👨‍💻 The Godot Interface

The Godot Interface

Project Manager

When you first launch Godot, you will see a screen that looks similar to the below image:

This screen will allow us to create, import, or delete projects in Godot! We can also change the language or look at various templates using the templates tab. This is the screen you will be greeted with every time you open Godot.

Creating a New Project

Creating a new project is easy! Simply click the new project button and you will be greeted with this screen:

We want to give our project a unique name and save it into an empty folder. If you do not have a folder already you can click browse and then create the folder in the location of your choice. You will also notice that you can choose which renderer to use. All you need to know about this is that OpenGL 2 works on weaker hardware so we will tend to use it most.

Godot’s Editor

Now that our project is created and opened, you will see the Godot Editor screen. It looks something like the below image:

Here you can see the main menus in the top left, the workspaces in the top middle, and the playtest buttons on the top right.

We also have access to the filesystem dock on the bottom left which is where we will be able to manage our project files and assets.

Right above that is the scene dock which will allow us to see the active scene’s content and change its properties.

The toolbar, which is right above the viewport, will allow us to transform, move, and scale the objects in our scene.

Finally, we have the bottom panel which will show us debug information when we run the game.

The Workspaces

You will notice that there are four workspaces at the top of the editor: 2D, 3D, Scripts, and AssetLib. For the purposes of this class, we will not be using the 3D workspace.

The 2D workspace is the main one we will work in. It will allow us to design our games and define our interfaces!

The Scripts workspace will also get a lot of use. This is where we will write the code for our game. See the image below for an idea of what it will look like!

Finally, we have the AssetLib workspace. This is a way for us to find free assets, like characters and objects, to use in our games!