This intermediate-level course is here to help you take your 2D game creation skills to the next level.
There are plenty of free tutorials available to learn Godot's basics.
But for the most part, they only teach one isolated feature. And when you sit down to make a complete game, you get stuck.
As your projects grow, bugs appear more frequently, and your progress slows down...
It doesn't have to be this way!
Professional developers use methods that stood the test of time to stay productive year-long:
In 2D Secrets, you'll develop these skills through a wide variety of detailed game creation tutorials.
In 2D Secrets, you will learn:
All that using Godot's GDScript programming language.
Because you learn the most by doing, the course is entirely project-based. We're working on many types of games to keep every new chapter fresh and engaging.
Also, while videos can be great to get started, they get in the way when learning advanced code.
In video, thirty lines of GDScript easily become a 10-minute monologue. That just slows you down.
With text lessons, you can easily jump around with the search and go through big code snippets in no time.
That's why this course is text-based.
With 140 lessons, 2D Secrets is loaded with content.
It's made of self-contained series, each dedicated to a different kind of game, so you can follow them in any order, anytime.
Here’s a list of everything you'll get right now.
The Simulation game inspired by Factorio shows you how to create a builder game with automation and a complete inventory system. Using an Entity Component System (ECS), you will learn the techniques you need to create simulation games with Godot.
The first chapter covers the game’s foundations like making isometric maps, creating machines, connecting them with wires, and producing, storing, and providing machines with electricity.
The second chapter focuses on the user interface and shows you how to create a complete inventory system with all the bells and whistles you expect from this kind of game.
The JRPG combat series explains you how to create a turn-based combat system with “Active Time Battle”. Character stats, managing time and turns, status effects, or artificial intelligence, we approach all the essential topics.
The first chapter focuses on implementing all the systems. The second one is dedicated to making a pretty user interface while keeping your code scalable.
The dialogue system series shows you how to code and create the interface for a visual novel’s dialogue system, or every kind of game, really. You’ll get to design the text box, animate the characters, and design scenes with data.
The tactical RPG grid-based movement series is short and accessible. It shows you how to create a grid-based game. It focuses exclusively on unit selection, pathfinding, and movement, drawing inspiration from games like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars.
Bonus: mini-tuts! These bite-size, cookbook-style tutorials each tackle a particular problem, like creating an animated transition between two scenes or smoothly zooming in and out using the mouse wheel.
Bonus: best practices in Godot. A series of guides focused on the good practices to follow and the bad ones to avoid using Godot.
Bonus: programming patterns in Godot. A series dedicated to popular programming patterns that we use in our projects, but fully adapted to Godot, saving you painful research and trial-and-error. We experimented a lot with patterns and code structure over the past three years and will share everything we found with you.
There are already four more series in production for the next few updates, on top of all the above:
And of course, we keep improving the course based on your feedback and share every enhancement in the course’s changelog.
Once you bought 2D Secrets, you get lifetime free updates. All extra content we add to the course will come at no extra cost. Even if we increase the price in the future.
The course is also available in the Godot Secrets combo bundle with VFX Secrets, Shader Secrets, and PCG Secrets.
Or in the Ultimate Godot bundle that contains all our current and future courses.
This is an intermediate-level Godot course where we don't hold your hand. It is intended for users who have worked with Godot for a while and want to professionalize themselves.
The content goes straight to the point and focuses on teaching you what matters the most.
While some tutorials are accessible and even beginner-friendly, other projects are complex and require strong programming foundations.
You can check out the free samples in the menu on the right to get a sense of the style and pace.
Note: If you buy it and figure out it's not for you, your purchase comes with a 60 days refund warranty. You just need to contact us to get an instant refund.
Pre-requisites:
If you have no experience with Godot, start with our Free Godot guide learning paths to get up to speed.
GDQuest is an international team committed to helping you become a better game developer, all the while contributing to Free and Open-Source Software.
We've been consistently using and supporting Godot for over 4 years now.
I, Nathan, made hundreds of tutorials on our YouTube channel and was hired to work on the official documentation.
All the code from this project is available under the permissive MIT license.
In short, you can use it and modify it freely, even in commercial projects.
By buying this course, you support Godot's ecosystem and the creation of Free and Open-Source Software.
Here are all the open-source demos from Godot 2D Secrets:
If you would like to pay with PayPal, that is possible.
To do so, please:
We will send you a payment request via PayPal. Once paid, you will get access to the course within two business days.
If you need an invoice, please tell us in your message and send us your full details.
If you don’t like the course or you didn’t learn anything, send us a message within 60 days after your purchase to get an instant refund!
Just send us a message with your Mavenseed account's email and the product you'd like to refund.
Take your 2D game creation skills to the next level.
How do I access the course?
