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Welcome to Learn 3D Gamedev From Zero!

Thank you for the support you're showing by choosing to start this course in Early Access. With your trust, we're able to make the course we wished existed when we decided to become game developers.
Learn 3D Gamedev From Zero with Godot 4 is a brand new course that picks up where Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero left off. However, both the 2D and the 3D courses are currently being developed. If you are learning from zero with the 2D course, you will need to wait before jumping onto the 3D one, as it will be more advanced.
There's been a lot of demand from more experienced developers for us to release the 3D course soon, so we're working on both courses in parallel. Jad is focusing on the Learn 2D Gamedev course while I'm working on the 3D one. We'll do our best to bring you both courses as fast as possible without sacrificing quality.
Throughout early access, you can expect many improvements, new content every month, and more frequent updates with fixes and improvements that we'll make with your feedback. We will not only improve the content; we also have updates planned for the website and educational technology. You can check out the Early Access Syllabus here.
As you can imagine, polishing all of this is a lot of work for our small team. That's why we mention that courses will remain in early access throughout the year on our course roadmap.
We will keep refining everything until the course has all the 14 planned modules. For that, your feedback is essential to us. By sharing your thoughts, experiments, questions, and more, you help make this course and the next ones better for everyone. So please get in touch as often as you need: Use the contact form, write an email, join our Discord server, post lesson-related questions... whichever works best for you.
Enjoy Learn 3D Gamedev with Godot 4. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create as you complete the course.
Nathan
Founder and teacher at GDQuest
Much of what you learned creating 2D games directly applies to 3D: using scenes to decompose your game into components, accessing and manipulating data, designing and coding user interfaces, and more. With 3D game development, you'll use and build upon all that knowledge.
Generally speaking, 3D adds a layer of complexity on top of everything you've learned in 2D. That's why our curriculum starts with 2D games to learn programming and game development in Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero. It helps to build a solid foundation before taking on the more complex math and rendering challenges of 3D.

What makes 3D gamedev unique

If 3D builds upon 2D, what makes it unique? First, all the logic that deals with positions and orientation is harder with the third dimension. In 3D, you constantly have to consider what is forward, back, left, right, up, and down.
The input, motion, and orientation of the player's character are relative to a camera that can look in any direction. So, unlike in 2D, you often have to transform the player's input direction from 2D coordinates to the game's 3D world space.
A robot character aiming with the camera behind their shoulder
Then, there is rendering. In 2D, we work with sprites: images that we directly place, scale, and rotate on the screen. We often display them as-is.
A 2D scene with a couple of sprites representing a chest and items
In 3D, characters, props, and more are 3D models. They are made of vertices, edges, and faces (points, lines, and polygons) that define their volume in space. To display them, we use the model, 2D texture images projected onto the model, lights illuminating the model, and materials controlling how the model reflects light: how shiny, rough, metallic, etc., a surface is.
As you'll see in the next module, unlike in 2D, having at least one camera is required to see anything in 3D. Just like we need eyes to see, in a virtual 3D world, we need a camera for the computer to know how to capture the virtual game world and render it on our 2D computer displays.
These differences may not seem like much, but they have ramifications and require extra learning and training. The way we create game levels is different, and the way we make characters and the environment behave believably is more complex with the third dimension.
This added complexity also affects the computer's workload. Calculating all the 3D geometry and the interaction of lights, materials, and physics is more demanding than in 2D. So, you have to be more aware of performance trade-offs when working on 3D games compared to 2D.

In this course, we'll go beyond the basics

This course teaches you how to use 3D models, materials, lights, and cameras to bring 3D game worlds to life. You'll also learn how to create more complex scenes and characters and make them interact satisfyingly.
But we'll do more than explore the specifics of 3D. We'll also take the opportunity to build upon everything we learned in Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero with Godot 4 and work with more elaborate code.
You can expect to deal with:
  • More complex scenes with more nodes and scripts.
  • More elaborate character controllers.
  • More focus on how and why to structure code in some ways (which people often describe as architecture).
  • More programming patterns. We'll notably cover Finite State Machines in M4 (module 4), a valuable tool to separate and manage the different states of your game characters and scenes.
Now that you have a strong foundation in 2D game development, get ready to unleash your creativity and bring your game ideas to life in 3D! This course will help you build the skills and knowledge to start creating engaging 3D game experiences.
Before we embark on this adventure, let's take a moment to familiarize yourself with our learning platform and best practices for a productive learning experience. We'll do that in the next couple of lessons. See you there!
What if I am just starting out?
If you purchased this course to learn game development from scratch, we recommend starting with Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero with Godot 4 instead. It will give you the foundations you need to really enjoy 3D game development and make the most of Godot.
Because 3D game programming is more complex, it's better to start with 2D to get very comfortable with the basics and later build upon them and fully grasp everything in 3D. While it's possible to make beginner-friendly 3D learning material, the risk of starting with 3D is that you might get completely stuck later because of the complexity.
If you'd like to swap your purchase of this course with Learn 2D Gamedev From Zero with Godot 4, please contact us, and we'll help you.
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Lesson Q&A

Use this space for questions related to what you're learning. For any other type of support (website, learning platform, payments, etc...) please get in touch using the contact form.

  • order of doing the coursesmrelectronHi team, should I wait for the 2d course to be done with all its modules and go through them then start the 3d course, or go through whats currently available then start the 3d course? 1 2 Aug. 22, 2024
  • Do I REALLLLY need to do Godot 4 2D GamedevDistroWizzHi guys, I was wondering if I had to do Godot 4 2D GameDev Course before doing this, because I did most of the Godot 3 course (up to the obstacle course part 2) and I'm wondering if I really need to do it. 1 0 Sep. 08, 2024
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