What’s Wrong With Most Godot Tutorials (including ours)
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- Опубликовано: 22 май 2024
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We made this Free and Open Source app to learn to code with Godot! It's still in development at the time of writing, but ready to test.
It's like Codecademy, FreeCodeCamp, etc. but for game development with Godot and GDScript.
Try the app here: gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/
Get the source code here: github.com/GDQuest/learn-gdscript (please star the project to support us!)
Great video! Could you Nathan actually make a vlog of some sort covering your own experience back when you learned to code? I think that would be interesting to watch.
It's planned for during the Kickstarter. I think it's coming in a little under two weeks.
You sure you're talking about our tuts? We exclusively cover GDScript
This is incredible, I would, if its possibl,e like to somehow contibute to the project coding-wise?
Frankly I don't like how unity handles tutorials and demo projects. Usually it boils down to bowl of spaghetti code with singletons sprinkled all over the place. But I do like GDQuest's tutorials. Relatively clean with minimum amount of singletons(autoloads) if any. With some advanced architectural topics touched here and there. Thank you, guys.
"Start slow and learn good" is what I learned from this
Start slow, and learn Gadot
@@XwarslayerXmemechannel Start slow, and watch movies with Gal Gadot.
@@XwarslayerXmemechannel LOL
@@Theraot :)
@@Theraot Start slow, and just watch the no man's land clip from Wonder Woman.
As someone who understands that coding is just really advanced instruction making but lacks the ability to mentally break it down (and who probably has an actual learning disability when it comes to mathematics), I can appreciate the fact that you recognize the flaws in teaching code and can even self-criticize your own methods in order to compensate for people like me. I hope your plans go well and that the prototype is a success, and if they are you'll most likely see me joining your curriculum in the future :)
IMO- Do small chunks like Nathan emphasizes. Let your brain have time to digest the new concepts. Some folks can retain a new language and environment like a sponge - others of us need to take smaller bites. With Nathan's 2D Dodge tutorial I probably spent 10 days on it - doing it in 30 minutes chunks before bedtime (probably 5-10 minutes of video and 25-30 minutes coding/tinkering) and then reviewing each chunk the next day before I moved on. Test, Test, Test - test each chunk and then change things to gain more understanding of what the code and structure is doing - and just tinker to feel more comfortable with the Godot IDE. I have found that programming languages I previously found daunting years back are much clearer when I learn for a bit, take a break, reflect and return days, even months later. Chunk the learning into small blocks - achieve small successes (this is key!) - understand context, big picture and details - take a break - reflect on what you learned - repeat. Now I must follow my own advice if I want to get through the 3D tutorial! Good luck! and BTW - you don't have to remember all things coding verbatim - you have to remember where you saw/developed a solution to a similar problem that you can adapt or use as a start point/reference - or at least have the solid context to search for a solution when you need something new to allow you to evaluate approaches. Sorry for the ramble - but following a GDQUEST quality tutorial that shares best practices and key insights is miles better than a self-promoting book or hacker video/code post that says "look what I did". Keep it simple!
Reminder to check it out if you haven't already.
> lacks the ability to mentally break it down
I've had discussions with people about this being a core part of programming and the resulting agreement that we always arrive at is that it's not just an essential skill for programming, but *any complex task*.
You want to write or analyze music? That's just breaking down a piece into individual parts which are broken down into collections of measures and phrases which are broken down into collections of notes and inflections.
Want to be a 2D character artist? You'll have to break down characters into their different physical components, then break those components into their basic shapes.
Want to be an architect? "Design a building" isn't exactly a straightforward or simple task.
What about playing a game of chess? You can't just win by knowing you have to "put the opponent in checkmate," you have to think about how each of the pieces can be used, how the opponent can move them, what strategies can be employed by combining them...
In the end "any complex task" is really *most* tasks considering most tasks are easy to recognize as more than a single step or factor.
I lucked out and i write like a 3 year old but i crush math.
This is exactly what I need. I've been struggling with godot for a while and these tutorials are just not clicking for me. I can't wait to see what happens
Just code lul, people who need tutorials get trapped
@@kidmosey yeah, like any other programming language. The problem is when people doesn't understand coding at all for a general lack of experience
@@kidmosey Not really, the problem with that approach is that you can learn to do things in a terrible way. Ing game dev this means losing tons of time, you will basically need to rewrite over and over again. Even worse, you may actually never realize what you have been doing wrong for years. That why it ia extremely important to read tutorials ir books that cover good and bad practices. So why not read only books? Because a tutorial is more oractically oriented text, that focus on one language/library/engine. A good practice may be terrible in certain language or tool because ot the way it is created. So nope, juat doing things is wgat absolute beginners should do. Once you have few years behind your back it is extremely useful to read well writteb tutorials.
@@kidmosey tutorials are primers AND documentation, gives you shortcuts and then you add on it
As a complete idiot who is desperately trying to make a Tower Defense game, I would absolutely LOVE to see that.
xDDDD
@@karlwest437 It is, and okie dokie, I thought it'd be one of the simpler genres. I appreciate the good advice!
Try here, also very good channel: ruclips.net/video/wFdpCGbrVXI/видео.html
@@karlwest437 Good thinking, I'll start there. Thanks!
@@wiktorwektor123 Awesome recommendation, thanks a bunch!
As a teacher of middle school computer science, I agree so much with what you say! The academic, theory-first approach to teaching coding works for a few. But most students, as you correctly say, just want to make something happen in their game. Harnessing that desire and giving support along the way is the road to success. I am hoping that this new venture is a smashing success! I only wish it was available right now for my classes, but I will be following with great interest. Thanks so much!