After your purchase, the course instantly becomes available on your account.
You can click lessons in the right menu bar to open them.
Below every lesson, you'll find a download section that allows you to download everything, DRM-free, to read tutorials the way you want. The course is yours to keep.
Once you started a course, it will also appear in your account dashboard.
Will you update your courses for Godot 4?
Sure, we already have plans to update all Godot Secrets series when Godot 4.0 comes out.
Also, almost everything you'll learn with the current courses applies to Godot 4. While it's a big release with many improvements, Godot 4.0 is still Godot.
Until when do I have access?
You get lifetime access. Also, all courses come with DRM-free downloads: you can keep the files on your computer: you really own them.
If you have more questions or need anything, you can contact us.
This course was funded and made possible by hundreds of backers on Kickstarter.
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I really underestimated the amount of information there would be here. I read the list of lessons and thought there would probably be a lot of repetition and yes, there is, but not nearly as much as I had expected, and it's always presented in a new way or expanding on their capabilities. Hours of reading (and re-reading)in and I am nowhere near done with this course.
This tutorial series has been very helpful in learning the ins and outs of the Godot engine. If you have at least a little experience with object-oriented programming (and are comfortable learning new interfaces on the fly), you should be able to catch on fairly easily following these tutorials.
I would not recommend this series if you have never programmed before, as a lot of the concepts and lessons will require a base-level knowledge of how programming languages works (e.g. how to declare variables and functions, how to read code comments, how to follow if/then logic, the purpose of arrays and dictionaries, etc.)
Overall, though, this series has been extremely helpful in my efforts to learn GDScript and its built-in features and functions, and how to leverage those assets to build a game from scratch. It has a lot of good information on how to design a game, too, so that it's not only functional but also fun.
I have completed several sections within this Godot 2D secrets: the RPG sections, Visual novel, and tactical movement. These lessons are not targeting beginners, GDquest has a beginner course you should look into if you are a beginner, but rather these lessons are designed to teach from a more intermediate level, to help you take your game programming closer to what professional game devs use. These courses are what you need to take your skills to the next level, and I feel that they have helped me to move in the right direction.
Some times you want tutorials that approach the content at a level above beginner. If you feel like you are ready to upgrade your programming skills, then These GDQuest tutorials are a great place to do that. They have certainly helped me. And these are components you can (and likely will) reuse in your code.
Plus Nathan is responsive when you post questions. I recommend this course.
Thank you very much, Jerry!
I've been following the Japanese RPG Combat lessons as I'm mostly interested in that right now. So that is the part that I can actually review. I'm halfway through the core systems and I feel there's one thing that is "missing". So here it goes:
First and foremost: I understand where the lessons are going and what system it is implementing and showing. I'm an advanced programmer with a lot of experience in Scala, Python and C#. GdScript is easy enough to get the hang of and your code style, advice and best practices are on point. The code is great; I would've done a few things differently but those are just opinions and style.
What is do feel though, and possibly this is just talking from experience in giving a lot of trainings myself, is that you've taken a great end product and chopped it into pieces to build constructive lessons instead of building it from the trainees perspective.
I would've expected/hoped for a more progressive system which would've included more: "let's run the game and see what we have so far". Halfway through the course I haven't ran the game once. Also, it can't run because there are things that will be implemented in future lessons.
Now, I can live with that and can code around it, but not everyone can.
My biggest advice, from one trainer to another, is that each lesson should end with: run the game. It could be as simple as
Just a few thoughts.
All in all it's a really good start for beginning to intermediate game developers who look for best practices and ideas to solve problems that are not apparent in traditional backend systems. It's much more complete than any of the free resources I've used so far and I like the text based format as it removes the rush from coding along someones speaking tempo in a video.
The lessons are valuable not only for Godot, but the way of solving problems are also useful in other engines like Unity.
On a different note: apart from GcScript I also coded along in C#. For those wondering, it's fairly easy to translate GdScript to C# on the fly, and all the lessons and concepts still apply.
Thanks much for the review. Agreed, it's something we started doing after working on the JRPG's first chapter. I think you'll see that in the UI series, but also in other courses.
The JRPG one you read was the very first chapter I wrote for the course, and the first early access release.
I'm taking good note of that for a future update. We're busy with new projects now, but we'll definitely update this project for Godot 4. And that'd be a good time to integrate your feedback. That is, if we don't get to this before.
I hope you get to check other series too, as there's a ton of value there. The JRPG series is but a small part of 2D Secrets.
It is very well explained.
And I didn't expect to have so much content.
Thank you very much for your work on this course.
Thanks much for the review! Glad you like the course.
The simulation course is amazing, if not the best gamedev course I've ever taken. I will be using the source code as a reference for severals systems in the future.
