Welcome to Godot

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

1. Explain in one sentence what a game engine is and why we use Godot.
2. Install Godot 4.x and create your first project.
3. Name the four main parts of the editor: Scene, FileSystem, the viewport, and the Inspector.
4. Add a Label and run your project so a welcome message appears on screen.

Welcome to the very first lesson! No experience needed — we start right at the beginning.

Think about three games you have played and loved. Now talk together (or think quietly):

• What did the people who made those games actually use to build them?
• Did they type every tiny thing from scratch — or did they have a big toolbox ready to go?
• Which of these do you think is a game engine: Godot, Photoshop, or WhatsApp?

Imagine cooking in a fully-stocked kitchen — stove, pans, knives, oven all ready. You focus on the recipe, not on building a stove first. A game engine is that kitchen for games: it already handles drawing pictures, playing sound, physics and input, so you focus on your game.

So what is Godot?

Godot(say it “GOD-oh”) is a game engine that is:

• Free and open-source — no cost, ever, and no fees when you sell a game.
• 2D and 3D — make flat games and 3D games in the same tool.
• Light — it runs well even on a modest school laptop.
• Friendly to learn — its language, GDScript, looks a lot like Python.

Two words you'll hear all the time

We'll go deeper next lesson, but meet them now:

• A node is one small building block — a picture, a sound, a piece of text. Godot has a node for almost everything.
• A scene is a group of nodes saved together — a level, a menu, a player. A game is many scenes working together.

Today we make one scene with one node — a Label that shows text — and run it.

Follow along on your own computer. We install Godot, create a project, look around, and run something.

Step 1 — Download Godot 4.x

Go to godotengine.org/download. Download Godot Engine (the Standard version — not the .NET / C# one; we use GDScript). It arrives as a zip — unzip it and double-click the Godot app. There is no long installer; Godot is a single program.

Step 2 — Create a project

The first window is the Project Manager. Let's make a project:

1. Click + Create (or New Project).
2. Project Name: HelloGodot.
3. Project Path: pick an empty folder you'll remember (e.g. a “Godot” folder in Documents).
4. Leave the renderer on the default. Click Create & Edit.

The editor opens. This is where we'll spend the whole course.

Step 3 — Tour the editor

Four parts matter today. Find each one:

Step 4 — Add a Label and run it

1. In the Scene dock, click 2D Scene to create a root node.
2. Click the + (Add Child Node), type Label, choose it, and press Create.
3. With the Label selected, look at the Inspector. Find the Text box and type: Selamat datang ke Godot!
4. Press F5 (or the Play button). Godot asks you to choose a main scene — click Select Current, then Save the scene as main.tscn.

Your scene tree now looks like this:

Node2D
└── Label

And the Inspector for the Label shows:

What you should see: a game window opens with the words Selamat datang ke Godot! in the top-left corner. You just made and ran your first Godot scene. 🎉

Work in your HelloGodot project. Press F5 to run after each change and watch what happens.

1. 🟢 Task 1 — Make it yours

   Change the Label's Text to your own welcome message — for example “Aisyah's first game!”. Run it and check your words appear.

2. 🟡 Task 2 — Bigger words

   Find a way to make the text bigger. With the Label selected, look in the Inspector under Theme Overrides → Font Sizes → Font Size and set it to 48. Run again — the message should be much larger.

3. 🔴 Stretch (optional) — A splash of colour

   Add a second node: a ColorRect as a child of the root, drag it big behind the Label, and pick a colour in the Inspector. Now your welcome has a coloured background.

Put today's skills together. Build a simple title screen for an imaginary game using two Labels.

It works if:when you press Play, the window shows a game name on one line and “made by your name” on a second line below it.

Node2D
├── TitleLabel      (Text: "Pasar Malam Dash")
└── MadeByLabel     (Text: "made by Wei Jie")

• A game engine is a ready-made toolbox for building games — Godot is ours.
• Godot is free, open-source, 2D and 3D, and light enough for a school laptop.
• The editor has four key parts: Scene, FileSystem, the viewport, and the Inspector.
• A node is one building block; a scene is a group of nodes saved together.
• A Label node shows text; F5 runs your project.

Vocabulary

• Engine — the software that does the heavy lifting so you can build a game.
• Project — one folder holding everything for your game.
• Node — a single building block (text, picture, sound…).
• Inspector — the panel where you change the settings of the node you clicked.