10 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Large Godot Project (Cost Me Months)

Starting a large project in Godot is exciting… until you discover the mistakes that can quietly destroy months of work. As a software engineer with over 10 years of experience, I approached my first large Godot project thinking many common engineering best practices would transfer directly. Some did, but others led to surprising problems that cost me a lot of time. In this video, I go over 10 things I wish I knew before starting a large project in the Godot Engine. These are lessons I learned while building a Mega Man–inspired platformer in Godot 4, and several of them combined to force a complete restart of my project. If you're moving beyond beginner tutorials and starting your first serious game in Godot, these tips could save you weeks, or even months, of development time. Topics include: • Project architecture mistakes • Hidden engine quirks • Physics scaling issues • Code organization • And more Whether you're making your first serious indie game or transitioning into larger projects with Godot, these lessons will help you avoid some painful mistakes. --- Subscribe for Godot development tips, deep dives, and dev logs. Fat Earth Studios is my indie development studio where I'm building games in Godot and sharing the lessons learned along the way. --- CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 0:33 Don't Blindly Trust Tutorials 1:15 Sprite2D Offset vs Position 2:33 Add a Debug God Mode 3:54 The Scaling Mistake That Killed My Project 5:32 Preload Memory Pitfalls 7:08 Enemy Spawning with VisibleOnScreenNotifier2D 9:09 Resolution and Scaling Setup 11:12 Static Typing in GDScript 12:42 Version Control with Git 14:02 Quick Godot Tips 15:12 Outro --- Music used in this video: "Floating Waterfall" Composed by Daniel B. Russell © 2026 Daniel B. Russell. All rights reserved. #godot #gamedev #indiedev