My biggest piece of advice is to start small. This is extremely important in my eyes. When you’re just starting out, you will almost certainly be super inefficient, writing code that’ll cause you a ton of headache down the line. Prepare to abandon tons of projects. (I feel like this is something that gets said a lot, but no one actually pays attention to.)

A big help with this is starting with 2D projects. They are a whole lot simpler and they let you put more focus on things like learning how scenes and nodes work.

From there, you can read stuff like the GDScript reference page on the docs but ultimately the best way to learn is by doing.

My preferred way of learning things was to set my sights on adding some kind of feature, and then whenever I hit a wall, or I don’t understand what something does, then I search it up. The docs are incredibly useful for learning about what different things do, and there are a lot of questions on ask.godotengine.org with answers that have been very useful to me.

There are also a few built-in script templates (at least in Godot 4). For example when you create a CharacterBody2D node you can get an example script for a basic platforming character. Although these came into existence after I learned the basics, I imagine analyzing them would prove very useful.

Older post, but I’m surprised nobody posted the interactive GDScript tutorials by GDQuest: https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/

I can’t attest to it’s quality for beginners, but I’ve been really curious how it works to know if it’s a good resource for my students, but it looks quite nice to me!

This script will rotate a MeshInstance2D node clockwise on the screen:

extends MeshInstance2D

var rotation_speed: float = 1.0

func _process(delta: float) -> void:
	rotate(delta * rotation_speed)

• Create a new scene
• add a MeshInstance2d
• set it’s Mesh parameter on the right to new BoxMesh
• scale it and put it in the middle of the screen
• add this script to it
• press play

If you’ve figured out to do the above correctly, you will see a box spinning clockwise on your screen.

Now figure out how spin it counter-clockwise

After that see if you can figure out how to move it to the left. Then see if you can move it back and forth.

Congratulations! You’ve started :D

GDScript is based on Python so I would learn basic programming with Python first before I tackled game engine programming.

Here’s a couple of basic courses at Udemy:

• Python for Absolute Beginners

When you have basic programming knowledge, this course starts you from scratch to build a game with Godot using GDScript:

• Create a Complete 2D Survivors Style Game in Godot 4

I’m doing the Godot course, it’s pretty good…makes no assumptions about your game development knowledge at all. No, I don’t work for Udemy :) Buy the courses when they go on sale, they always go on sale :)

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/about/introduction.html

The website itself is a fantastic resource, with plenty of links to tutorials including their own. Documentation is built into the editor, and functions are searchable.

https://gamefromscratch.com/?s=godot I really enjoy his youtube channel and is overall a great resource for anything game dev.