Part of the problem though, is when you don't teach that fundamental theory, you end up with programmers that have massive gaps in their knowledge. They may know how to piece together code, but they are bad programmers because they aren't thinking like programmers, they're thinking like bad mechanics who just want to patch holes and get the car running without considering tbe long term.
@@DodgaOfficialI agree with your point, though I might differ on the way to teach the fundamentals.
@@BobIrving2 I think it comes down to teaching those fundamentals, but changing the way we teach them. There has to be fun and interesting ways to teach algorithms and data structures and problem solving skills without it feeling like you're learning calculus
Basically, I think this is a great idea, but you should be mindful of some things. I first learned coding using similar online teaching tools to get my feet wet before diving into more free form projects. That these teaching tools work is no surprise, and in my case, they lead to me studying computer science at a university which I otherwise would never have done.
But some of these tutorials/courses had huge flaws, that severely hampered information retention:
1.) Assignments were too easy:
Sometimes in order to complete an assignment you simply had to rename a variable or copy mindlessly the syntax that was given as an example. This is not good teaching. To learn something as a student I need to be forced to understand the properties of the question and at best rearrange these to fit the given problem. Often this problem seemed to stem from not wanting to leave anyone behind. But making everything modular and "jump in at any point"-feasible hamstrings the construction of a good and engaging difficulty/learning curve.
2.) Code created was hard to reference back to:
What I mean by that: After completing a course I would sometimes face a problem in "the real world" that was very similar to an assignment I had done. But In order to get the information out I needed to restart the course, click through all the steps before to look at the solution of the assignment. This could have been solved in a variety of ways. Either writing good cheat sheets that the student gets at the end of the course or have a method in place to download your finished code for future reference. Or have a good indexing system for completed task that makes it easy to navigate back to finished parts.
3.) Code test were to obscure or wrong:
By wrong I mean the test sometimes marked a task as not completed when all that was missing was a blank space in front of or after e.g., a variable name. That is a killer for any enthusiasm if one is not very self-driven or curious - and new to coding. Searching an hour for an error that is no error, but simply different formatting is very frustrating and could turn away some students. One of the online courses I use has a tool in place now that enables "diffing" what you coded with the solution of the instructor, similar to git. This helps a lot to see if you are only missing a white space or if something else is wrong with your code, but this also makes it easier to "cheat" by looking at the solution. But let’s be honest, cheating cannot be completely avoided. And I feel having good hints or tools in place to self-check is more important than making cheating impossible - especially if you do not plan to give out certificates, like some websites do.
I am sure you have thought of all these things I mentioned - but in case you haven't, I wanted to share my experience ;)
There are some more things I experienced while using online learning tools, but I do not want to write an essay more than I already did :D If you want and it helps I can try bundling my thoughts and maybe send you a message or an email - I would love nothing more than for this idea you guys had to succeed.
Thank for all the cool videos and everything you do!
The detailed feedback is much appreciated, and if you'd like to share more, that'd be most welcome. We've thought of some of that, some features other companies don't provide and we'd like to, but we'll be limited by time and resources, much more so than large companies like Codecademy.
Especially when it comes to making the experience really fluid. I think the testing part takes many iterations and user testing and feedback because of those edge cases. Those situations may happen to 0.1% of users, say, so it easily slips through testing before release.
Whichever works best for you. You can contact me on Discord or email me at nathan [at] gdquest.com
Do you have to be "forced" to learn how to speak? Code is just another communication tool to be "spoken" in order for something to be enacted or done - to have an understandable outcome and that is why it is called a system of language. This is why most academically based language courses fail - we force beginners into mechanical abstracts like grammar: conjugating verbs/diagramming sentences, before exposing them to see and hear the language first. Your approach to learning obviously doesn't work for the majority of people wishing to learn a new language of any kind. I am glad that it works for you and others like you.
@@JayVBear45 Sorry, computer code isn't language, despite us calling it that. I teach both languages and computer programming and the two things are completely different. The "language" part of programming is a secondary challenge to learning to reason about code logic and structure.
I learned coding because I was tired of constantly shitty, buggy lego game scripts
I'm a person who used to try to learn code, and YES, you summarize it very well, all tutorials seems to be lazy or skipping the begining of the begin, I'm trying to learn from 1 to 10 let's say, but they all seem to be skipping half of it and it's already on 6 if you know what I mean.
Yeah this is what I feel like the vast majority of people trying to assist others with code do, and while I don't think it's intentional, it definitely makes learning feel harder than it seems like it was for people who already know lots. It'd be like looking up a tutorial on how to walk and the video opens with "so first what you're gonna wanna do is sprint to the gym-"
@@SnoFitzroyI second this. I have a bit of experience with programming but trying to learn stuff like game engines and other complex software can be really hard. Like I just wanna know what i’m looking at first. They are already yapping about classes and inheritance?
That is absolutely genius idea to make the tool like stackblitz, codepan and e.t.c. And the overall analysis behind that decision is also impressive. I'm trying to make tutorials but your insights advanced me a lot in understanding of how we can approach teaching. I totally agree that academic approach is outdated and doesn't fit contemporary pace of life and we need something fresh.
Will it be available as free tool for making tutorials?
We're considering open-sourcing the app, although we haven't settled on that yet. It'll depend on funding and potential contributors. We have limited resources so we have to really focus on what's most sustainable for us now.
Moving forward if we could get subsidies and sponsors that would help a lot; right now all our revenue is in selling products.
