Laser Beam

What’s a game without lasers? Well, it’s still a game. But I’d argue lasers are cool.

In this tutorial, you’re going to design a powerful laser beam.

You can use this effect for weapons, puzzles, traps, and other game mechanics.

You are going to learn to:

• Fire a beam in a straight line with a raycast.
• Emit particles along a growing line.
• Design particles with swirling motion.
• Emit particles when a collision happens.
• Animate properties procedurally using Tweens.
• Use Godot’s built-in post-processing shaders to make the beam glow.

Requirements

To follow this tutorial, you need to understand how Godot’s physics system works at a basic level. You should understand:

• What the difference is between areas and bodies.
• What physics layers and masks are.
• What are raycasts.

We are going to use GDScript code to fire the laser. You can copy the LaserBeam.gd file from the final project and assign it to the LaserBeam node you’re about to create if you want to skip the programming part.

Here are tutorials and guides to get you up to speed:

• Our tutorial on physics layers and masks.
• Our Godot Nodes 101: Raycast2D Gun video tutorial.

You can find more information in the official manual:

• Physics Introduction
• Raycasting