The Ultimate Guide to 3D Games with Godot 4
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Build 4 Complete 3D Games While Learning Godot and GDScript by Patrick Felicia |
Book Description
Build 3D Games with Godot
Learn 3D game development with Godot by creating four complete games from scratch.
Through practical, step-by-step projects, you will learn how Godot's 3D systems work while creating games across four different genres: third-person adventure, first-person shooting, arcade racing, and space exploration and combat.
What You Will Learn
- Create and organise 3D scenes, environments, objects, and reusable game components.
- Implement third-person and first-person movement, cameras, gravity, jumping, and collisions.
- Work with animated 3D characters and control their animations through code.
- Use signals, groups, timers, collectibles, objectives, and game states.
- Create raycast shooting, reusable projectiles, health, ammunition, pickups, damage, and shields.
- Develop enemies with waypoint patrols, navigation, pursuit, attacks, and state-based AI.
- Build an arcade car controller with acceleration, braking, steering, automatic gears, and nitro.
- Create racing AI with overtaking, adjustable difficulty, checkpoints, lap timing, and race-position tracking.
- Create procedural space scenery, obstacles, hazards, and enemy encounters.
- Build HUDs, menus, pause systems, victory and failure states, and complete game loops.
Build Four Complete 3D Projects
- Chapter 1 - 3D Adventure Game: Create a third-person adventure in which the player explores a 3D environment, jumps across platforms, collects objects, finds a key, unlocks a door, switches camera perspectives, and completes an objective against a time limit.
- Chapter 2 - 3D First-Person Shooter: Build a first-person combat game with raycast shooting, ammunition, health, pickups, animated enemies, waypoint patrols, navigation, player pursuit, enemy attacks, a combat HUD, and victory and defeat conditions.
- Chapter 3 - 3D Arcade Racing Game: Create an arcade racing game with acceleration and braking, a four-speed automatic gearbox, procedural engine sound, checkpoints, lap timing, nitro, AI opponents, overtaking, difficulty levels, race-position tracking, Training and Race modes, menus, and a racing HUD.
- Chapter 4 - Space Core: Extraction: Pilot a spacecraft through an asteroid-filled planetary corridor, fight hostile ships, collect five Energy Cores, and manage Energy and temporary Shields. Implement automatic flight, pitch and banking effects, laser combat, state-based enemy AI, pickups, procedural scenery, environmental hazards, mission tracking, and complete victory, failure, restart, and replay systems.
Learn by Building
Rather than studying Godot features in isolation, you will learn them by applying them to complete games. Each project introduces new systems while reinforcing reusable concepts such as scenes, nodes, scripts, signals, groups, collisions, interfaces, AI, navigation, projectiles, and game-state management.
Each chapter develops its game progressively and concludes with a summary, quiz with answers, and practical challenge to help you consolidate what you have learned and extend the project yourself.
By the end of the book, you will have created four playable 3D games and gained practical experience with systems you can adapt to your own Godot projects.
Start building your own 3D games with Godot today.