to learn programming, this is the best book ever written.

Beginning C++ Through Game Programming: https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Through-Game-Programming-Fourth-ebook-dp-B00LZW07P0/dp/B00LZW07P0/

It's for C++, but it's mostly just command line text games, so it applies to any language. And mostly all languages are derivative from C, so the basics of if statements and logic are useful everywhere. This could be used for teenagers or people with no experience at all. And I've read hundreds of programming books probably, I'm sure this is the best.

Erich_L

@Nerdzmasterz said:

@Kojack said: Speaking of modular things, in my favorite space sim Independence War 2 you piloted a small shuttle that attached itself as the cockpit to different rear sections.

I guess the big question is what style of space craft you're going for? Not like Star Wars vs Star Trek, I mean like high definition or low poly, realistic or cartoony, government-controlled vs pirated?

I want as low poly as possible to make physics collisions efficient. It's no fun to fly through space if you don't have a few hundred bananas to fly through! I also want to envision what the first ship would look like that's built in Earth orbit for belt mining. I also want it to be a simple enough of a shape that I can hit the reform button with different scales and it'll regenerate without ever looking stretched in an awkward way. I think I might have to move my timeline up to the point where there's already some cheap asteroid material being shipping to Earth orbit from closer asteroids than the asteroid belt- that way it'll make sense to be able to 3d print larger shells. The shell I'm going for first is an elongated hemisphere.

Erich_L

@Nerdzmasterz said: I wish they had more on this forum, or whatever, and not like copy/paste stuff- more like video tutorials. Perhaps, in addition to that, add longer tutorials that are entire games- like a space-shooter, or platformer, or FPS. I bet they could make tutorials on some of the stuff on the asset lib.

I have eight years of teaching experience- kids and adults. The thing with most adults (every adult I've dealt with actually) is that they'll often spend so much time fretting about how to learn they often complete much less of the studying they want (usually none of the studying). Which I suppose makes sense if you're doing things on your own, after all who's to guide you? Who's to know if you're learning the right things or the right way? You need to stay engaged to learn. For programming and game development, my suggestion to any learner would be not to look for "how to make game x" tutorials (unless it's a really simple game) and just keep consuming "how to do x" tutorials as hard as you can then as soon as you think you can put something simple together do it.

Nerdzmasterz

@Erich_L said:

@Nerdzmasterz said: I wish they had more on this forum, or whatever, and not like copy/paste stuff- more like video tutorials. Perhaps, in addition to that, add longer tutorials that are entire games- like a space-shooter, or platformer, or FPS. I bet they could make tutorials on some of the stuff on the asset lib.

I have eight years of teaching experience- kids and adults. The thing with most adults (every adult I've dealt with actually) is that they'll often spend so much time fretting about how to learn they often complete much less of the studying they want (usually none of the studying). Which I suppose makes sense if you're doing things on your own, after all who's to guide you? Who's to know if you're learning the right things or the right way? You need to stay engaged to learn. For programming and game development, my suggestion to any learner would be not to look for "how to make game x" tutorials (unless it's a really simple game) and just keep consuming "how to do x" tutorials as hard as you can then as soon as you think you can put something simple together do it.

I just posted a quick tut for beginners on best practices if you want to critique. I can fix it if needed.

https://godotforums.org/discussion/30062/indie-devs-best-practices#latest

Nerdzmasterz

@Erich_L said:

@Nerdzmasterz said:

@Kojack said: Speaking of modular things, in my favorite space sim Independence War 2 you piloted a small shuttle that attached itself as the cockpit to different rear sections.

I guess the big question is what style of space craft you're going for? Not like Star Wars vs Star Trek, I mean like high definition or low poly, realistic or cartoony, government-controlled vs pirated?

I want as low poly as possible to make physics collisions efficient. It's no fun to fly through space if you don't have a few hundred bananas to fly through! I also want to envision what the first ship would look like that's built in Earth orbit for belt mining. I also want it to be a simple enough of a shape that I can hit the reform button with different scales and it'll regenerate without ever looking stretched in an awkward way. I think I might have to move my timeline up to the point where there's already some cheap asteroid material being shipping to Earth orbit from closer asteroids than the asteroid belt- that way it'll make sense to be able to 3d print larger shells. The shell I'm going for first is an elongated hemisphere.