Это потому, что в инди геймдев идут люди креативные, с кучей идей в голове. Но такому типу людей тяжело воспринимать сухую теорию, я к сожалению такой же 😞
@@AwesomeFactorio не всегда видосик проще чем документация. Все зависит от сложности и способа подачи. На начальном этапе без видосиков никак, не всем же повезло входить в айти с богатым техническим бэкграундом из продвинутых столичных школ и ВУЗов. Бывают ведь и однодневнве ААА игры с супер графикой и идеальным кодом на плюсах. А игры типа flappy/angry birds с минималистичной графой и кодом в 20 строк рвут все рейтинги скачивания. Потому что они цепляют, в этом может быть и часть везения, а может быть и понимание разработчиком того, на чем народ может залипнуть. И такое понимание у "подстригателя ногтей" может быть гораздо глубже, чем у супер-технаря, который даже думает на Ассемблере))
I wholeheartedly agree with this. I attempted Godot after I failed learning Unreal, and I eventually stopped consuming Godot tutorials because I thought that they did nothing to improve my skills as a programmer. Now, I use Unity, as it isn’t too difficult and has great tutorials online. Not only that, but I found tutorials that not only improved my game development skills, but programming in general.
Of course, everyone has preferences and people learn in different ways. My advice to beginners is to see what works for you. I found Unity to be helpful, but others may prefer Godot, Unreal, or any other engine. In the end, it’s going to come down to the individual who creates the game, not the game engine.
Yeh this comment didn’t age well 😂😂😂😂😂
@@Gorartsy wym?
@@PandaBoyMakeStuff unity and like the prices
This is brilliant and I love how you truly care for people who are struggling with the engine
This is fantastic. I've always wanted to get into game design and have tried a few times with various engines but didn't get very far for the exact reasons you've mentioned. This will be a gamechanger for me
This is a fantastic summary, and exactly what I would want from any course, not just beginner ones!
I guess we need to teach Godot from scratch. Not how to make a game. But how the parts of code work. We always make tutorial on how to make specific mechanics but never consider the absolute beginner that will only consume that one video then get stuck again trying to implement something else.🤔
Well, what's the point of Godot? It's not to make profit obviously. The point, I would imagine, is to create game developers and then possibly programmers in general as a secondary goal. To do that, the language GDScript should be taught from the ground up. I started one of HeartBeasts tutorials about a week ago. The only reason I kind of understand what is going on (rather than blindly following/copying what he is doing) is because over the years I've taken an intro to programming college course, messed around on Code Academy and watched a video or two here and there. So I am at least familiar with Objects, Classes, Arrays, Variables, Strings and all that. I haven't been consistent but am familiar. Anything I don't remember just takes a quick search and then I have renewed or improved understanding. But if you're completely new..... yea like I said I've been off and on again. But I stay longer and longer each attempt and learn more and more. The whole reason I wanted to start learning years ago is because all I do is play video games, but unless I'm making them, playing games most likely isn't going to buy me a house. All of these engines, especially the paid ones, don't really care if you actually know how to code, the one thing you absolutely need to know how to do. Being a game artist and making a game are very different things. You can make art all day, but you still need to know how to code if YOU want to MAKE the GAME. If Godot isn't trying to turn a profit (giving it away for free isn't going to accomplish that) then it should focus on creating developers which requires addressing the low man on the totem pole. Accomplishing that, I'm sure with enough success will bring all the funding it needs. I know that if I make a game with Godot and it is successful, the developers will receive a nice donation. Plus, Godot its self will then have a massive pool of talent to organically create teams and companies developing games with the software. The software is a community where as with Unity and Unreal the software is a company.
@@socius3865 my brother in christ no one is reading that.
That's right, making a game out of a tutorial is just copy and paste, there's little to no thinking at all, not a single exercise. These kind of tutorials will be useful for those who already learned quite a bit of godot. However, they give the false impression the student is learning since "oh it's working for me, I'm a gamedev now".
Oh my god I could cry. Time and time again I wanna learn Godot because I like a lot of things about it over Unity/Unreal, but I get so distracted from tryna learn from the step by steps, document/books, etc. This feels so much like a game changer and im all for it 🥺 this is so appreciated. I suck at learning unless I'm one on one with somebody, or something.
Realy looking forward, you guys are doing awesome job and I hope this can help me to get over basic obstacles
This looks fantastic. I tried learning with your tutorials and indeed found myself baffled once I tried to do this things myself.
However, I'd like to add a note - I am not a complete beginner, I have experience in python web development. Understanding how to code with gdscript was actually the easy part for me.
What I've always found to be true when learning new things and teaching, is that a lot of people focus on the technical stuff and answers. "How to make character jump", "how to create a tile map" and that's all fine and good, but honestly, the first time I felt like I understood how to do web development was when I had a question, and *I knew how to word it to find the answer myself*.
I learned python from an academic book. It was drag, boring and annoying. However, once I started applying it, after about a year, some of the things I learned there came back and helped me a lot. I think the problem isn't that it's "theoretical" but rather that it's presented badly.
I, for one, mostly feel like what I need *is* theory. Learning python took about a month. Learning how to apply it within the context of web development took a year before I was anything near decent at it.
I feel stumped because, I can easily find how to make x thing happen, but what I don't understand is how the system is working. How nodes interact, how do you plan and organize, how scoping works in Godot, how do you pass information and data, etc.. Django is an MVC model-view-controller. These three parts each has its role and relationship to others, and there's a clear distinction and organization to it. Web development itself has clear concepts of "back end" and "front end" that reflects a schematic structure with clear roles and interactions. Godot feels like it doesn't have that level of organization, anything is a node and a bunch of nodes can be a scene which can also be added to a node multiple times. I'm not criticizing Godot's design here, but it makes it harder to understand. How do scenes communicate? How can I access information in a nested scene?
