Attention: Here be dragons

This is the latest (unstable) version of this documentation, which may document features not available in or compatible with released stable versions of Redot.

Setting up the project

In this short first part, we'll set up and organize the project.

Launch Redot and create a new project.

../../_images/new-project-button.webp

When creating the new project, you only need to choose a valid Project Path. You can leave the other default settings alone.

Download dodge_the_creeps_2d_assets.zip. The archive contains the images and sounds you'll be using to make the game. Extract the archive and move the art/ and fonts/ directories to your project's directory.

Your project folder should look like this.

../../_images/folder-content.webp

This game is designed for portrait mode, so we need to adjust the size of the game window. Click on Project -> Project Settings to open the project settings window, in the left column open the Display -> Window tab. There, set "Viewport Width" to 480 and "Viewport Height" to 720.

../../_images/setting-project-width-and-height.webp

Also, under the Stretch options, set Mode to canvas_items and Aspect to keep. This ensures that the game scales consistently on different sized screens.

../../_images/setting-stretch-mode.webp

Organizing the project

In this project, we will make 3 independent scenes: Player, Mob, and HUD, which we will combine into the game's Main scene.

In a larger project, it might be useful to create folders to hold the various scenes and their scripts, but for this relatively small game, you can save your scenes and scripts in the project's root folder, identified by res://. You can see your project folders in the FileSystem dock in the lower left corner:

../../_images/filesystem_dock.webp

With the project in place, we're ready to design the player scene in the next lesson.