Day 1 of Building Our Internet-Made Game: Setting Up Godot

Source: Dev.to

Overview

After letting the internet shape our game’s genre, setting, and characters, we’ve finally reached the point where ideas turn into a build. Day 1 starts with the engine. Up to this point, the project has been all about decisions—choosing the genre, defining the world, and letting the community shape what the game could become. Those decisions were exciting, but they lived in the realm of ideas. Day 1 marks a different kind of milestone: the moment we begin turning those ideas into something playable.

Why Godot?

For this project we’re using Godot. If you’ve never made a game before, a game engine is basically the toolbox that lets you build and run one. It handles scenes, movement, physics, animation, and eventually exporting the game so people can actually play it.

Godot felt like the right place to start for a few reasons:

• Lightweight and straightforward – ideal for a public build where we document the process as we go.
• Accessible – supports momentum rather than slowing it down.
• Stable and cross‑platform – helps keep things running smoothly across a wide range of devices.

These choices reflect how we want to build the game overall: accessible, practical, and stable from the start.

Engine Setup

The setup itself is simple, but it carries a lot of weight when you know what it means.

1. Go to the Godot download page.
2. Install the engine.
3. Launch Godot.
4. Click New Project and give it a name.

Mechanically, it’s not dramatic, but creatively it’s the moment the game stops being hypothetical. The empty project window may look boring from the outside—no character art, no soundtrack, no combat demo—but it’s the foundation on which everything else will be built.

What Comes Next

Now that the engine is set up, the next step is creating our first scene and moving from setup into actual game structure. That’s when the game will really start to take shape.

Stay tuned for Day 2, when we dive into scene creation and begin fleshing out the world we’ve imagined together.