With the final project done, this course is coming to an end.
Of course, your journey is not over. As we explained in the introduction, you never stop learning in programming.
But you’ve reached the point where you can learn independently and start experimenting on your own.
Learning to code is hard. Making games is even harder. There’s a really steep initial learning curve, and you kept at it.
Congratulations! You can be proud of yourself.
Not only for making a complete game, but also for working your way through this challenging initial learning phase.
I’m sure you had moments where you got stuck, or your brain was on fire trying to make sense of something. But you kept at it, and it eventually clicked.
Keep doing that. That’s how you’ll achieve your goals. That’s also part of what makes programming and game creation feel so rewarding.
Let’s take a moment to look back at everything you achieved and how you’ll use your new skills.
First, you learned and practiced over a hundred programming concepts. Yes, that many!
They are the foundations upon which all your code projects will build.
Early on, you learned about steering, which allows you to control any character smoothly. It works for playable characters, enemies, and even vehicles.
You first used it on a ship.
Then, on a top-down character.
And finally, on enemies in the final game project.
After the basic concepts, you learned how to create a dialogue system.
You could reuse it to make a visual novel, or dialogues in an adventure or a role-playing game. It works the same way.
You generated rocks and later rooms procedurally. Those are the basics of procedural content generation that games like Dead Cells or The Binding of Isaac use.
In the obstacle course series, you learned to work with physics bodies and areas. They are the bread-and-butter of 2D games.
You reused areas to create vision ranges for turrets in the tower defense series, pressure plates in the side-scroller, and damaging zones.
They’re super versatile, and you’ll use them almost every time you need to make things interact in the game world.
In the tower defense series, you created guns and bullets and started to work on real game AI.
You would handle ranged weapons the same way in side-scrolling action games, twin-stick shooters, and more.
Most importantly, you reused the movement, the damage areas, line of sight, weapons and bullets, steering, and much more in a different context with the final game.
This is a great example of how to reuse everything you learned in different and unrelated projects.
A common misconception is that you need step-by-step tutorials about each kind of game.
Many people search for those tutorials hoping to get good, but they tend to stay stuck in tutorial hell. They never manage to make anything without a step-by-step recipe.
The thing is, that’s not how we developers work at all, as you hopefully saw. We combine the many tools that we learned in creative ways to bring game ideas to life.
We approach things with a certain mindset that we tried to give you in this series.
First, we break down big game ideas into small problems. Making a game is overwhelming, so we divide and conquer.
Then, we solve those problems one at a time, often in isolation. Finally, we combine our little solutions into larger game systems.
Oh, and we iterate a lot. We throw things away and start over or slowly polish them until they feel good.
You may not have the experience to solve every problem, but you have the tools to make all kinds of games.
You should now be able to read and understand most courses and code demos out there to keep learning.
You also learned to create games with the free and open-source Godot game engine. As you can see, it’s a truly powerful tool, so you can keep using it to make more games.
You also saw how much work it is to make a game. It takes time and hard work!
But the process is interesting, and finishing projects is rewarding.
We’ll now wrap up with one last guide to talk about what you can do next to keep learning. See you in the next one.