Godotes #1 - The year of Godot

Welcome to the first issue of Godot Notes! And for the few of you receiving this as an email, thank you!
I don't have much else to say other than I hope you like these numbers and find some value in them.

This being the first issue and all, I thought it would be a good idea to start things up with a look at Godot's grow during the past couple of years in the game making business.
For this, I'll be using itch.io as an example (I'm still in the middle of building a dataset of games build with Godot on Steam/Gog/etc)

The numbers are clear: Godot is gaining traction, fast. Over 50% (52.7) of all the games made with Godot, on Itch.io, where build in 2020. I'm assuming because of a mix between Godot's popularity grow, and Covid lockdowns.
And this came after two years with almost no growth: 2018 and 2019 show 18% and 21% of the total number of games, respectively.

The most surprising part of these numbers, for me, is the fact that only 48% of the games were made for Game Jams. So more than half of them were created as passion projects. Probably a combination of new devs getting into Game Development, honing their skills on itch.io, building games on the smaller side, and more experienced devs looking up this new engine.

I would expect that in 2021, with vaccines on the way and (hopefully) lockdowns becoming a thing of the past, we will be able to see clearly the full scope of Covid's influence on the increasing usage of Godot. Although the release of Godot 4.0 will probably change things quite a bit.

It would be amazing to have data on other engines, and see how much are they growing year by year, and how much of all the numbers depend on the growth of itch.io itself, but that will have to wait.
I will get the numbers though. And you will too.

Godot news round-up

WaterGenGodot

Arnklit published a river generation tool for Godot (here's the Reddit announcement) and it was promptly picked up by gamefromscratch.
GitHub's Repo: click me

I let you with the original video and the gfs' one:

Game Off 2020 🌚

Game Off 2020s results are here, and they are really looking good for Godot.

Not only the second place, Paralunar, but 8 out of the 21 games highlighted on The Github Blog post were build using the Godot Engine.

The full list:

• Paralunar . A 2D shooting game set inside a haunted castle on the Moon
• Catapult, cat space program, a game about catapulting a cat to the moon.
• Pack, packing boxes in preparation for an upcoming rocket launch
• Ogi, A casual, relaxing adventure.
• Scap Out, a vacuum cleaner in the middle of a big scrapyard.
• Bloodmoon, an early-90s, DOS-era-inspired, first-person, action adventure.
• Moonarchists.  Shoot mini-moons at other planets.
• Abbadon, control Terrabots to mine, build and fight.

Per Game Off rules, any game competing had to make the full source code of the game public. A good chance for new devs to learn different implementations in Godot.

New Releases:

• TheSeaHorseHS published on Reddit the launch day stats of his game, Paralyzed.
  20 copies sold, gained 50 Wishlist.
• Charge Kid will be releasing on the Switch on January 6th, 2021
• Salar99, an Iranian game, was released on cafebazaar, a local marketplace with over 40+ million users.

Extras

Aseprite is currently on sale on Steam. 35% off

And that's that for this first issue.

I hope this can give you an idea of what to expect from the newsletter from here on out. A bit of original data, and a bit of news regarding the Engine.
What it will not be, is an exhaustive list of links and news like thisweekingodot (highly recommended) but a look at Godot's position in the world, with the necessary data to back it up.  One section at a time.

This first issue was a little lackluster because itch is kind of a mess when it comes to data collection, so I expect to get better with every issue.

Thanks for reading!

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