Well written, well-documented and extremely satisfying flow. If you're a beginner and you want to get some intermediate level knowledge on game development, especially for godot -- do not miss this one out. The others are good too, but especially the simulation course.
Crank up a chill playlist and code along, I was so into it I didn't realise I did it for six hours straight. Looking forward to the next part.
Thanks much for the kind words! We're taking all the feedback we get on the course, as it's still in early access, and we try to apply it to new series as we make them.
Godot Tutorials is not affiliated with or sponsored by Godot Game Engine.
The lessons are a work in progress, and to my understanding, more is to come (and so my review may change, most likely for the better).
My first impression of this product is that it is well presented, straight to the point, and no hand-holding.
The JRPG section has no videos to accompany it. As a matter of fact there are no videos in this course.
If videos are your thing, this course will sadly not be for you in terms of your preferred learning style. I personally enjoy books and articles over videos.
Regardless, you are left to reading the code in the articles, writing the code, and providing your own game assets to make this project your own.
On top of that, you will be learning the author's way of solving problems, which is excellent, especially if you are new to finding solutions to these problems.
They introduce topics quickly, such as the Command Pattern, which is a powerful pattern to learn.
This course does not go into detail of the pattern.
Keep in mind that this course is called "2D Secrets". This course show's you the author's way of dealing with game design problems. Not "Beginners Guide to Design Patterns" or "Beginners Guide to …" and so the intermediate+ level is at play here.
There are lots of free materials on Design Patterns, including the Command Pattern and so you should not be hindered by the fact that the lessons don't go into full detail on the Command Pattern.
A quick read on design patterns should get you up and running on how these lessons get you to use them (in the case of the course, it would be in regards to coding actions).
Overall I would say that this course is great for all levels.
For the beginner programmers starting out on their journey, this course will show you where you are weak in coding, Godot, and GDScript. It will get you to improve yourself on your shortcomings, so you can become a better programmer. If you are a beginner, there will be shortcomings in this course, a lot. Again no hand holding, you need to know GDScript and Godot at a level of competency.
For the intermediate programmers, it will push your coding experience to a higher level. This is in terms to reading, understanding, and debugging code in Godot GDScript.
This course for advanced programmers shows you specific solutions to game design problems that you can then compare with your own.
If you are not fully satisfied, this course comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Outside of a beginner feeling that they aren't ready for the topics in the course and wanting a refund due to the difficulty (understandable and you shouldn't hesitate to do so), I would guarantee you feel satisfied with what you get based on the price you pay.
Lastly, the entire project is downloadable. This means it's travel friendly!
In conclusion, this course can only benefit you positively, so what are you waiting for 😆.
Best of luck and warm wishes to all who journey into the complex topics of game programming!
Thank you for the detailed review! I personally wouldn't recommend the course to beginners in the sense of people who have little programming experience. Maybe to developers who are getting started with game creation.
In any case, if someone were to buy the course and realize it's not for them, we have this 30 days refund warranty. Feedback's also always welcome, especially as we're making the course: if any explanation is lacking, we're always happy to answer people's questions and to expand the course.
Pros:
Cons:
My Pov:
Generaly I'd say it's good for those that are looking for designs of certain game mechanics that are covered in here, but already are programmers (might find better sources thought).
I'd not recommend it as a learning material on Godot as the code is way too messy for it and might teach some bad habbits.
Gave it a try as the first course on GDQuest and went only half way through and although it's WIP, I assume that the JRPG Core systems part isn't going to change drastically. Probably won't try any other course for reason above.
Thanks for the review.
Note the course is only in early access
1, with less than 20% of the content available. It'll get a lot more
content and, based on our students' feedback, many improvements.
Could you tell us more about what you consider bad habits, and why (you
can share detailed feedback in the community tab:
https://gdquest.mavenseed.com/community )? How would you code a
scalable JRPG combat system in
Godot instead?
We're
a team of professional game programmers working on this
intermediate-level series, and that's the kind of code we would
recommend to use. The development of our game projects is always public
(in this case https://github.com/GDQuest/godot-2d-jrpg-combat" target="_blank">https://github.com/GDQuest/godot-2d-jrpg-combat for the RPG) and we do peer review on every project. This includes reviews from the community.
If
people can point out poor programming practices in the code,
things that will cause problems down the line, creating a complete game, I'll gladly update the series or even
rewrite it. I've done so in the past with our "Make Pro 2D Games with Godot".
Also note that, as explained on the course's landing page, this is an intermediate to advanced-level game development course:
"This is an intermediate to advanced level course. To follow it, you should be comfortable reading code.
While some tutorials are accessible, we cover some complex projects that require good programming foundations."
Finally, we offer refunds as well! If the course isn't for you, just send me a message and I'll refund your copy.