Pro Tip:

Don’t just watch other people doing stuff in a video and replicate it. Make your own project, think about what needs to be done and then explicitly search for answers to your questions.

Game Dev is even more about identifying tasks then it is about solving them.

I don’t know how much programming experience you have so I won’t assume yet the stuff I wrote down the line are quite basic.

Generally speaking you always want to use the latest stable (!) version of whatever tool you want to learn, just be sure you’re watching/reading tutorials for the right version.

As to how to learn, I’d suggest to start with videos on YouTube - get some free assets on itch.io (maybe ones being used in the tutorial, maybe not) and just do stuff along the videos - figure out the basics, build the base and move from here.

You want to get the feel of the process, what works, what doesn’t, try to break the whole game in pieces and just do one at a time. Make an animated character, make a level with collision, map some inputs to the character, run through the level, add something the character can break, add means to attack, break the thing that is breakable, add an enemy, realize there’s no health, add health and damage and so on… Don’t really focus on getting it right - focus on getting it done, you’ll have a lot more understanding how to do something better after you’ve done different parts of the game.

As to the docs - it’s great, but you don’t need to read it as a book to start something, it’s a hefty time investment and you won’t get much out of it at the current point. Just remember that the doc exists and go there with questions you have. You’re stuck with the collision BS? Go read the docs - the answer is there and you’ll understand and memorize it much better as you apply it to a problem you’ve faced.

Also don’t be disappointed or harsh on yourself for being “stupid” and doing something in a weird/ugly/inefficient way after learning how it’s done properly - it’s part of the learning process.

For the publication of your game - it’s up for you to decide, I mean you can just share it with friends or relatives, it’s all good as long as you’re having fun with it.

For myself, i am a complete beginner with godot but have years of programming experience in general and do agree, the official docs are written in a way that assumes you know of programming concepts that are common in modern gamedev so they explain tools rather than concepts and best practices.

Thats sadly not so useful for people who are just starting out. Like others said, check out GDQuest but also i liked youtube videos from https://youtube.com/@PlayWithFurcifer they are amusing but mainly short and introduce concepts that i was not familiar with.

Most important thing is to start small, like really small scope to figure out which bits do what in both the ui and engine. And for a chance to try our different ways of getting things done. Once you try to implement x,y,z and think “this seems complicated” is a good chance someone explained a better, more reusable way to achieve the same result.

GDQuest tutorials are a good place to start if you like videos. Looks for something beginner like a 2d platformer.

https://m.youtube.com/@Gdquest

Don’t stress the programming aspect. Programming IS hard. But it’s learnable with practice. It’s just math and logic which I believe anyone can learn if they’re dedicated. Just keep working at it and you will get better I promise. It’s hard but it’s not daunting. Art is harder in my opinion because you can’t scrape by. You can absolutely get away with “bad” code for a good while.

If you’re new to Godot, I’d probably use godot 3.5. Godot 4 came out a few months ago, and they’re still working kinks out. It’s similar enough to Godot 3.5 that once you learn the ropes with 3.5, you can think about migrating to 4. I would also lean toward 3.5 bcz there are way more tutorial for it, and you’ll be digging through documentation to figure out what changed with 4. Hope that helps.

Right now it’s a little harder to answer as the support resources for learning Godot are all in the process of being updated from the way things were done in the old Godot 3.x to the new Godot 4.x system. The changes aren’t huge from a learning perspective and largely I’d say the Godot 4 way (where it differs) is actually a little easier to learn.

For example, this is a wonderful free interactive course on how to program in Godot (which is one essential skill for making games in Godot and probably the biggest sticking point for new developers) however it was made for Godot 3.x (I think 3.5 specifically…) so… It would be a good place to go learn the basics of how to program in Godot but you’d have to do so with the awareness that you’ll be learning some stuff that you’ll need to update your knowledge of at some point for Godot 4.0 (for example, when you are programming for a character to move on screen there’s a command you can use called “move and slide” that tells Godot that you’re done setting up for it and it should make your character do movement stuff now. In Godot 3.5, you need to explicitly tell it to use the movement speed you just told it to decide how fast your character should move. In Godot 4, you just tell it the movement speed then tell it to do movement stuff and it does it. Slightly quicker and easier in Godot 4 but if you use the exact same code from Godot 3.5 it’ll throw up an error until you figure out what needs to change.)

Anyway, here is the course for Godot 3.x (fyi, you can still download and use Godot 3.x if you wish, but you will eventually want to switch to Godot 4, so it might be better to just use the slowly appearing new educational content for that rather than the more extensive stuff for Godot 3.x… It’s just a transitional time right now.):

https://gdquest.github.io/learn-gdscript/

They are also working on a new Godot 4.0 version but because the course actually recreates the effect of what you are doing live as though you were working in Godot (by using a modified version of Godot in the background) it’s a lot of work. Surprisingly it looks like it might only be a couple of months before some sort of 4.0 version appears.

In terms of Godot 4.0 tutorials, Heartbeast’s first one (a simple black and white 2d platformer) is 99% finished (I think he has one final video to do but it should be out long before you could catch up to it if you started today). I haven’t watched it but his stuff is usually quite good and often recommended:

https://youtu.be/nQVoD_LhEmE

I’m a couple hours into this one and it’s fantastic to work along with: https://youtu.be/nAh_Kx5Zh5Q