When you have some experience you know how to take a task and break it into bits, then work them one at a time. But I don't understand the theoretical concepts well enough to be able to cut it into these digastable bits that I can figure out myself.
We can mock the tardiness of old books, but I think there's real value to be had in explaining the conceptual parts alongside basic concepts. And for me personally, perhaps I'm a minority among viewers, it would be immensely helpful to have some sort of general guide and theoretical explanations of how the system works. I don't need to be taught coding. I need to understand the system I'm working in.
Just my 2 cents. This isn't to take away from this project, again it looks incredible and very helpful (I am dreaming of a testing area like that so I can mess around). Just know some of your audience is actually looking for a more broad theoretical understanding too :)
Note from the video, the idea is absolutely to explain conceptual parts alongside basic concepts. The idea is just to start concrete and then introduce something that's more like theory rather than dump a lot of theory you don't need or you can't understand yet.
Note game engines and games do have a clear separation between back and front end: the engine's the back end, your game's the front end.
And there's already a great series on how things work in a more general sense in the official docs: docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/best_practices/index.html
@@Gdquest thanks! I'm sure it'll be great. I'll probably try it too I've watched some of your content there. Still struggling, but we'll get there. Thanks for that link!
I have that same struggle, coming from web development, I already know how to code, but I can assemble a plan of action on my mind using the engine
Thank you, I have ADHD and have had a very hard time learning C# because of the video and reading tutorials, as well as the textbooks.
It was always so uninteresting so even after 2 years of studying, I still have trouble grasping the basics.
What you guys said in this video made me realize what I was doing wrong, and maybe this is the method I need to follow to learn code.
I am very much looking forward to the final outcome of this project! :)
Learn by doing. I personally do bot prefer learning by vidoes. I only use them as a last resort if I do not understand the documentation.
Thank you so much for this. The Learn to Code From Zero App helps a ton. Ive been struggling for weeks with multiple tutorials and feel like ive retained nothing.
More than learning the basics of movements we also need to better understand how to properly use some of the nodes, to cover some of "pause/restart" UI menu for other uses like when hit a certain spot in the game, it automatically pauses and a text appears on screen with buttons and text inputs interacting with the game scenes, learning how to apply variables to the game is the best yet uncovered tutorial on godot.
i've so far recommended this engine to most my friends and family which some of them only uses godot engine now for developing their indie beginner games, i love this engine a lot and it's hardworking wonderful dev team, so thank you for always being beginner friendly, and keep up the good work.
This look really awesome - ambitious, thoughtful and very cool! I wish you guys all the best with it
I've spent time teaching in classrooms as well as online, and there are still a lot of challenges to teaching online. The testing program is very cool, though I can 't even imagine the amount of work involved. The challenge, I suspect, is going to be finding the sweet spot between something solvable and still meaningfully challenging for each student.
I also see a lot of tutorials (though admittedly not yours) that are closer to recipes - far more focused on "press x, then Y, add node z" than the why it works, which means students don't actually have a chance to develop mastery. hopefully projects and videos like this will help plug that gap.
Yann
I love Coding Academy sites like this! I'm so glad you're doing this! I remember my first intro to Node-based engines was me and three friends in a room with a Unity "example project" and hammering our heads against it and long-winded "comprehensive" tutorials to try to change a simple thing in the project. I wish something like this existed back then. I look forward to supporting the Kickstarter!
Dude, I'm so glad that you guys have taken this initiative. That's awesome, man. And you're right, that this is really tough for beginners, when they get so overwhelmed with things to learn. I had the exact same experience, except with JavaScript, and eventually that was taught to me.
Thank you GDJeremy, and GD-Guys!
Wow this sounds awsome. I am struggling in just about every way you described. Spent hours and hours following along many tutorials to then just get stuck right away when im not using them.
Keep it up!
Sounds like a great idea. Can't wait to try the course. I love to tinker after getting an idea of how something works from a tutorial. Stretch goals for students to complete independently of the course might be a way to encourage curiosity; without adding a large amount of additional work to the course.
Nice analysis of the educating problem. I've been pondering and exploring this myself as my wife struggled to teach herself. I like your take, turning education into "small victories" that don't overwhelm, similar to how create reward loops in games, but the game this time is educating. 😋
Being a teacher is just as much a skill as being a programmer. It's easy to lose sight of fundamentals and explanations your audience is craving because after years it's become such second nature. Assumptions get made and pretty soon the lessons have snowballed into incoherent ramblings none of us can learn from.
Terminology and context are often big hurdles when I'm learning something new. Good illustrations or comparisons of real world things can go a long way for someone who doesn't think like a computer yet.
This, so much this, yes.
That's such a bit failing with so many 'Beginner' tutorials on RUclips for things like this. The video presenter is just like "so do THIS thing, then do THAT thing, and here's how we do that THING". And you pause the video...then scan it frame by frame frantically...and you're like "wait...don't tell me about THAT thing yet...what was THIS thing, and why did we have to do THIS thing in the first place?". You continue with the tutorial anyway, try to copy THIS thing from the few frames of the video you saw it, although you don't understand it, then take in the explanation from THAT thing and accurately recreate and understand that part at least, but your project then won't work. You don't understand why, because as far as you could see your project was identical to the one on the video - but in actual fact you missed a step on THIS thing, because the video presenter totally glossed over it and acted like it was nothing because it had become second nature to them. But to a newbie, nothing is second nature. More creators need to understand that.
this.... so much of this... if you're making something and expecting people to **actually** use it, you gotta teach yourself to rid of any context that you've built up through your years of experience
fun example, where systems level programmers explain an API. Sure the documentation is nice to have for experienced devs, but my god is it awful if you have no idea what you're doing.
