Capstone Projects

Recreate Pong, Breakout, or Asteroids with menus, score, sound effects, and a high-score table saved to user://.

Project 1 — Arcade classic remake (beginner)

Recreate Pong, Breakout, or Asteroids with menus, score, sound effects, and a high-score table saved to user://. *Concepts: nodes and scenes, input actions, CharacterBody2D/Area2D, signals, UI, ConfigFile saving.*

Project 2 — Polished 2D platformer (beginner/intermediate)

Five levels built with TileMapLayer, coyote time and jump buffering, collectibles, checkpoints, moving platforms, enemies with patrol AI, parallax backgrounds, music crossfades, and save/continue. *Concepts: physics movement, TileMapLayer, AnimationPlayer/AnimatedSprite2D, autoloads, JSON saves, tweens, audio buses.*

Project 3 — Top-down action RPG (intermediate)

Overworld and dungeons, melee and ranged combat with hitboxes/hurtboxes, inventory and equipment defined as custom Resources, dialogue system, NPCs, quests, and a minimap. *Concepts: component architecture, custom Resources, state machines, AnimationTree blend spaces, UI containers and themes, groups, scene transitions.*

Project 4 — Tower defense (intermediate)

Grid-based map, enemies following paths (AStarGrid2D or NavigationAgent2D), towers with targeting priorities and upgrades, waves defined in Resources, economy, and speed controls (Engine.time_scale). *Concepts: pathfinding, data-driven design, object pooling, signals, UI, performance profiling.*

Project 5 — 3D third-person adventure (advanced)

Third-person controller with camera collision, animated character via AnimationTree, interactable objects, enemies with NavigationAgent3D and node-based FSMs, day/night cycle with WorldEnvironment, and shader effects (dissolve, outlines, water). *Concepts: 3D math (Basis, Quaternion), CharacterBody3D, navigation meshes, shaders from GDScript, AnimationTree, Jolt physics.*

Project 6 — Online multiplayer arena (advanced)

2–8 players over ENet with lobby, MultiplayerSpawner/Synchronizer, authoritative server, client-side interpolation, chat via RPCs, scoreboards, and a headless dedicated server build. *Concepts: MultiplayerAPI, @rpc, authority, replication, networking security, export of a dedicated server.*

Project 7 — Procedural roguelike (advanced)

Procedurally generated dungeons (BSP or cellular automata) computed on a WorkerThreadPool, TileMapLayer rendering, field-of-view, turn-based combat, items and enemies from Resource tables, permadeath with run statistics. *Concepts: algorithms, threads, AStarGrid2D, Packed arrays, seeded RandomNumberGenerator, unit tests with GUT/gdUnit4.*

Project 8 — Editor plugin + toolkit (expert)

A reusable addon: custom node types (add_custom_type), a dock for level authoring, a custom inspector plugin, @tool previews, undo/redo support, documentation comments, automated tests, and an optional GDExtension for a performance-critical part. Publish it to the Asset Library. *Concepts: @tool, EditorPlugin, EditorInspectorPlugin, EditorUndoRedoManager, GDExtension, packaging and versioning.*