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Introduction to Godsot — Godot Engine (stable) documentation in English
Introduction to Godot
This article is designed to help you decide if Godot is right for you. We'll walk through some of the engine's broad capabilities, give you an idea of what you can achieve with it, and answer questions like "What do I need to know to get started?"
This is by no means an exhaustive overview. We'll cover more features in this getting started series.
What is Godot?
Godot is a general-purpose 2D and 3D game engine that you can also use to create console games, although you'll need strong programming skills or a developer to port the game for you. Designed to support a variety of projects.
You can use it to create games or applications that can then be published on desktop or mobile devices, as well as on the web.
Note: The Godot team is unable to provide open source console exports due to licensing terms imposed by console manufacturers. However, publishing your game on consoles is always a lot of work, no matter what engine you use. You can read more about it here: Console support in Godot .
What can the engine do? ¶
Godot was originally developed in-house by an Argentinian game studio. Its development started in 2001, and since its open-source release in 2014, the engine has been greatly rewritten and improved.
As for apps, the open source pixel art drawing program Pixelorama is powered by Godot, as is voxel RPG creator RPG in a box (and so is the voxel RPG creator RPG in a box).
You can find more examples in the official showcase video .
How does it work and how does it look? ¶
Godot comes with a full-fledged game editor with integrated tools for the most common needs. It includes code editor, animation editor, tilemap editor, shader editor, debugger, profiler and more.
The team is committed to delivering a feature-rich game editor with a consistent user experience. While there is always room for improvement, the user interface is also constantly being refined.
Of course, you can use an external program if you wish. We officially support importing 3D scenes designed in Blender , and maintain plugins to code in GDScript and C# in VSCode and Emacs . We also support Visual Studio for C# on Windows.
Programming languages¶
Let's talk about the available programming languages.
You can code your game using GDScript , a Godot-specific and tightly integrated language with a lightweight syntax, or C# which is popular in the gaming industry. These are the two main scripting languages we support.
With GDExtension technology, you can also write gameplay or high-performance algorithms in C or C++ without recompiling the engine. You can use this technique to integrate third-party libraries and other software development kits (SDKs) into the engine.
Of course, you can also add modules and functions directly to the engine, since it is completely free and open source.
What do I need to know to use Godot? ¶
Godot is a feature-rich game engine. With its thousands of features, there's a lot to learn. To get the most out of it, you need a solid programming foundation. While we work hard to make the engine accessible, you'll gain a lot from knowing how to think like a programmer first.
Godot relies on the object-oriented programming paradigm. Familiarity with concepts such as classes and objects will help you write code efficiently in them.
If you're new to programming, we recommend taking Harvard's CS50 OpenCourseWare. This is a great free course that will teach you everything you need to get off to a good start. It will save you countless hours and hurdles to learn any game engine later.
Note: In CS50, you will learn several programming languages. Fear not: programming languages have many similarities. Skills you learn in one language transfer well to other languages.
We will provide you with more Godot exclusive learning resources in Learning new features .
In the next section, you'll learn about the basic concepts of the engine.