During game development, especially in a growing project, it’s common to need globally accessible objects. Whether you’re persisting data between scenes, handling configuration settings, or managing signals across the game, this need arises often. In Godot, this is achieved through autoloaded singletons—those always available, globally accessible nodes or scripts. However, as your project expands, managing numerous autoloads can become a hassle.

The Problem with Script Autoloads

Autoloading scripts work well for small projects, but as the game scales, managing multiple global scripts can lead to bloated, hard-to-manage autoload lists. Often, developers end up with a dozen or more autoloaded scripts, each handling a single responsibility, cluttering up the project and making it difficult to track what’s happening globally at any given time. A large number of autoload scripts can lead to overlapping logic, difficulty debugging, and potential state management issues.

Autoloaded Scenes to the Rescue

Just like scripts, scenes can also be autoloaded, and unlike scripts, they can have child nodes. This means you can separate your logic into multiple manageable parts within a single scene, which supports composition. Instead of managing numerous autoloaded scripts, you can have one autoloaded scene that contains multiple child nodes, each responsible for different aspects of global game functionality—be it saving progress, managing sounds, or handling player data.

Using scenes allows for a modular structure. By breaking down your systems into individual nodes within a single autoloaded scene, you not only keep the autoload list short, but you also make the system more manageable and maintainable.

Why Use a Scene and Not a Script?

The core difference between autoloading a script and autoloading a scene is that scenes allow for hierarchy and children. This makes it much easier to group related functionality together and ensure that they interact correctly. Rather than needing to autoload a dozen separate scripts, you can autoload a single scene that contains nodes for:

  • Signal Bus: To manage and centralize signals.
  • Player Data: Handling persistence of player state across scenes.
  • Configuration Manager: Managing settings and configurations.
  • Sound Manager: Centralized handling of audio.

For example, imagine you’re building a game where you need to keep track of player stats, sound effects, and input management across various scenes. Rather than loading three different global scripts, you could create an autoloaded scene with child nodes like PlayerStats, SoundManager, and InputHandler. Each child node focuses on its respective task, making your global management far more modular and easier to extend as your game grows.

How To Implement Autoloaded Scenes

  1. Create a Scene: Build a scene that will contain your globally accessible nodes. For example, this could include a root node named GlobalManager, and beneath it, you can add child nodes like PlayerData, SoundManager, and SignalBus.

  2. Autoload the Scene: Once the scene is set up, go to Project Settings > Autoload, and select your newly created scene. The entire scene and all its child nodes will now be available globally throughout your game, just like any autoloaded script.

  3. Accessing Nodes: Because you’ve autoloaded a scene, you can access any node inside it globally. For example, to access the PlayerData node inside your GlobalManager autoload, you would use the following code: 
    var player_data = GlobalManager.get_node("PlayerData")
  4. Modular System Maintenance: With the scene autoload system, adding new global systems is easy. Simply add new nodes as children under the GlobalManager scene, and they will be accessible wherever needed without cluttering the autoload settings.

Benefits Of This Approach

  • Modularity: You can keep related functionality grouped together in one place, allowing for clean, modular code.
  • Maintainability: If you need to make changes to your global systems, you can modify or replace individual child nodes in the autoloaded scene without impacting others.
  • Scalability: This system easily scales as your game grows. If you need to add more global functionality, just add another node under your autoloaded scene.

Best Practices

  • Keep It Focused: Only include global functionality that needs to persist across scenes. Don’t overload your autoloaded scene with too many child nodes, or you risk recreating the original problem of complexity.
  • Separate Logic Appropriately: For larger systems, consider breaking your autoloaded scene into multiple sub-scenes. For example, you might have separate autoloaded scenes for game-specific systems (like player state or inventory) and engine-wide systems (like input management or sound).

By adopting this autoloaded scene structure, you’re able to keep your project organized and modular, simplifying the maintenance and debugging process as the game’s scope expands.