Awesome presentation. You can see where this is going from the first half.
That format was exactly how I actually started coding properly a few years ago (when codecademy was still free). Interactive learning ftw.
I honestly believe this is an innovation that will exponentially increase the amount of godot devs that will actually stay and keep on learning instead of giving up halfway (me when I just started learning lol).
I've tried it out and I think the approach is very good - you guys are refining to an optimal approach for teaching beginners. Kudos and keep up the great work.
I appreciate you thinking outside the box when it comes to this. I've gone through multiple courses as well as taken a 3 month coding boot camp at a local school. I know a lot but none of it really seems to help me progress.
I'm about a month in learning Godot starting with very little coding knowledge. It's thanks to Heartbeast's step by step videos that I got an idea of how everything is supposed to look, and it's thanks to taking and finishing the beginner course on your app that I had an idea of how to write things myself.
I'm just learning about as many tools as I can and trying to recreate things I see in tutorials my own way, and now I'm making my own turn based system from scratch, working my way up to some cool ideas.
It's thanks to you and many other people online that actually teach why you do what you do that I'm getting the hang of this and having fun, so thank you so much!
Thank you so much for writing about your learning experience. I'm really glad we could help.
Excellent approach! Our team really needs your tutorials.
So true! Seeing small sections work and learning how to put them together is how EVERYTHING, not just programming, should be taught.
I like the new Fireship style for the videos. It is such a good format for focusing on the text without distracting with visual noise!
This is brilliant! Great, great work, guys!!
Thanks so much for doing the work to make this app. I always appreciate what GDQuest is doing for the Godot community, and this is going to be a huge win for total beginners to learn to code not just for Godot but actually in Godot.
You also have a ton of wisdom in this video. Your conclusion is something I've been thinking through a lot recently with my own videos, too - in general, tutorial series tend to have less overall experiential gain than smaller, individual projects do. Since most of my videos are part of long series, it's been making me rethink where my time as a tutor is best invested.
That said, I do think it is important for long tutorial series to exist - they not only show that certain types of games can be made in an engine, but they also show one possible way of doing. I think for newer engines like Godot you almost need a healthy catalog of long tutorial series (maybe even game genre-specific ones) to really build interest in the engine. In the long haul, though, it's the smaller projects and one-off exercises that really help improve not only memory of what you learn but also help expose you to the fullness of an engine or language.
Anyway, some random musings. Thanks again for the work you all do!
This is amazing. The musical analogue to this is called the "Suzuki method", it has become a standard in teaching how to learn instruments and its only better that that becomes a standard for Godot too.
Not a teenager. A bit of Basic, Pascal, C# and even a smattering of Python and SQL, and more. Godot still intimidates me (and I sort of kinda made a little progress with but also failed with Unity).
I also have a bad habit of forgetting stuff that I learnt to do things, and this knowledge of forgetfulness discourages tutorial following, and as such feel like a "raid boss" of "uncoachability". At this point I've almost given up on learning and have become more inclined to seek out 'exported knowledge' - knowledge at one's fingertips that is easily accessible - when required. Basically the "toys/" you refer to - but more like a catalog of functionality.
Good luck with your kickstarter. Also the new experimental app looks like it would be interesting.
That happens to many and that's why our latest product was a cookbook: a collection of concrete examples you can come back to. That's also why we're doing the app. You can help people repeat things until they memorize them. Although there's a long way to go until we can have a large catalog of practices to cycle through and possibly repeat.
This is brilliant. Please keep us updated. Subbed.
Keep up the great work! it's definitely difficult to strike the balance of explaining everything and moving the content forward. Including making the content interesting and described enough to create those "aha" 💡 moments.
Totally agree with your observations about how learning works for most people. I bought your course and I'm enjoying it a lot. Thank you.
this is a really thoughtful and exciting approach. i can see it benefiting people whatever their level, but of course especially beginners. :)
Wow, you are truly amazing Nathan! This blew my mind
This sounds like such a cool initiative! Can't wait to see the results!
Amazing! I've always thought teaching in a non interactive way was absolutely not useful. When I was a student, I did a lot of personal projects to actually understand how things work and I believe I learned much more that way.
I think this is a huge step forward!
This is both challenging and inspiring my practice as a programming teacher. Thank you, very much. Been stuck in a rut for a while and this has been the motivation I needed.
Just got to the kickstarter plug, definitely backing! Thanks for your service!!
It is absolutely amazing to me, having worked in the tech space for a little while, how absolutely self-absorbed a lot of coders are in terms of the standard knowledge of the common user. I don't think most consider at all what the absolute basics mean, and just how much memorization and context clues they have gotten over the years. 0:43 is something I've seen again and again and again and it fills me with rage for anyone absolutely new to things like working on games: 1. "Start with another language" makes no sense considering almost every techy I know got into coding because they started working on something they had a passion for. Not giant projects, either, usually small scripts or mini-projects to do something goofy for themselves. Typically you work on the thing you want and then dip sideways into other concepts or languages as you learn what you want to work on. And 2. "Just use Godot" absolutely deserves a punch in the face, because if you don't have the foundations for how to make something you want to work on, the result is an overwhelming sense of helplessness and instant dejection trying to enter the community. Just use Godot means hours of aimless digging into a program with confusion and frustration. And it is 100% fair for a new person to not want to waste their own time as much as possible. I'm not saying an exploration in the program you're using isn't warranted, but there's a difference between learning for 5 hours to find the one direction you want to take, and beating your head against a wall for 5 hours only to be absolutely frustrated and angry by the time you find the avenue you wanted to take.
