Introduction to the final course challenge

You’ve spent many long hours learning about dozens of programming techniques and concepts. The list is so long it would fill a couple of pages!

If you’ve followed the entire course actively and completed all the practices, you now have almost all the tools you need to make any kind of 2D game.

In this final series, you will put what you’ve learned to the test and push your problem-solving skills.

You will create a game inspired by Enter the Gungeon and The Binding of Isaac, but simplified for learning purposes.

This is not a step-by-step tutorial where you will just reproduce recipes. While we provide the assets, you’ll be asked to put your own twist on the game through many optional challenges.

By the end, you will have a complete little game you can send to your friends and family.

What you’ll learn

There are still a couple of essential techniques that we’ll explore in the series.

You will learn:

• How to use a global node to connect enemies, the player, and the game’s heads up display.
• How to use coroutines to temporarily pause code execution in the middle of a function.
• How to structure the files and code of a real game project.
• How to export your game to send to your friends and upload to the internet.
• How to approach making a complete game.

This series will challenge you

This will be the course’s final challenge for you and your opportunity to see how much you learned.

You will find that the writing style is different in this series. That’s on purpose.

You will have to read code, work with fewer instructions than before, and solve some problems on your own.

This will test what you learned in the course and train your problem-solving skills, which are essential as a game developer.

However, you will not be completely alone either. We still broke down the game project into manageable tasks for you, and we will provide tips and explanations along the way.

Also, if you ever get stuck, you can always show us your code and ask for help using the questions and answers section at the bottom of each page.

Moving from the “Copy Stage” to the “Remix Stage”

In the course’s introduction, we talked about the three stages of learning: copy, remix, and create.

So far in the course, you worked a lot on the copy stage, which is the starting point to learning anything. Even as professional developers, we learn new programming languages by copying examples at first.

This series will fully take you into the remix stage.

What, I’m only now getting into the second phase?!

Yes, and this is entirely normal. It’s a significant achievement, actually.

Getting to the remix stage means you’re out of tutorial hell. You’ll no longer depend on step-by-step recipes to do everything.

You’re at the point where you can learn new things and experiment independently.

After it, you will be able to read all kinds of guides and code examples, read open-source code demos, and combine the things you learned to make other kinds of games.

Creating a complete game

You now have almost all the tools to make games, but you may still lack the experience to know exactly how to combine them.

In this series, we will show you an example of how to do that with one game.

You will get a better idea of how much work it takes to make a complete game. You will also see how everything you learned pieces together.

In the project, we’ve provided you with some ready made scripts so you can skip the less exciting parts for learning.

These are mostly things you already did in the course, and you should be pretty familiar with them at this stage.

Please keep in mind that we developers use a lot of code from other developers. There’s absolutely no shame in that.

Our premade scripts are very small compared to the amount of code in Godot’s nodes.

With that, we’ll get started with an overview of the starting Godot project in the next page.

Files Needed

If you haven’t already, download the godot-final-game-start-project-*.zip file.

Unzip it:

1. In your file explorer, navigate to the folder containing the downloaded file.
2. Right-click the zip file and select the option saying “extract” (Windows, Linux). On macOS, you need to double-click the file instead.

You should see a new directory named like the zip archive. It contains all the files you need to get started.

Launch Godot, and in the project manager that opens, press Import.

Navigate to where you unzipped the project, enter the directory, and double-click project.godot.

Finally, press Import and Edit.

You’re ready to follow along!

In this last project, we encourage you to experiment. There is more than one unique solution to the following lessons. The file godot-final-game-completed-*.zip contains a finished project that you can look at if you feel like it. It’ll give you one approach to solving the problems in the series.