It was supposed to be easy: check my list of Godot games on Itch, find the first one, and make a post about it. I already have a nice chart telling me that 6 Godot games were published on itch in 2014 (none in 2013), what more do I need?

I need to check the games one by one, apparently.

First try: Gardenia ❌

Prima facie, according to my list, the first game ever made with Godot published on Itch.io was Gardenia, "A contemplative world-building game / toy. Take your time and tweak this or that little world."

The game was published on Feb 11, 2014, not even a month after Godot's first public release.

So far, I like the story. The game even has a couple of devlogs, one of which is about Godot. Great!

So I read Remake incoming! and surprise:

In the last few months / years, players have commented that the game was not working on their machines. This is basically a side-effect of Flash and Adobe AIR, the technologies in which the game was built, becoming obsolete by their maintainers. [...] So, I have decided to rewrite the game! I have been wanting to learn more about Godot, the free game engine, for a while. It is a cross-platform engine, so by porting Bonsai Worlds to it, I might be able to export it for the web, Windows and Android phones, which would be quite fun. Also, I get to learn more about the tool.

The game was made with Godot only in 2019. The first Godot game on Itch was made with Flash.

Even tho it should have been obvious, it never occurred to me that any game ported to Godot after its publishing date on Itch would show in my charts in a completely wrong position.

There weren't 6 Godot games published in 2014. Only 5...so far.

Try two: The Pixel Medic ❌

I didn't even have to read the devlogs to know this was another no go:

I made the first version of this game some years ago with MonoGame - this is kinda remake with the Godot Engine and some gameplay improvements.

The game was ported to Godot in 2021.

On the one hand, it's really nice to see devs using Godot to improve their games after publishing them. I kind of wanna check just how many ports like these I can find. On the other hand, we're down to only 4 games published in 2014 using Godot.

Onto the next one!

Third time's the charm: Haunt ✔️

The third game on my list was made on November 15, 2014, exactly one month before Godot's 1.0 release.

"Haunt is a multiplayer horror game made by the SteamLUG 7dfps team, as an entry to the weeklong game jam"

Luckily, this was a Godot game from day 1: "This was made using only open source tools, including the Godot Engine."

We have a winner!

They even have this on the game's repo:

The game was an entry for the 7DFPS 2014 jam, and it was made by a team of 5, beansmyname, HER0, Nemoder, razieliyo, and Tigge.

Now just to be clear, I don't think this was really the first Godot game on Itch.io. The community was already big enough to have multiple game released even back in 2014. But Haunt was the earliest game I could find. At a minimum, it was probably the first game to have Godot in its tools list. Of course, It's the first result on Itch if you sort games made with Godot by date and go to the last page

But what about the other games of 2014? were they really made with Godot?

At least the next entries are definitely original Godot Engine games: Enter the Winter Holiday Godot Game Jam!

Winter Holiday Godot Game Jam!

Announced on December 9, 2014, this was (probably) the first Godot-only game jam ever made.

It ran until January 2, 2015.

It wasn't hosted on itch, like many other jams around that time. I assume Itch just wasn't as popular as it is today, even if they already had jam hosting back then.

The problem with a not-on-itch-jam is that the pages with all the info are long gone, save for a few exceptions, courtesy of the wayback machine:

• Announcement

• Event thread
• Forum page

I went hunting for the games named on the forum page. I'm still looking for some of them, I haven't found any game I didn't already have.

Only two of them were published in 2014: Karaokeyboard and Santa Sniper.

Out of the two, Santa Sniper ("So many Santas, so few bullets...") was the earliest, published on December 24. That makes it the second Godot game on Itch.

Karaokeyboard was published on December 31. It was the last Godot game on itch during that year, and the 4th Godot game ever.

The last game, and 3rd place on the list, Wormhole, was published on  Dec 25, 2014.

It doesn't show on the image of made-with-godot games I posted above because it doesn't have a tools section, only a godot-engine tag.

This puzzle-platformer was updated in 2016, it doesn't have devlogs, comments, or any development related text, so it could have been ported to Godot years after publishing, like the first two games on this list.

But if I go down that road, any game updated after publishing could be guilty of Godot-baiting. Unless stated otherwise, I'm not assuming rebooting.

So that's it: Only four games were published on Itch in 2014 made with Godot, and 2019 and 2021 are both short by one.

📰 Godot news round-up

• Godot finally made it to the "Engines used in the most popular Steam games" list published in the gamedev subreddit by u/justkevin since 2019.  Thanks to Cruelty Squad, Godot is on the 2021 edition with one entry. The engine is still in the "Other" category tho. I'm not salty at all!
• A "reference gif for all the interpolation methods" made the rounds this week on the Blender subreddit, and was then posted on r/godot.

• The Godot Add-on Jam #1 ended with 60 entries and 666 ratings. Improved resource picker, Dialogue Manager, and Hyperlog Godot Addon are the top three entries. There are some extremely cool projects in there, check it out.
• Just a cool Twitter thread by @Reduzio about the Godot development process

If you have anything you want to share with the Godot development community please let me know by sending an email to contact@godotes.com