How I Organize My 10k+ Line Godot Project!

In this video I walk through my project hierarchy for Dauphin, providing an overview of the core organizational concepts I employ as well as an overview of my most important top and second-level folders. Hope you find it useful!

#godot #organization #gamedev

00:00 Intro & Purpose
00:55 Core Organizational Concepts
03:13 Assets
03:55 Common
04:47 Config
05:07 Entities
07:36 Localization
07:51 Stages
08:45 Utilities
09:22 Wrap-Up

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[pokelord]

I've just hit the point in my RPG dev where I need to seriously consider how I want to organize everything. Truly perfect timing

[adamhelesic]

Deeefinitely please make more of these educational videos! This one was very insightful

[BunchOfNerdsMakingGames]

Great video! The first time I worked with a team on a game jam we didn't know how to organize our files and it turned into complete chaos. By the end of the competition we couldn't find anything in our project. Organization is so critical yet can be so easily overlooked.

[TheCraftyAutistic]

I really needed to learn this! So many tutorials seem to stop at the minigame level.

[loipesmas]

When I started I was grouping files by type (I think some tutorial suggested that), but with time, I've also landed on grouping by functionality instead. So I approve this message!

[_gamma.]

One thing that made my workflow work better was adding a “support” folder that includes raw assets for itch store pages, unprocessed audio files I may use, credits, etc. Great video, I’ll pick up some of those organizational tips!

[autumnshade]

This is awesome. I had everything in seperate asset>art and scripts folders and was quickly losing everything, and finding I was creating different directory structures. This is much easier to keep track of everything. Thank you so much for sharing.

[poleski]

Love this! Great to see someone elses implementation and organization strategies, even if there are some downsides. I find that managing shared files often gets overlooked with the "organize by usecase". Like a player and an enemy that both have a shared health script. The health script doesnt belong in either folder, and thus is booted up a layer. Despite the feeling that it should live at the same level as both the player and the enemy. It almost feels as if like a file hierarchy isnt doing justice to the complexity of the code structure. Like if i could organize files based on a 2D graph instead of a filesystem, i feel like that would almost be more intuitive. Forget folders and organization strategies, and just looked at which nodes / files are tied to each other in the 2D graph.

[_mickmccarthy]

Excellent video! I've just gotten back into game dev after a few years out, and am always interested to hear about things like directory structure, design patterns, how entities communicate etc. So would love to see some more of this style of video if it's something you're interested in covering!

[SDGGames]

That's a big tree! I'm surprised that you haven't color-coded anything in there. I love having different folder colors for art, UI, scenes+scripts, etc. At least in my experience, it's made things a lot quicker to find.

[grymmjack]

Thank you for showing us behind the curtain of a well organized and large Godot project! Very helpful. I can see how this system could work in lots of ways, and scaffolding you've got here is very good!

[betadyne]

Do you know this is by far the Godot video I've watched the most so far, except maybe the Miziziziz's video about tutorials ? This is extremely precious knowledge and I'm glad you spent time sharing this with us because it's very good !

[AspiringHeroGames]

I really like the folder structure. It seems really intuitive to keep everything related together like that.
I'm so used to keeping all singular file types together (scripts in Scripts, models in Models), and oftentimes it takes me a while to find the file I need. I'm strongly considering implementing a hierarchy like this now!

[Michael-The-Composer]

I've taken notes from this video and put it in a nice document called 'Game Dev Wisdom', and I will be using this structure when I eventually delve into a bigger game!!! I appreciate this breakdown so much! This system just makes so much sense

[justgame]

This is similar to vertical slice architecture, which is a method in distributed systems and back end architecture design for organising code by features rather than technical concerns. Interesting to see parallels in very different software engineering domains

[johannesandersson]

This was one of the most helpful videos I have seen in a long time. Not only does this inspire new developers to better organize their projects but also seasoned developers. Personally I think maintaining good orginasized code throughout the project is the most challenging. Your ability to organize your project is inspiring. Thank you for uploading such a good content

[pbilkhu]

Great video! As someone who struggles with organizing projects to the point where I feel like I’m constantly changing my folder structure, this is very insightful. I especially like your naming conventions for different inherited objects, it’s feels really intuitive. I’d love and appreciate more content like this!

[grzegorzgrzelczyk]

I'm here watching this for the second time as I'm reorganizing my little project just because when I watched it for the first time I knew I must do it this way. Seems super intuitive.

[RichardCalder]

As a new game dev, but a long time developer, I love this. I keep watching tutorials with a Scripts folder and that just seems like such a horrible idea for a real game to me. This also gave me some ideas on how to better structure my own work moving forward. Thank you!

[shindig]

Thank You!
This has finally helped answer some of my questions that I can never seem to find information or advise on! 😭