Are you talking assets like these? You can use them in Godot, although the particles won't work.

https://syntystore.com/

fire7side

I think duane has the right idea for a 2d game. Minimal graphics on a grid. I still play a game on my tablet off and on called Hoplite. Simple strategy, turn based game. A puzzle game that you push crates. A snake game. All good starter projects. I wrote my own astar pathfinding from a tutorial. Good nuts and bolts stuff. I started out with adventure game creater software which I feel was a mistake. Too much of it was already written.

DaveTheCoder

The thing with most adults (every adult I've dealt with actually) is that they'll often spend so much time fretting about how to learn they often complete much less of the studying they want (usually none of the studying).

There's also an attitude among adults that studying is for children, and adult classes should be fun and effortless.

fire7side

@DaveTheCoder said:

The thing with most adults (every adult I've dealt with actually) is that they'll often spend so much time fretting about how to learn they often complete much less of the studying they want (usually none of the studying).

There's also an attitude among adults that studying is for children, and adult classes should be fun and effortless.

You run the whole gamut, but there are certainly a percentage that have just forgotten how to learn anything. They've been doing the same routines over and over. Those people are prone to dementia also, which just makes the whole thing a nightmare in certain cases. I worked at a factory and the women would almost have a nervous breakdown if they had to do a slightly different job. I was the safety manager and trying to prevent repetitive motion but I finally gave up.

Megalomaniak

@Audiobellum said: To me, I don't like this assumption that a 2d game is easier to make than a 3d game; I'm living proof of that. Even when people recommended that I first start off with 2d, I did my own thing instead and got the results that I wanted.

I think that mostly applies to the graphical assets, so the assumption is in case one makes their own. I'd say initial investment into 3D assets is greater but it's also easier to reuse parts for new assets, so there's some truth to it, but it can still vary.

Programming wise while having one less dimension to deal with might make it a bit easier it's probably indeed somewhat overstated.

Megalomaniak

@Nerdzmasterz said: Honestly, I would rather show them how to do a text-based game than anything. If they're just starting out, they don't know what an if statement is yet.

3Dbuzz used to have a great python series programming a text game type of thing, a 'vending machine text adventure game' sort of thing as an intro to python. It was pretty great. Something like that would indeed be a good starter tutorial for someone who has never coded anything before.

Nerdzmasterz

I'm currently trying to make a series of tutorials for games and best practices for beginners on my Best Practices post, if you want to critique. It's in GDScript and is intended to just help people get their feet wet with coding, and slowly get harder.

some_lame_kid

The best tutorial I found for Godot was guided on the rails of an RPG tutorial, but a large majority was teaching how to debug. I think the art of debugging isn't given enough attention in beginner's tutorials.

fire7side

Games from scratch has a little tutorial video on extracting unity assets without having Unity installed.

cybereality

Well my secret is that I am a life-long learner. I got into programming when I was 13 years old, and taught myself BASIC in a weekend. There were not really tutorials back then, but people would post code online, so I just downloaded some examples and printed them out and read them. But since then I have been consistently reading programming books and working on side projects on the computer the whole time. And I read all sorts of books, even beginner books or computer languages I'm not using just to gain a perspective. So that is a big part of it. People don't put in the investment, or they read a couple books and think they are done. You're never done.

Nerdzmasterz

Idk, is Best Practices accessible to beginners whereit'sat? I might want to have it moved to tutorials or something where they're sure to find it.

Bimbam

This and similar homebrew projects was how I taught myself Python:

Made a bootleg 3D scanner out of Cardboard, Tape, a servo motor, Raspberry Pi and a GoPro. Then used VSFM/Meshlab to reconstruct a point cloud:

Nowadays your phone can probably do this out of the box, but the tech to do this has existed for years. The output is pretty janky but it was never about the finished product, just the journey. There was something immensely satisfying in solving each part of this problem and learning along the way rather than just accepting 'someone else already did it so I don't have to'.

My random explorations of Python/Rapsberry Pi introduced me to Blender, led me to PyGame, and eventually saw me pick up Godot :D

I guess I've always enjoyed problem solving and with knowledge of gamedev the scope limits of my problems goes from my bedroom to my imagination.

Kojack

2D and 3D may not seem that different... until you run into gimbal lock or quaternions. :) (Or gimbal lock while using quaternions, then you google for it and read "quaternions don't suffer from gimbal lock" which is misleading because they can if used wrong)

cybereality

Well, yes, quaternions are a whole other ball game. It took me almost my whole life to feel like I understand them, and it's still confusing. But you could do a lot without quaternions. Most simple 3D games could be done with Euler angles, and that is simple enough to understand on a high school math level.

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