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

Enjoying it a lot so far.

I've been writing various types of software for 10 years and was interested in learning Godot for 2D games. This book turned out to be informative and easy to follow and gave me the knowledge I was seeking. I learn best by example, and this project focused book was excellent in that regard.If you have zero programming experience, I would recommend learning something like Python before diving into this book. The book teaches with GDScript, which is Godot's Python-like programming language.There are some minor mistakes in the book, but an errata is currently being kept up-to-date on the github repository for the book. I opened a few issues for things I discovered, and the author added those things to the errata. Keep this in mind if you end up getting stuck on something and are 100% sure you followed the directions in the book.I use Unreal for 3D games, so I have not yet gone through the chapters of this book for 3D games. I wouldn't expect a drastic drop in quality, but for the purposes of this review I can't give any insight on the 3D chapters.

I very rarely write reviews for things, but I felt compelled to do so for this book based on my experience.I had an amazing experience with this book for the first 3 chapters. There were some errors and things just plain missing in those chapters, but I was able to debug and provide solutions for those things. For example, some lines of code were omitted and score keeping was completely left out from Chapter 3. I have since found that errata is helpfully published on the GitHub repository. Overall I had a lot of fun working through the first 3 chapters.Chapter 4 is where I decided to give up and move on to other resources. I found the lack of guidance on level design and truly understanding and using tile maps and tile sets downright frustrating. Perhaps this chapter would be more approachable if I had prior game development experience. The author very much glosses over level design and it went from a poor explanation of the concept to just "now design your level". Referencing the finished project from the GitHub repository did not provide much assistance either.If you are new to game development, I think the first 3 chapters are a helpful introduction and they have definitely furthered my interest in both Godot and game development. However, I had to bail after Chapter 4 in search of better material.Perhaps I will return to the book after learning more from other resources.

simple and easy introduction to godot and gdscript.

My nephew wanted a similar book- this had better reviews and I heard about lots of things that he’d done with this book. Glad I got it

As a hobbyist Godot game dev, I was worried the early chapters of this book would be boring for me because of the beginner-friendly nature of the book. What I instead found while reading through the first few chapters was that a lot of the online Godot tutorials out there are great for code, but not as much for planning - this book has helped me to really think through what nodes I use. I've also learned about incredibly useful things I had no idea existed, even as early as the first project, such as MarginContainer nodes.There are the occasional errors in the chapters I've read such as typos in function names or missing images, but the book itself does link to where such errors can be reported and I'll certainly be doing my part to report those errors when I have the time to finish working through the book's projects.All in all, while I haven't gotten very far into the book yet, I'm already pleased with what I've seen & even more excited about the upcoming chapters based on the promised topics - in particular, I'm super excited to get to the chapter with procedural generation!

Absolutely loved this, takes you through building 5 different games from start to finish, and explains not only how to do things, but it also explains the why! Throughout the course of making these 5 games, you also get introduced to many of the Nodes within Godot, explanations on how they are used, and gives you some experience using them! Feels good to add more tools into your toolkit as you become more familiar and comfortable using more Nodes.Even though this book is not intended for beginners, I would still recommend this book. It comes with a link where you can download example files and get going with minimal effort, however to get the most out of the book I would try to recreate stuff yourself.I found it very useful for easing myself into trying out 3D development. I've been doing 2D for years, and am currently developing a 2D game in Godot, once I complete that I'll be diving headfirst into 3D and this book gave me a lot of insight, and I feel much better about the whole process.

This book is chock full of small errors, perhaps more than I've ever seen in a programming book.The information is useful, albeit not much better than a free Godot tutorial. If you're an experienced programmer, and you like books more than website tutorials, you can definitely work around these errors with some irritation, but if you're more novice or you're looking for a hassle free learning experience, look elsewhere.