Sorry for the rant, I've just been surrounded by people who have no awareness of others, and feel that coding makes them superior to others, instead of making them an apt teacher to save others time and energy for the things they really want to work on.
see, this is exactly my problem. it's so hard finding the resources I need to learn how to code and it feels as if coding itself is gatekept.
I've wanted for so long to be able to develop a game, a fighting game specifically, but in order to do that I need to learn a coding language. but the question that I always ask is: where do I go to find it? how do I find it, how do I learn it, how can I make it do what I want because I am ignorant to the thing I'm trying to do. but the only answer I ever get is "just learn it."
amazing advice! why, I'm sure many have learned how to speak Mandarin Chinese by simply reading through complex Chinese texts! why haven't I thought of that?
I absolutely would love to explore a program, but the problem is that I don't know the basics, so if I don't know the basics on what I'm doing then how can I explore? you need tools to explore and without those tools, you'll never make it out alive (in this case, coming out completely unmotivated and unable to do what you sought out to do.)
all I'm looking for is just a straight forward "this is how it works so you know what you're doing" and *then* you can send me out to explore the program.
_"there's a difference between learning for 5 hours to find the one direction you want to take, and beating your head against a wall for 5 hours only to be absolutely frustrated and angry by the time you find the avenue you wanted to take."_
HOLY FUCK IT'S IN WORDS NOW
@@biohazardbin No joke, you gotta hit the books or take some classes if you want learning with structure
It's great that you did this. I'm glad you're doing something about a common problem. The way I learned to code was using Scratch. I think it's perfect for learning to code, as all the blocks are self-explanatory, and it's easy to get results fast just by experimenting. It bridges the accessibility gap in coding extremely well.
This website is exactly what I needed, thank you! I know some basics of html so I understand certain ideas but that's really it
I've been a struggling programmer since 2001, and before that I was just as bad if not worse. I started learning BASIC on a VIC-20 back in 84 at the age of 7 and programming has always been a dream of mine. It wasn't until the last few years where I really started to grasp it. To those who get it the first time, you are truly gifted. Some people can't get it so easily, but I grew up to bad books, no tutorials and no teaching classes on the subject. The internet has been my learning center.
Your comment made me smile. Don’t worry about how good you are, just enjoy it. Follow your dream. Celebrate the little victories.
I stopped trying again since those 2 years but once more I think It's time to try again.@@Jacob-ol3zb
I totally agree with this sentiment. I tried to learn to code for years and kept failing. I didn't find Godot until I had a moderate grasp on coding already but it's really what pushed me over the edge to be able to code confidently. So I love seeing projects like this. As someone who is trying to make online tutorials I have actively avoided beginner level because I can really only teach people what I've figured out on my own. And telling people to ram their head against online tutorials for 5 years isn't going to be a very good video. I will be backing your project for sure.
Oh my god. I just watched a very long GDQuest ad. 😂😂😂 I hope the Kickstarter goes through! I do hope the content can eventually become part of your Ultimate Bundle: It is a very attractive bundle because it seemed to include all your content, but if it becomes segmented, it becomes a less desirable purchase.
No, it's a paid course. It's the app and some content that would become accessible for free, if the backers accept those terms. If you try to fund a free course, very few persons will back it, that would be really unsustainable. We'd need subsidies or something like that to do that.
This course, like all our existing and future on-demand Godot courses, will be part of the bundle, yes.
Wow, this is an awesome venture and an important lesson for others too!!! All the best!!! ♥♥♥
You guys are amazing! Great work.
Yeah this is part of why I started making my videos. there were tons of tutorials that showed you how to make this or that kind of game but rarely did they described the underlying context of how what you're making actually worked.
Thanks for this video! I'm starting to learn both Godot and Julia. My goal is to build toolsets to allow users with different cognitive and sensory needs to experience games together. I look forward to seeing more of your work!
The observation and comments are spot on. Few years a go I read a book on performance psychology. I don't remember the name of the book, but I do remember one part of it where the author talked about a study that found that people learn better and more meaningful not when they learn the problem from start to end, but instead break it into smaller basic pieces. Like if you want to learn to draw then break all the components of drawing in to all it's smaller parts and practice those, rather than a full on drawing.
I did found the same with code. If I can identify the areas I'm lacking knowledge I spend some time to isolate and create a specific practice to try and understand the topic.
I really can feel your soul into all of this, guys. U rock. I love ur approach
i always appreciated these kinds of learning environmenta where you can focus on one task in an interactive way. other examples of this often fall short on the number of available tutorials and they often stil cram too much in there so you‘ll get frustrated at some point. if the learner can just choose her path and every step is small, this will be a big success!
This will be great. I took the cs50 course during lock down but got stuck with the last 3 sections as it got extremely complex. It’s great for learning how coding works but since it’s based on C they go far more in depth. Now I’ll have to start from scratch again as it’s been a year since I took it.
Dude you guys are so awesome!
I'm a 40 something IT working guy with some basics coding knowledge and i struggle like crazy with usual tutorials, so yes, i fully agree with your pov on that topic. So thanks a lot for thinking about newcomers/beginners.
used to teach by small projects, when I did extra curricular teaching of python, it works really well, but yeah it's a lot of upfront work for the teachers.
getting results helps with small wins and feeling accomplished to get students to continue.
there is nothing in the world, to me, more rewarding than teaching and seeing their happiness with completing tasks.
Where did you get the ideas for the projects? Trying to teach python but I don't have projects that work on specifics points.
Yeah as someone who has been programming most of my life, teaching someone else sort of a mystery to me. I've tried many times, don't get me wrong, but there are people that I just cannot get to, that some other people managed to teach.
