As I’m about to graduate with my bachelor’s degree in computer science, I’ve been thinking more and more about my journey up to this point.

Really, I’ve discovered that I have a lot less to show for it than I thought. Most of my work is broken up into fragmented minor projects or school work that I couldn’t really apply passion to.

So what do I do? My solution is to treat the creation of my portfolio like a job. I expect to work on it certain hours each day and to make incremental progress for the next few months.

Writing here in my blog is just another aspect of my portfolio. I want to fully explore the software engineering process and record my thoughts as I go. I want to look back on these projects and learn something from them even years from now.

That being said, I’m still brainstorming what will go in my portfolio. Scope is difficult for me to judge. I know that “GitHub for musicians” is massive in scope and that “Metacritic for recipes” is smaller. But how much smaller? Could I finish the latter in under a month and have a genuine product to show for it?

Only time will tell.

Godot is a lot of fun to use and, in my opinion, may be the best platform available for teaching people how to program. Godot is very lightweight (~50mb) with no dependencies, it is completely open source under the MIT License, it supports both 2d and 3d game development, and its scripting language is python-esque.

I think all of those things are excellent reasons for beginners to use Godot. However, that isn’t to say Godot doesn’t suit advanced programmers. Godot supports several programming languages including C, C++, and C#, you can crack into the engine and make changes yourself if you run into any problems, and there are a ton of open source projects using Godot that you can look at to get a feel for the engine.

The biggest benefit for me, personally, is performance. Godot can run on very low end machines. Unity and Unreal take a lot of system resources which is not very helpful when I’m doing a lot of my work on a laptop with a duo core from a few years ago.

You can download Godot here for free.

Once Godot is downloaded unzip it wherever you’d like. It should just be a single executable. Double click the executable to launch the engine. From this point you can just start making games. I love the simplicity.

I will be working on a simple metroidvania tutorial here on my blog over time. I kind of hope to release the whole thing all at once so it might be a bit before it goes live.

Wow it just never really seems to work out every time I try to get this blog going. I’ll be honest here: I usually just forget it exists. It’s easy to say to myself “Oh I can wait to make another blog post.” And, I’ll keep telling myself that right up until I completely forget about the blog entirely.

I’ll be going back and doing some editing (some of my posts sorely require it) and maybe this time I can actually stick with it.

I have been playing around with Godot recently because of how lightweight and pleasent it is. I think it will become my prototyping tool of choice. I might even try to complete a full game in it. So far it’s going pretty smoothly.

With school and other obligations my free time is getting stretched pretty thin, but everything should work out.