Yesterday, I restarted working my way through the GDQuest Learn 2D Gamedev from Zero with Godot 4.
One of the lessons talked about approaching this with a learning mindset, and included suggestions like a learning plan and a Pomodoro timer.
I interpreted the learning plan as the need to document my journey; this was something I had been planning on doing anyway, but this was an explicit push.
I had originally called this a blog; that’s from muscle memory, reflecting my emerging experiences on the Internet. More accurately, this is a dev diary, and I’ve named it as such. Names are important; they set clear expectations.
For my desktop environment, I’m using Linux Mint Debian Edition; I used to use Ubuntu, but that ecosystem started intrusively advertising services that I didn’t need or want and made some technology decisions that I don’t love. Linux makes it easy for me to manage development dependencies and provides an experience very similar to what I’d be working with when I set up CI/CD. I also have MacOS and Windows, and I’ll be doing my audio and music production in MacOS. Windows is pretty much used for just gaming these days.
So, when it came to a Pomodoro timer, I looked at a few Linux options and was met with several flatpaks that would have been at least a gig in size. Excessive for my needs! LMDE 6 uses Cinnamon desktop, which means I can use the Cinnamon Spices Ecosystem, including the applet Pomodoro Timer. It’s tiny, simple, and works. I do feel it helped me focus.
Yesterday, I got to Module 3, which includes the Learn GDScript From Zero tutorial. I got about halfway through yesterday, and completed it today. This is the second time I went through it, and I’m glad I’m doing the refresher.
I also experimented with setting up GitHub Desktop on Linux and initializing a repository in the GDQuest project. Of note, there’s a special, empty file in the directory: ._sc_ which will enable Godot’s self-contained mode.
This mode makes Godot write all editor data, settings, and cache to a directory named
editor_data/in the same directory as the editor binary.
If anyone else wants to use Git to manage their GDQuest progress, the .gitignore you’ll want to use is:
# Portable Godot
*.x86_64
# Self-contained mode
editor_data
# Godot 4
.godot
I’ll try to commit once per lesson at least; I’m doing this for rollback in case I really mess things up. Always good to get in the habit of wearing your seatbelt.
Some meta aspects: I’m publishing this diary on Neocities using the Neocities CLI, Hugo and the eXtremely Minimal Hugo theme. Today, I added Tags for navigation, a subscribe link, a footer, a meta description, and a build script to reduce accidents (don’t use neocities push . in the project root because it will happily upload files you don’t want!).
I’m thinking about CI for the diary, but the more I think about it, the more I think it’s overkill. Linting wouldn’t hurt.