The small projects approach does work, but it has to be with people that can learn by themselves to some degree and many require much more hand guiding.
Truth is like me, most teacher just do the standard thing, that doesn't work for many people and truly deep down have no idea what actually makes people learn, some do it really fast, it's amazing, some take years but still manage, and some apparently never get the basic concepts according to some research done in that field.
Teaching can be fun and humbling, like some kids learn in a month what took me 2 years growing up or so, maybe I didn't have enough guidance maybe I was slower but loved it, not sure, don't care that much. But sometimes teaching is really frustrating as some things are just hard to teach and cannot be reduced without being-self referential, one of that things is pointers, you can change the language and how to explain them but once you get to some level there no going simpler than that.
One thing that is a constant between people that learn it is perseverance, I think even the slowest guy can hit his head against the wall enough until he achieves the moment that things click, but that's hard when you seemingly aren't progressing, but it's something that has happened to me in some contexts. And the same goes for finishing a big project. Perseverance (and planning!) is key.
Amazing work as always. We're lucky to have you!
Great initiative! This would be incredibly useful, not only for beginners but also for people who are experienced in other programming paradigms and just get lost when facing Godot nodes and scripts.
You touched on so many great points in this video and it's definitely not an easy problem to solve. One of the reasons I was able to fall in love with programming so much was because I had an amazing set of computer science courses in my high school with a truly amazing teacher. Instead of how most courses tend to go, which I learned from my friends from other schools to be very theory-based, my teacher took us immediately into practical examples that used core concepts. The first year was all codeless as we only used scratch. While I thought this was annoying at first, I later realised that it got us thinking like programmers so moving to actual code would be less jarring. Next we used Java to build basic sorting algorithms and stuff like that that were practical, as well as teaching us how to use basics like if and while statements. We then built up to more complicated games and other programs that utilized concepts like data structures. All of this kept us engaged as we could see the product of our efforts and it also let the concepts sink in. In the end we were making games like Solitare that utilized semi-complex logic and data structures like stacks and ques. After high school, I was able to take my knowledge to better learn things from normal video tutorials. I wish everyone could get the same foundation that I did, and I'm really glad you are working towards these tools that can help people to get a similar experience.
Awesome job on this project. It will be a challenge to come up with an interface that provides ample enough space for student's code. I hope you nail it!
this reminds me of the tool i used to learn some code in hs - i havent found anything that worked quite like it. i think if not for the fact that i wasnt actually allowed to work too far ahead, i wouldve gone and completed everything there.
something that site had that i cant tell if this has in the assignment window you could still easily reference the vocab/tags/whatever, even on tests. having resources like that available without switching back and forth between tabs was extremely helpful while i was learning python and html. im excited to see how this app develops, because this seems to be the exact type of resource that ive been looking for for a long time now.
This is a great idea! Sounds very helpful.
That's a great idea. I got into game programming some years ago after taking the Khan Academy course, that teaches in a very similar way to what you are developing, and it was way more effective in teaching me how to code than an IRL course I was taking around the same time, exposing just the necessary amount of code and teaching interactively with practical examples REALLY makes the difference when you are starting to learn something (although the more theoretical part is still very useful after you already learned the basics).
Definitely want to start getting an understanding of complicated node interactions and seeing what clicks. I'm especially interested in finding out how terrain sprites snap together.
Really appreciate you all doing this! Especially since I have been having trouble getting godot to click!
Sounds like a great idea, especially for beginners who would be daunted by a massive, complex hierarchy of lessons that all depend on each other. Flattening that hierarchy somewhat with small minigames and toys seems like a good way to teach beginners without scaring them away. After watching this I immediately backed the Kickstarter -- it's already at $80k of the $20k goal and I have enough programming experience outside Godot to not need this course, but I wish success for you and all the beginning programmers who can benefit from it.
Yes sounds great. I wanted to try and make mini games to learn this kinda stuff anyway and a resource that guides you through that process sounds perfect.
Looks really good!
You guys are doing great work, and you will succeed for sure.
Commenting so the YT Algo recommends your content more often. Also writing a load of text to further encourage the YT algo that I want to see this content etc. Dear YT algo, I'm a Unity dev swapping to godot and attempting to exploit our AI overlords to do my bidding. Thank you for your consideration of devs like me who are experienced with an old engine, and seeking to pick up a new engine. Here's the part where I've run out of things to say, so please accept my gratitude for processing my input in less than a fraction of a second so I can see content like this more often. By the way, I use ChatGPT, which is probably the closest thing we have to sapient AI, and I still have to be hyper-specific, and understand how to optimize my prompts to have any hope of it being the slightest bit helpful. Still, it's easier than pair-programming with my good friend who's usually unavailable (or unwilling) to participate in projects that I need support on. So thanks for always being there for me (unlike my dad; well that's not true, he's a helicopter parent and I had to cut him off.. now this is getting personal so I'll change the subject again). I really like game dev, and I appreciate the people who put so much time and attention into making videos like this for easier onboarding to a new engine, as well as insight into the design space. Looking forward to having the algo throw tons of this content my way. Thanks and goodnight. Love, SpellMender.
I've just discovered you. I'm amazed by your conclusions with regard to shortcomings in various educational areas and I really hoped the video would have ended with "that's why we have a beginner python learning course with godot for you"... :) I'll keep an eye on you though :)
I think this will provide a very much needed course for the coding beginners. Another course that I would love to see is something on understanding the math and physics side of things. I've been a programmer for 25 years, but all my work has been business logic related. I haven't studied math and physics for a long time. I can copy and paste code, read a few tidbits here and there, but a course that would start with the basic building blocks of how games use math and physics and worked up to advanced mechanics would be a wonderful addition.
