Player scene and input actions

In the next two lessons, we will design the player scene, register custom input actions, and code player movement. By the end, you’ll have a playable character that moves in eight directions. New Scene. Create a KinematicBody node as the root and name it Player. Kinematic bodies are complementary to the area and rigid bodies used in the 2D game tutorial. Like rigid bodies, they can move and collide with the environment, but instead of being controlled by the physics engine, you dictate their movement. You will see how we use the node’s unique features when we code the jump and squash mechanics. See also Physics introduction. For now, we’re going to create a basic rig for our character’s 3D model. This will allow us to rotate the model later via code while it plays an animation. Spatial node as a child of Player and name it Pivot. Then, in the FileSystem dock, expand the art/ folder by double-clicking it and drag and drop player.glb onto the Pivot node. Pivot. You can rename it to Character. Note .glb files contain 3D scene data based on the open-source GLTF 2.0 specification. They’re a modern and powerful alternative to a proprietary format like FBX, which Godot also supports. To produce these files, we designed the model in Blender 3D and exported it to GLTF. Player node again and add a CollisionShape. In the Inspector, assign a SphereShape to the Shape property. The sphere’s wireframe appears below the character. 0.8 meters. Then, move the shape up so its bottom roughly aligns with the grid’s plane. Character or the Pivot nodes. Player.tscn. With the nodes ready, we can almost get coding. But first, we need to define some input actions.

Creating input actions

To move the character, we will listen to the player’s input, like pressing the arrow keys. In Godot, while we could write all the key bindings in code, there’s a powerful system that allows you to assign a label to a set of keys and buttons. This simplifies our scripts and makes them more readable. Project menu and select Project Settings…. Input Map. This window allows you to add new actions at the top; they are your labels. In the bottom part, you can bind keys to these actions. Godot projects come with some predefined actions designed for user interface design, which we could use here. But we’re defining our own to support gamepads. move_left, move_right, move_forward, move_back, and jump. To add an action, write its name in the bar at the top and press Enter. Create the five actions. Your window should have them all listed at the bottom. move_left and in the drop-down menu, click Key. OK. Do the same for the A key. Joy Axis. Device 0 corresponds to the first plugged gamepad, Device 1 corresponds to the second, and so on. You can select the joystick and direction you want to bind to the input action on the right. Leave the default values and press the Add button. move_right. After binding all keys, your interface should look like this. jump action left to set up. Bind the Space key and the gamepad’s A button. To bind a gamepad’s button, select the Joy Button option in the menu. Add button. Your jump input action should look like this. That’s all the actions we need for this game. You can use this menu to label any groups of keys and buttons in your projects. In the next part, we’ll code and test the player’s movement.