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Basic Top-Down Movement

Godot’s documentation already has a good example of how to do this. Not much to refine here.

This assumes that there are four inputs already defined as “left”, “right”, “up”, and “down”. It will work with both keyboard and controller inputs.

The result of this will be a character that doesn’t have any “weight”. That is, they move exactly as much as the input specifies. When no input is provided, the character instantly stops. This would be fine for lofi, 8- and 16-bit games, but not suitable for anything with mass. For that, you’d want some sort of acceleration, such as a basic linear acceleration.

The Code​

extends CharacterBody2D

## The maximum speed allowed, in pixels per second
@export var max_speed: float = 200.0

func _physics_process(_delta: float) -> void:
	velocity = _direction() * max_speed
	move_and_slide()

func _direction() -> Vector2:
	return Input.get_vector("left", "right", "up", "down")

Implementation Notes​

  • _physics_process(float) is used over _process(float) since this involves moving the character, and physics operations should be applied within the physics thread.
  • I moved Input.get_vector()’s usage into a helper function because I can never remember which direction is which, but it doesn’t save anything here.
  • move_and_slide() takes into account delta time, and so your character will move at a consistent rate (even if your physics frames don’t)
  • This character will always move at top speed when using a keyboard for input. Using a controller, it’s possible to move at less than maximum speed by not moving the joystick all the way to one direction. This could be addressed by normalizing the output of Input.get_vector().