Prerequisites

What You Need

A passion for games. Any kind. Video games, board games, card games, tabletop RPGs, mobile games, playground games you made up when you were nine. This book assumes you play games and have opinions about them. If you do not play games, this book will make very little sense, the same way a book about film criticism would make little sense to someone who does not watch movies. Go play some games. Come back. We will be here.

A computer. Windows, macOS, or Linux. Godot Engine runs on all three, and it runs well on modest hardware. You do not need a gaming PC. You do not need a dedicated GPU (though one helps for 3D chapters). If your computer can run a web browser with ten tabs open, it can run Godot.

Willingness to play games analytically. This is the hardest prerequisite and the most important one. You need to develop the habit of interrupting your own fun to ask, "Why was that fun?" When a game makes you angry, instead of throwing your controller, you need to ask, "What design decision caused this frustration -- and was it intentional?" When a game hooks you for four hours and you lose track of time, you need to ask, "What kept me in the loop?" This is not a natural way to play games. It is a learned skill. This book will teach it, but you need to be willing to learn it.

A notebook. Physical or digital -- whatever you actually use. Game designers document their thinking. Every design decision in your progressive project should be written down with the reasoning behind it. "I set the jump height to 3 tiles because..." is more valuable than the jump height itself. The notebook becomes your design journal, and by the end of the book, it becomes a portfolio artifact.

Time to play games. This is not a joke prerequisite. Many chapters reference specific games and ask you to play them (or specific sections of them) as part of the learning. You will get more from this book if you have played -- or are willing to play -- Celeste, Dark Souls, and Breath of the Wild, the three anchor examples referenced throughout. But hundreds of other games are cited as well, and you are not expected to play all of them. The further reading sections distinguish between "play this to understand the concept" and "this is a good additional example."

What You Do NOT Need

Programming experience. None. Zero. GDScript (Godot's scripting language) is taught from scratch in Chapter 3 and introduced gradually throughout the book. GDScript was designed to be readable by humans -- it looks like Python, and if you can read a recipe, you can read GDScript. The code examples in this book are short (10-40 lines), heavily commented, and always secondary to the design concept they demonstrate. You are not learning to be a programmer. You are learning to be a designer who can make ideas real.

Art skills. You will not draw a single sprite in this book. Every visual example uses placeholder art (colored rectangles, simple geometric shapes) or free asset packs with clear attribution. The progressive project can be completed with zero original art. Ugly games with great design are better than beautiful games with bad design. Celeste's prototype was white rectangles. Undertale's art is deliberately simple. Design quality and art quality are independent variables.

Game development experience. If you have never opened a game engine, that is fine. Chapter 3 walks you through installing Godot, creating your first scene, and writing your first lines of GDScript. If you have game development experience, the early chapters will move quickly for you, but the design thinking may still be new. Many experienced developers can build games but struggle to articulate why their design decisions work or don't.

A specific type of game you want to make. The progressive project is a 2D action-adventure, chosen because the genre is accessible in scope while demonstrating a wide range of design principles (combat, exploration, progression, narrative, level design, economy). But the design principles taught in every chapter apply across genres. If you want to make a turn-based RPG, a puzzle game, a visual novel, or a farming sim, the frameworks transfer.

Money. Godot Engine is free (MIT license). This textbook is free (CC-BY-SA-4.0). Publishing to itch.io is free. Every tool, asset pack, and resource referenced in this book has a free option. Game design education should not require a credit card.

Software Setup

You need exactly two things installed before you begin Chapter 3:

1. Godot Engine (version 4.x)

Download from https://godotengine.org/download. Choose the Standard version for your operating system. The download is under 100 MB. There is no installer on most platforms -- you unzip it and run it. Godot is a single executable with no dependencies. It is the easiest game engine in existence to set up.

Do not use Godot 3.x. The GDScript syntax changed significantly between versions 3 and 4, and all code in this book targets Godot 4.x.

2. A text editor (for design documents)

You already have one. Notepad, TextEdit, Google Docs, Notion, Obsidian -- any tool where you can write and organize text. Your design documents do not need to be fancy. They need to exist.

Optional but recommended:

A gamepad/controller. Many of the games referenced in this book are best experienced with a controller. For playtesting your own game, testing with both keyboard+mouse and controller input is good practice.
An itch.io account. Free to create at https://itch.io. You will use this to publish your completed progressive project in the capstone chapter. Setting it up early lets you browse other indie games for analysis throughout the course.
A screen recording tool. OBS Studio (free, open-source) or your operating system's built-in screen recording. Useful for recording playtesting sessions and reviewing your own gameplay for analysis exercises.

That is everything. If you have a computer and a willingness to think critically about why games work, you are ready to begin.

Open Chapter 1.