Godot Basics: Nodes, Resources, and Scripts

This article is an introduction to the Godot Game Engine, we’ll cover the editor and some core concepts at a high level. This article is part of the Godot Basics series.

The Godot Editor

The Godot has a relatively simple and friendly editor once you get a bit familiar you’ll really enjoy working with it!

Above is a screenshot of the Godot editor with our snowboarding game Matterhorn open.

Main Area

• Top left: all of the nodes in the current scene tree (see Nodes).
• Bottom left: all assets, saved scenes, scripts, etc.
• Top middle: editable visualisation of the nodes in the scene.
• Bottom middle: console output that displays messages from the editor and the running game via print(...).
• Right: inspector displaying configuration for the currently selected node.

Toolbar

• Left: the usual menus for saving, exporting, setting project configuration, etc.
• Middle: buttons to switch between 2D, 3D and Script views.
• Right: play button, etc to run the current scene.

Nodes

Nodes are the building blocks of a game in Godot. There are nodes for sprites, rigid bodies (physics), audio, etc pretty much anything you’d want to do in a game. Nodes are organised into a tree structure for example a player node might contain a sprite node to display a player and a rigid body to handle physics.

Some nodes require resources for example a sprite node needs a texture resource. Nodes can have scripts attached to them to perform additional behaviour.

Saving and Reusing Nodes

Nodes (including their children i.e. a branch of the tree) can a saved to a scene file for reuse. These saved scenes can be added to a scene in the editor or programmatically in a script.

Loading a saved scene in code is achieved using the instance() method on a PackedScene for example:

extends Node

export var packed_scene: PackedScene

func init():
	var node = packed_scene.instance()
	add_child(node)

Resources

Resources are data such as textures, audio, mesh data, etc which are used by nodes. Resources are either a file e.g. an image file or a built-in resource such as a curve resource in a path node.

Scripts

Scripts allow nodes to have additional behaviour for example move left when the player presses left or open a door when an area is entered. A script can be added to a node by right-clicking and attaching a script.

The default scripting language in Godot is GDScript a simple dynamically-type Python-like language. Here’s a little taste of GDScript, the script is the movement logic driving the snowboarder in Matterhorn.

extends KinematicBody2D

export var speed = 100
export var turn_speed = 0.1

var angle = 0

func _process(delta):
	if Input.is_action_pressed("ui_left"):
		angle -= turn_speed * delta
	elif Input.is_action_pressed("ui_right"):
		angle += turn_speed * delta

  angle = clamp(angle, -PI * 0.4, PI * 0.4)


func _physics_process(_delta):
	move_and_slide(speed * Vector2(sin(angle), cos(angle)))