Love these thoughts about modern day tutorials, I always thought about how can you learn by following a tutorial it didn't make sence to me in the past
I am very much looking forward to this!
Amazing effort. Kudos.
Brilliant approach.
love you guys keep it up !!
I started learning to code ever since the advent of AI LLM like chatgpt and try to use it as some sort of training tutor. It's not perfect but it saves 5-15 minutes browsing for answer or reading documentation. It saves a complete beginners like me from spamming a forum with simple question such as how to get a value from an array, how to calculate an angle or to simply identify an error with my syntax. It's great! I still need to look up online tutorial for the more advanced tricks but it definitely makes programming a lot more accessible
Dope once i know more ill come back to you guys :) thanks for being so honest.
I love how you showed Daniel from TheCodingTrain. He's so awesome I bought his book and it's amazing.
You've sold me, I definitley want to learn how to code I am a begginer and everything you said sounds like the best way for me to learn because I am an objectual thinking not and equative one
Wow. That sounds really promising! I would say that i am over that hill already, but i think this project could lower the entry barrier to godot significantly
Woooooooooo!!! Just what i needed :D
I tell you what, almost one year ago I startet learning Godot with your Tutorials (Make your first 2D Game with Godot). And just after that Tutorial it was Uphill for me :D Made a first simple Game to enjoy with my Family, learned Networking (Dedicated Server), participated in a GameJam and now working on a Multiplayer-Game.
Love you Guys!
I enjoy the coding part of things, makes me feel more like an artist and creator rather than an "editor".
I value alot basic principles and I'm starting just now to learn Godot.
So far i'm loving it. It seems to have a tool to calm down every fear I had.
One thing I have found super helpful, and one of the things that drew me to unity vs Godot, is a tutorial focus on single aspects and features of an engine or coding language. I feel like Godot, likely due to Godot scripting having a much smaller user pool than say, C#, has a tutorial base that tends toward 'project' tutorials. Those are OK for people that want to take a programming course online, but I know I and a lot of beginers would much rather figure this stuff our ourselves, and I found tutorials for Unity that were much more 'This is a text box, this is what you can do with a text box, this is how to do it. Next week drop down menus' and so on, threw UI basics into phyiscs and gameplay systems, one block at a time, and focused on that thing. People don't want to sit down and follow step by step guides to answer a question, if they are looking to learn an entire new skill they might want a few of those, but they might not. A lot of the time people want to know about a thing.
I think one good example is casting. I must have followed 50 tutorials for unity that cast various functions, but the concept of casting was never explained, I was told I had to do it in order to do a thing in this tutorial, but with no background... did I know when to use it in my own projects? How and when it was better to cast than to just start with different data types? No, none of that, I just knew that in step 30 I had to do it or I got an error.
Compaire that to say, actual documentation for a language, it gets it. It is broken down into tiny, granular parts, it explains them in explicit detail, and it lets you build with them as you see fit. It doesn't show you 3 use cases and hope you intuit proper use, it doesn't leave you guessing what it can/can't do by only showing you one usecase, it'll list it all. I find youtube videos that basicly dumb down technical documentation into dummy speak 2000% more useful than 2 hours of watching somebody build a game to maybe pick up two new bits of info... and still have to hit up stack overflow the first time I try to use one.
as a teacher who worked in vocational education, i recognize so many of the points.
and yes, the effort needed to make good educational materials is so often unrecognized by our principals. :(
I completely agree with starting from a problem and teaching code from their. I took a coding class in high school while trying to learn Ruby at home. I couldn't grasp TrueBasic in class because I didn't know what I was doing. At home I was messing with existing Ruby code in RPG Maker XP so I could slowly make changes and see my results so I actually started to pick it up.
Shortcuts, quite relatable, I suppose-
Around 15 years ago, I was an avid user of RPGMaker XP. And eventually some newer alterations of it.
It was super easy to get into, because it was the first time I was introduced to a game maker that didn't need understanding of codes. It did allow custom codes to make your own systems. Without custom codes, it had some limits, but some people took up challenges to make the best games they could without a single line of custom codes. Results were impressive for its time.
I did learn how to edit a few lines to get the results I wanted, so there was that.
I didn't really touch game making for a long while, so when I got interested again, I heard of Unreal Engine 4, and its node based system. Now I didn't really make anything useful of it, but I got more results from that, than attempting with writing myself.
I suppose as long as we know that a shortcut exists, and it's proven to work, we will always seek and make use of it until it's no longer considered a shortcut, but the standard route.
Alternatively, some people just learn and use things visually rather than with just theories.
Great video, I'm glad to see growing discourse on RUclips about how to better teach new programmers.
I think tutorials are good for people who already know how to program and want to add a feature to their existing project, but they're really not a good way to learn in the first place. Regarding academic teaching I think people forget that Computer Science courses aren't supposed to teach you to program they're supposed to teach you Computer Science which is related but not the same thing. I'm not sure universities are well suited to teaching programmers at all.
This must be a lot of work but it is really awesome! If after this you guys can do something like this but for the other disciplines of game development (art, design, and sound) will be just perfect! Good luck!
Well, this one is surely a good approach. Most people come to programming are interested in programming anyhow and most of them are math lover. But those who comes to game Development specifically in this covid situation are gamers who are not familiar with the software stack. So, I think you found a great start. Appreciate that. Learning from documentation is actually hard. Although it worth it in long run, starting from enjoying the game dev thing by doing some basic project maybe one of the best approach possible.
Thank you very much for doing this.