A short beginner’s guide to discovering Godot 4

Wondering how to dive in this nice free & open-source engine? Learn the basics with this getting-started guide!

With everyone looking for alternatives to Unity after their new “fee” announcement, and considering Godot, thought I’d make a little “getting started” bouncy ball tutorial… I hope it can help some game devs with the transition, and help people discover this really cool free open-source game engine :)

So if this is your first time in Godot and you want to understand the basics of this game engine with a basic bouncy ball demo, then this tutorial is for you!

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to create some simple 3D meshes, setup a camera and a light and even add a bit of physics to have your objects interact.

As usual, don’t forget that you can get the demo scene and all the assets from this demo on my Github 🚀 with all my other Godot tutorials.

The tutorial is also available as a video — text version is below:

And, on that note, time to dive in and take our first steps in Godot :)

Install & setup

Alright — first of all, of course, we need to download the software. So just head over to Godot’s website, to the Download section, and pick the version that matches your OS.

You’ll notice that there are two variations: either with or without .NET. Basically, .NET support is useful if you plan on doing C# in Godot — which can be more efficient than using an interpreted language like GDScript, but can be a bit tougher to learn if you’re not familiar with it yet :)

Anyway, let’s say you go for the basic version — once it’s downloaded, just unzip the archive and you’ve got Godot on your computer…