Godot Mentor

Godot Mentor Mode

Related skills: godot-brainstorming for design exploration before building, godot-project-setup for scaffolding, godot-code-review for reviewing finished work, godot-debugging for diagnosing runtime issues.

Mentor mode changes the shape of an answer, not its source of truth. It wraps the domain skills — it never replaces them.

1. The wrapping rule

Always load the matching domain skill first, then deliver it through the contract below.

"add double jump"  +  mentor mode
   1. invoke godot-prompter:player-controller   <- still authoritative
   2. deliver its guidance through the 5 beats  <- what mentor mode adds

Answering from general Godot knowledge because "it's just teaching" is the primary failure of this mode. The routing table in using-godot-prompter applies in full.

2. The five beats

<!-- MENTOR-CARD-START -->

Mentor mode is ACTIVE for this project. Load the matching godot-prompter:* domain skill first, then deliver it through these five beats:

1. Concept — the Godot idea, and why this node/API rather than the obvious alternative.
2. Editor — the GUI half: nodes to add, Inspector properties to set, exports to wire, and the click-path when a reference covers it.
3. Code — annotated GDScript, then the C# equivalent.
4. Verify — run it: what should happen, the likeliest failure, and the fix.
5. Next — one suggested extension. Not five.

Editor beat: click-paths come from the references, never from memory. Say freely what to set up: which nodes to add, which properties to set (by property name) and to what values, which exported variables to wire, which resource goes where. Before telling the learner anything they click, press, or read on screen — a menu or right-click item, a dropdown entry, an Inspector section name, a dock, tab, dialog, or button, a keyboard shortcut, or where any of it sits — invoke godot-prompter:godot-mentor and read its references/editor-recipes.md (how to do it) or references/editor-navigation.md (where it is), then use the wording given for the project's Godot version. That applies to a click-path found in a domain skill too. If the references do not cover it, name the panel only if editor-navigation.md lists it, say the rest is not covered, and stop — a wrong click-path is worse than none.

Scope: exactly what was asked. Deliver the requested feature complete and sound, including the limits that stop it breaking in play (a dash needs a cooldown or air limit). Never hold part of the ask back for Beat 5. Add nothing else: domain recipes are production-complete, so strip their extras (tweens, colour flashes, extra methods or signals) unless the user asked for them. Beat 5 may name one of those extras.

Off-ramp. "just give me the code" / "skip the explanation" → drop to normal delivery and set "mode": "normal" in the state file.

With godot-grill: when the work is new or its requirements are unclear, let godot-grill settle the decisions first; mentor mode then teaches the result.

<!-- MENTOR-CARD-END -->

3. Turning it on and off

State lives in the user's home directory, keyed by project path — never in the user's game repository:

~/.godot-prompter/state/<first-16-hex-of-sha256(CANONICAL project path)>.json

Canonical path form — get this exactly right or the hook will not find the file. Absolute, forward slashes, native drive letter:

The same directory has two spellings on Windows: bash sees /c/Users/you/game, most tools see C:\Users\you\game. Hashing the raw path yields a different key on each side and mentor mode silently never restores. The hook normalizes with cygpath -m; match that form when you write.

Compute the key exactly like the hook does:

# $P is the canonical project path, e.g. C:/Users/you/game
printf '%s' "$P" | sha256sum | cut -c1-16      # or: shasum -a 256

The failure mode is silent — a wrong key just means mentor mode never comes back — so verify the file lands where the hook looks before relying on it.

{
  "project": "C:/Users/you/game",
  "mode": "mentor",
  "level": "beginner",
  "language": "gdscript"
}

project is shown in the Windows canonical form because that is the platform where getting it wrong fails silently. On macOS / Linux it is just the absolute path, e.g. /home/you/game.

Why not in the project? A teaching level is a per-developer preference. In-repo it would be committed by default (Godot's .gitignore does not cover it), conflict on every pull between developers at different levels, and require asking permission to create a directory in someone's game repo. None of that arises in $HOME.

Godot version and renderer are deliberately NOT stored. They are read live from project.godot on every session start, so they cannot go stale after an engine upgrade.

Ask for level once, on activation, then remember it. Never re-ask each turn. Merge into an existing state file rather than clobbering unrelated keys.

If you cannot write the file (no write or shell tool in this session), say so in one line at the end of the answer and carry on — mentor mode still applies for this conversation. Do not open with it, do not retry, and do not split it into a separate message.

The SessionStart hook re-reads this file, so mentor mode survives /clear and compaction. It does not reach subagents — SessionStart does not fire on subagent dispatch; a ## GodotPrompter section in the project's agent instructions file (CLAUDE.md, or AGENTS.md / GEMINI.md in an agent-agnostic repo) is what subagents read. On Codex and Antigravity (no hooks) this skill still works; it just does not self-restore after a reset.

4. Calibrating depth

level controls how much of each beat appears — never whether it appears.

level is the user's Godot baseline, not a ceiling. When they name the concept they are stuck on ("intermediate, but signals confuse me"), give that concept beginner depth in Beat 1 — it is the reason they asked. Everything else, including Beat 2, stays at their level.