GDQuest

Teacher dedicated to making game dev accessible. Teaching Godot and how to code with free and open-source tools.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

Some people feel entitled to a lot. Which is your favorite? Mine might be the:

"Its been 6 months, and you've still not fixed it?! WTH are you doing??"

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

@hellotherekyle @StayAtHomeDev @colosoglobal Yes, 2 days after posting: https://t.co/yRXbMtMpip

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

The section presenting @ThisIsDarkDax, @uheartbeast, and our comment as student reviews has been removed, and more detailed credits with the CC license links added. @KenneyNL and @KayLousberg have also been credited (sorry Kenney I didn't recognize your assets initially on the page).

That's now settled.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

Hey @StayAtHomeDev and @colosoglobal, I messaged you three days ago asking you to remove my name from the student review section of your paid course immediately. You acknowledged it was wrong on Thursday and promised to fix it. It's still there, three days later, during your launch sale.

You used an old comment I left on a public YouTube video and took it out of its context to make it look like I'm personally recommending your "class" before it's even available. I can't speak for @uheartbeast and @ThisIsDarkDax, but regardless, their comments look like they've been taken out of context too. Apart from being misleading to your customers, it's a false attribution.

You understand this should have been considered an urgent website update, right? Because it's making real people appear as though they said things about your product that they didn't. It's not something you let slide over the weekend during a sales campaign before taking it down.

It's your choice to base your $200 video course on a free and publicly available demo, environment, models and characters that we released under CC-By 4.0. But it's pretty sketchy to vaguely list "assets" as a course perk and a "special gift from StayAtHomeDev". Then it's a whole different level altogether to make it sound like we also endorse the product.

Remove the comment and GDQuest's logo immediately.

There's room for everyone in education, Godot, and gamedev to get honest recommendations and keep competition healthy and ethical.

P.S. Thanks for the creative commons attribution in thin grey font at the bottom of a section dedicated to your own portfolio and only after I mentioned the license. Much appreciated.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

I feel like it's a culture thing mainly?

Since we started getting rid of third party libraries and writing as much as we could ourselves in typescript, with more co-located procedural code and more specific names, it's become easy to grep and navigate things. But we use a subset of the language, no OOP, we avoid dependency injection, write larger functions than typical in web code, etc.

Especially dependency injection, it seems to be used a lot in the web world but I've found it often overdone and that it made it harder to trace where things came from. I suppose the same would happen with excessive use of function pointers or void pointers with poor naming?

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

My comment was not on educational material but on a "Godot news" format. That's why it reads "it's hard to keep up with everything that's happening in the ecosystem" ; I don't watch Godot tutorials.

It was also labeled "student review" as you can see in the picture. I'm not a student, this was not a review.

I don't imagine or judge people's intentions. This thing needed to be removed because it was a false attribution. If you let it slide, it sets a precedent for all creators. As soon as it was removed I had already moved on. It does remind me to be alert and careful, but that's it.

About the game, people can make a comfortable living in this ecosystem without resorting to these sorts of practices. You'll see that tutors making video courses can afford to spend a lot of their time making solo indie games, including the author of this very product.

They may not know it but they really don't need to do things like these, and they won't hurt themselves by properly crediting or supporting the FOSS or creative commons resources they use either.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

@devGuyBry @StayAtHomeDev @colosoglobal My pleasure!

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

@WChrisH @Redot_Engine Thank you for your support! I'm really glad if it helped your son and you.

[Kenney @KenneyNL]

Anyway, a good tool I found out about is MubLoop. It's free and helps create seamless looping sounds. I tried it, works really well and is now part of my toolset for upcoming audio assets!

Check it out:
https://t.co/dPjj5mgcBn

[Xor @XorDev]

Simple things that make your shaders look cheap, and how to fix them:

Starting with colors

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

I really like the k at the top right. It really reinforces the idea of rise with the mushrooms clearly going up.

It's the most legible to me. The distorted moldrise text in all others has lots of high frequency details that, even when the text is clear and centered as in G, make the title a bit more difficult to read for me. G being second most legible to me.

