Godot tutoring and consulting Pay what you want
What I am offering
What's this going to cost?
I am offering all of my Godot related services on a pay-what-you-want basis. That means that you are welcome to use my services for free and pay me any time if and when you can afford it and think my advice was worth it.
Why am I doing this?
In 2015 I held a lecture on game engines in which we had a look at all of the major and several of the lesser known engines. It was my goal to illustrate how the choice of engine influences the results, since in order to effectively work with an engine you need to start thinking in the terms established by the API and the tools, and that in turn will influence the creative process. The lesson to be learned was "pick the right tool for the job".
While preparing that lecture it became obvious to me that in our curriculum I needed to put my money where my mouth is and pick the right tool for the job at hand - and in case of our students that job is not developing a game, it is learning how to develop a game.
Up to that point we used Unity for all our student projects in the first semesters. Starting in the third semester the students were allowed to choose between Unity and Unreal. This decision was based on the fact that the vast majority of our graduates have to work with one of these two engines in their first job, and experience in working with Unity is still something that is required in many job postings.
On the other hand I have observed that Unity's API, its community and its learning materials are often troublesome for beginners. Topics like classical object orientation, separation of concerns, encapsulation and the KISS principle were hard to teach and often didn't stick with the students, since many if not most of the learning materials on Unity don't follow these rules either. Even the Unity API itself uses a mixture of procedural and both inheritance-based and component-based object-oriented programming, often achieved through advanced features leading to unexpected behavior that can be detrimental to the learning effort.
Godot follows and communicates clear principles, from the scene system that very closely resembles classical object orientation to the separation between C++, a language suitable for backend code, and GDscript, a domain specific language that is very similar to mainstream languages but reduced to those features that you should be using in high-level game code, which means that it's easy to learn, it's a good stepping stone into more complicated languages and you are much less likely to pick a complicated solution over an easy one you didn't know about.
Giving back to the community
So Godot has made my life as a teacher easier. When our students entered the second semester and started working with Unity we could observe that they have understood object orientation principles better and are able to come up with class structures for their games that are easier to write and understand. Even advanced features like events (C#) resp. signals (Godot) are being used more than before since they are much easier to use in Godot, and once you know what you need them for you'll be motivated to learn how to use them in C# or Unity.
Getting a head start
By offering free consulting for tutorial authors I am helping keep up the good quality we have in Godot tutorials today
Getting into game development today without using the vast amount of online resources available is inconceivable. By the time I have the first lectures with my students they will all have watched at least a couple of tutorial videos and/or read tutorial and manual articles, and even while they are studying with us most students will of course not want to waste any time and will keep learning outside of classes.
So the quality of tutorials is an important factor for teachers. It is highly frustrating to be forced to invest valuable lecture time into rectifying false information that could instead be used to teach new knowledge instead.
Spreading the insider tip
ButGodot has helped me not just as a teacher butas a developer as well. Even for experienced developers Unity's flexible API makes it hard to decide which techniques should be preferred. In just the few weeks I spent preparing material on the Godot engine for the lecture on game engines I experienced a new perspective on the same features you find in most engines, helping me decide how to structure future projects independently of the engine.