Setting up the project¶

In this short first part, we'll set up and organize the project.

Launch Godot and create a new project.

Download dodge_assets.zip. The archive contains the images and sounds you'll be using to make the game. Extract the archive and move the art/ and fonts/ directories to your project's directory.

Ensure that you have the required dependencies to use C# in Godot. You need the .NET Core 3.1 SDK, and an editor such as VS Code. See Setting up C# for Godot.

Download dodge_assets_with_gdnative.zip. The archive contains the images and sounds you'll be using to make the game. It also contains a starter GDNative project including a SConstruct file, a dodge_the_creeps.gdnlib file, a player.gdns file, and an entry.cpp file.

Ensure that you have the required dependencies to use GDNative C++. You need a C++ compiler such as GCC or Clang or MSVC that supports C++14. On Windows you can download Visual Studio 2019 and select the C++ workload. You also need SCons to use the build system (the SConstruct file). Then you need to download the Godot C++ bindings and place them in your project.

Your project folder should look like this.

This game is designed for portrait mode, so we need to adjust the size of the game window. Click on Project -> Project Settings to open the project settings window and in the left column, open the Display -> Window tab. There, set "Width" to 480 and "Height" to 720.

../../_images/setting-project-width-and-height.png

Also, scroll down to the bottom of the section and, under the "Stretch" options, set Mode to "2d" and Aspect to "keep". This ensures that the game scales consistently on different sized screens.

Organizing the project¶

In this project, we will make 3 independent scenes: Player, Mob, and HUD, which we will combine into the game's Main scene.

In a larger project, it might be useful to create folders to hold the various scenes and their scripts, but for this relatively small game, you can save your scenes and scripts in the project's root folder, identified by res://. You can see your project folders in the FileSystem dock in the lower left corner:

With the project in place, we're ready to design the player scene in the next lesson.