A to J remind me of metal bands for some reason. J also has a lot of personality, looks like sorcery to me, something evoking forests and something evil, but I couldn't immediately read the text.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

Yeah, you're right, we changed the timeline. Originally we planned to ship fast like our older Godot courses, but it became clear that meant trading depth for speed, and by the end people would have gotten less for their money. So we shifted to this multi-year EA, taking the time to really polish the content, work closely with students, and ship new content "when it's done" (which means much higher production cost and also less sales for us). It's already the most extensive Godot curriculum out there, somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 printed pages worth of material, with more coming.

That wasn't the original deal though, and anyone who got a course before the timeline change and who wants a refund can reach out. So if you haven't already, you can email me at support [at] https://t.co/v1lebShyee and I'll sort it out for you.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

The section presenting @ThisIsDarkDax, @uheartbeast, and our comment as student reviews has been removed, and more detailed credits with the CC license links added. @KenneyNL and @KayLousberg have also been credited (sorry Kenney I didn't recognize your assets initially on the page).

That's now settled.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

And for any of you looking to buy this course, know that the 3D assets advertised as a "course perk" and a "gift" from the course author are actually free, publicly available and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (and CC0 for Kay's assets).

You can download the free and open source demo environment used as a base to build this course right now from https://t.co/Me2OZUp60C

It includes the environment, enemies, props, collectibles, animations, and a third person character controller.

You can also download the character model Gobot from: https://t.co/Me2OZUp60C

Support creators who contributed these assets and open source demos to the gamedev community, like @KayLousberg and us at GDQuest!

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

@firebelley Thanks for your support! We also regularly recommended your courses.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

Yes. And that twist wouldn't be okay to me either because it still makes learners feel this is associated with or supported by popular creators people trust. It creates a positive brand association.

In any case, you always ask for people's permission beforehand for putting up testimonials on a product page.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

To be fair, it's probably patching up multiple things and I don't doubt the he's done coding work on it. We don't have access to the course files so I won't be unfair to the creator on that front. I'm only commenting on observable facts.

And yeah the creative commons attribution was originally absent. Now, after I asked it to be added, it's there but easy to miss.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

Thanks. I contacted the author privately first to give them a chance to act quickly and reach out to the other two creators and be transparent themselves.

But I also don't want to let it slide, companies and people selling courses shouldn't think they can just do whatever they want and walk over creators. If you let it slide it sets a precedent for everyone, not just for us (it's not a first for us anyway... usually we're sports and a direct message is enough to get things corrected immediately).

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

I directly suggested to StayAtHomeDev that he contacted you and HeartBeast back on Thursday. So, he did not...

I'm sports enough to first contact people and companies doing stuff like that privately, give them a chance to act quickly, regardless of their true intentions.

Then you'll see people apologize or feign ignorance, but the thing to pay attention to is people's actions (it's not a first for me, sadly).

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

@t3snake3 @valigo And thank you for the kind words! I'm glad if the zed extension's helpful to you.

[GDQuest @NathanGDQuest]

To me it's been relatively hard to find good resources for a long time, notably because we (in the broad sense) are eager to share what we learn or know or help onboard people.

Long story short, to me, the AI part maybe amplifies the root problem but it's not created it. One thing it does change to me is breaking trust, because the writing can be seemingly good and drown or hide issues.

---

For demystifying systems programming it depends on who you want to talk to. Typically valigo here and lots of people in the space speak mainly to already experienced programmers, and also sometimes more technically inclined people. If those people are your target, you mostly want a lot of systems programming experience yourself first and then you can share insights from there.

If you want to help a broader audience and notably people who are not already quite experienced (but who are already curious about how programming and computers work), I find @nicbarkeragain's work excellent.

And if you want to go even further and onboard people who are not really looking to be programmers primarily, or people who are more results-driven (this is probably the majority of people) you have to take a much longer, winded route. Typically, starting with tools that allow them to get results quickly, using that as a gateway, and poking at their curiosity little by little, unveiling little pieces of how things work as they encounter problems. Once you got someone curious about looking under the hood, send them to the right people to learn more. Only thing to have in mind is people might need a couple years to get there; depends on the person.