First games of 2022

Fireworks New Year, a game by flameshape on Itch.io, was (as far as I can tell) the first Godot game to be published in 2022.

It's also probably the last Godot game to be released in 2021, according to Itch's records: The game was released at 08:00 on December 31, and published on January first, 2022. The dev was most likely waiting for new year to hit to publish it:

Fireworks New Year is a 2D fireworks simulator, inspired by and created to celebrate the new year!

On Steam, the first Godot publication goes to the demo of Strange Aeons, published by Karolis Dikcius, on January 3rd.

The first released game, however, was Tether, "an abstract arcade platformer about elastic connections and arcing flights", released on January 4th.

GDQuest - Learn GDScript beta is out

GDquest keep on going with their Kickstarter campaign goles. After hiring pycbouh to work on Godot's interface and user experience, they have now released (the beta version of) the Learn To Code with GDscript tool they had announced on their campaign:

It comes with 8 lessons and 12 practices. - Nathan on Reddit

It works really well and, at least for me, is smooth as hell. The design is also really good

The interface of the exercises is similar to websites like freecodecamp or codeacademy. I dare to say, it looks even better.

Is not mobile friendly tho, not sure if that's a thing that is gonna change in the future. A message appears if you use a small enough screen:

Each section comes with a small lesson followed by exercises.

If they are going to be using the tool along side the Kickstarter course, then their goal of making the best course for beginners learning to code with Godot will be more than achievable.

Godot received a new grant from Meta, and some devs lost their minds over it

Godot received an undisclosed amount of money from Meta's Reality Labs (A.k.a. Facebook), and boy did some people took it badly.

I can't say I don't get it at all. This is Facebook (ew) we're talking about. But the amount of thin foil hats and misinformation going around where kind of crazy.

Here are some of the best I have. I'm probably missing a few good ones tho, because by the time I got to the posts (a couple of hours after the announcement) some of the comments were already deleted.

They were in the minority, I'm happy to inform.

Going by upvote count and top comments, the reaction across multiple subs like Godot, Gamedev, and Linux_gaming was pretty much the same: the majority of users were happy Godot was getting an extra grant to keep development going.

Still, to clear rumors and explain how these grants work, Akien posted a response on r/Godot that I will just copy in its entirety, because I think it's important:

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