Finishing up

We have now completed all the functionality for our game. Below are some remaining steps to add a bit more “juice” to improve the game experience.

Feel free to expand the gameplay with your own ideas.

Background

The default gray background is not very appealing, so let’s change its color. One way to do this is to use a ColorRect node. Make it the first node under Main so that it will be drawn behind the other nodes. ColorRect only has one property: Color. Choose a color you like and select “Layout” -> “Full Rect” so that it covers the screen.

You could also add a background image, if you have one, by using a TextureRect node instead.

Sound effects

Sound and music can be the single most effective way to add appeal to the game experience. In your game assets folder, you have two sound files: “House In a Forest Loop.ogg” for background music, and “gameover.wav” for when the player loses.

Add two AudioStreamPlayer nodes as children of Main. Name one of them Music and the other DeathSound. On each one, click on the Stream property, select “Load”, and choose the corresponding audio file.

To play the music, add $Music.play() in the new_game() function and $Music.stop() in the game_over() function.

Finally, add $DeathSound.play() in the game_over() function.

Keyboard shortcut

Since the game is played with keyboard controls, it would be convenient if we could also start the game by pressing a key on the keyboard. We can do this with the “Shortcut” property of the Button node.

In a previous lesson, we created four input actions to move the character. We will create a similar input action to map to the start button.

Select “Project” -> “Project Settings” and then click on the “Input Map” tab. In the same way you created the movement input actions, create a new input action called start_game and add a key mapping for the Enter key.

In the HUD scene, select the StartButton and find its Shortcut property in the Inspector. Select “New Shortcut” and click on the “Shortcut” item. A second Shortcut property will appear. Select “New InputEventAction” and click the new “InputEventAction”. Finally, in the Action property, type the name start_game.

Now when the start button appears, you can either click it or press Enter to start the game.

And with that, you completed your first 2D game in Godot.

You got to make a player-controlled character, enemies that spawn randomly around the game board, count the score, implement a game over and replay, user interface, sounds, and more. Congratulations!

There’s still much to learn, but you can take a moment to appreciate what you achieved.

And when you’re ready, you can move on to Your first 3D game to learn to create a complete 3D game from scratch, in Godot.