Building the Godot way
Knowing the commands is not enough. These craft references teach an agent to build like a Godot developer, each concept paired with a real godot-mcp recipe verified against the live engine.
Two rules thread through all of them: decouple with signals, not polling or get_node("../../") chains, and never trust a remembered API signature. Confirm it against 4.7 with engine class-info or engine search before you write it.
Foundations
GDScript style
Idioms a competent Godot dev ships: static typing, signals over polling, Resources for data.
Game patterns
Buildable patterns mapped to command sequences: movement, game feel vs juice, components, state machines, HUD.
Project structure
How a shipped project is laid out to scale: code/asset separation, feature slices, data/view split, composition.
GDScript architecture
Large-scale runtime architecture: autoload tiering, service locator, path-addressed stores, scene routing.
2D
2D platformers
The component actor, an intent API, physics-expression AnimationTree transitions, codeless moving platforms.
Top-down 2D
Layered TileMapLayer stacks, gameplay as terrain painting, a component library, the one-clock day/night pattern.
2D UI polish
Comp-faithful UI: a design-token class, drawn controls, the screen-builder traps that silently swallow writes.
2D lighting
The full 2D lighting stack: the CanvasModulate/PointLight2D/occluder triad, emissive exemptions, real glow, SDF.
Constraint tiling
The Townscaper/Bad North PCG family: the dual-grid fix, Wave Function Collapse from an example, variant buckets.
3D and spatial
Level design
Playable greybox levels: the Big to Small risk order, spatial-communication tactics, interiors, exteriors, 2D spaces, and pacing without combat.
3D character controllers
One camera-relative movement core for FPS, third-person, and platformer, plus the floor contract and rigs.
Environment art
The art pass after the greybox is proven: PBR materials, real lighting, post restraint, set dressing, the paper diorama.
Systems
Steering and agent movement
Movement that reads as a creature rather than a cursor: arrive, flee, pursue and separation as summable forces, blending vs priority.
Menus and settings
The meta-game screens: pause done right, the settings widget family, ConfigFile persistence, input remapping.
Audio and music
Bus architecture, SFX variation, interactive music, sidechain ducking, spectrum-driven visuals, loop points.
Shaders and VFX
gdshader authoring and wiring, the 2D VFX kit, and a programmatic compile-verification loop.
Save systems
Authoritative vs derived state, the persist-group collector, the five-format tradeoff, atomic autosave.
Multiplayer
Scene-tree replication, ENet, authority gates, @rpc arguments, the co-op skeleton, intent RPCs vs synced state.
Mobile and touch
Index-keyed multitouch, on-screen controls, pinch/pan gestures, safe-area HUD insets.
Rhythm games
The corrected audio clock pushed down the tree, beatmap data, notes as functions of time, windowed judging.
In-game docs
Gyms, zoos, and museums: document the game in-game with doc.* recipes so it never goes stale.
Shipping and export
The release pipeline across desktop, Android, web, macOS, and iOS: dev tooling out of the pck, encryption, and verifying by receipts.
Videos and trailers
Filming the game with the engine itself: duration and delivery profiles from a 15 s hook to 9:16 vertical, a director scene, the movie writer, the render matrix.
Genres
Event / decision games
Reigns-like architecture: immutable cards plus a mutable overlay that is the save, weighted selection, condition DSLs.
Run-based / roguelite
The reactive data blackboard, wave assembly under a weight budget, seeded staged worldgen with a self-audit.
Deckbuilders
The logic layer: an action queue, a hook pipeline for powers and relics, data-driven cards, event-sourced history.
Narrative / visual novel
Both families (Ink and graph dialogue) plus the manifest-driven product shell: boot flow, versioned saves, chapter select.
Interop
Unreal import cleanup
Fixing a scene exported from Unreal: env, lights, junk, imports order, and why it comes in washed out.
Porting between Godot versionsbeta
Moving a 4.x project up to 4.7 with evidence on both sides: a replayable baseline drive, the per-minor break list, and a measured noise floor to read the after numbers against.
C# in Godot
C#-in-Godot idioms for editing a C# project. Pair with the csharp group: setup scaffolds the solution, build compiles with structured diagnostics.