// the find
gdquest-demos/godot-platformer-2d
2d Metroidvania-inspired game for the 2019 GDquest Godot Kickstarter course project.
A Godot 3.x platformer demo built for GDQuest's 2019 Kickstarter course on making metroidvania-style games. It's a teaching artifact, not a game engine or library — the value is in seeing how GDQuest structures a real Godot project, particularly the state machines, steering behaviors, and GDNative heatmap integration.
The AI subsystem is more serious than most game demos: full steering behavior hierarchy (seek, flee, evade, intercept, arrive, blended), a C++ GDNative heatmap for pathfinding, and a scheduler for spreading expensive AI ticks across frames. State machines are properly separated for both player and enemies, not stuffed into a single script. The camera rig with anchor detection and shake is a reusable pattern that people actually want. Project structure is clean — src split by domain (Player, AI, Combat, Objects) with scenes co-located next to their scripts.
Godot 3.x only — this will not open in Godot 4 without a migration, and the GDNative heatmap is a Windows-only binary that requires rebuilding from source on any other platform. Last commit was April 2022, so it's effectively frozen. The GDNative submodule setup is fragile; clone without --recursive and the heatmap silently fails to build. As a course companion it's also incomplete by design — no inventory, no ability gating, no actual metroidvania loop — so don't treat it as a reference for those systems.