Godot 4
In 2021, I developed a game (Ninja Caves) using the cross-platform game engine GameMaker Studio 2 (now simply known as GameMaker), written in GML, targetting PC with controller support.
The project started as a thirty-day coding challenge, intending to create a simple platformer game (inspired by my childhood favourite Crystal Caves) that my son (six years old) could play.
I documented my progress across three blog posts:
The challenge went well, providing a fun incentive to get “hands-on keyboard” for a personal project, something that I could share with my son.
As a result, I continued the project beyond the original thirty days, eventually releasing the game for Windows, macOS, and iPadOS.
Earlier today, the Godot team released the highly anticipated Godot 4.
Godot is a free and open source 2D and 3D game engine released under the MIT license, which has been growing in popularity over the past few years. Godot offers a lightweight, cross-platform (Windows, MacOS, Linux, BSD), fully integrated game development environment, comparable to the Unreal Engine, Unity and Game Maker Studio 2.
Godot supports a variety of programming languages, including the integrated language GDScript, C++ and C#. GDScript is most interesting to me, as it is a high-level, dynamically typed programming language which is syntactically similar to Python.
Godot 4 is a major release, covering a wide range of new features. The video below from GDQuest provides a great overview.
I have personally been waiting for this release as a reason to dive into Godot. Therefore, I have decided to port Ninja Caves from GameMaker (GML) to Godot 4 (GDScript). The hope is to use this as a mechanism to learn Godot, building on a familiar foundation.
This is very much a side project (hobby). As a result, progress will likely be very slow. However, I do plan to post occasional updates regarding my learnings, with the hope that I can eventually make the Godot version of Ninja Caves available for download.