In April 2016, it was announced that "The community forum is back!". In the same month, the new forums hosted 71 new topics with 332 comments. May 2016 followed with 58 topics and 203 comments.

The same forums saw, during the April-May period of 2021, 503 new topics and 1,965 comments.

In fact, in the first half of this year, the forums already received more posts and comments than during the entirety of 2018 and 2019, and more than 2017 and 2016 combined.

2021 also surpassed 2020's Jan-Apr period by 130 new topics. Although is losing in the number of comments: 2020s had over 1,600 comments more in the same time frame.

General chat and Programming

Even tho the community, in general, has a similar amount of interactions per topic across categories (between ~3 and ~4 comments per post on average, depending on the category, ~3.5 overall), in terms of the share number of topics and/or comments, the General chat and the Programming categories take a comfortable lead to the rest.

They alone represent ~47.5% of all the topics on the forums and ~46% of all the comments. Programming is the number one by some 900 topics and 1600 comments over General Chat

And if you want a more detailed rundown of the numbers, you only need to take a look at the forums themselves:

I suppose it will take some time to see if Covid played a role (or how big it was) in 2020's jump in both posts and comments, as a 3x increase from the previous year is quite the leap, after all. Maybe last year was just a good time to run a forum (and maybe this year too?). We'll see.

What is clear is that the community is thriving. Time will tell if it can keep up the growth in post-Covid times.

Discord is nice and all, but I do miss forums. I'm adding this data for the upcoming Godot quarterly report, hopefully coming up next week.

GMTK's 2021. Two Godot games in the top 20

• Puzzle Sigma - "The idea for this one is that you play as a mathematical symbol - starting as a plus sign - and you can attach yourself to big chunky numbers blocks. [...] It's alarmingly clever and deserves endless points for making a game about math that's actually enjoyable." - GMTK's video at 03:01 minutes mark.
• Telephone Trouble - "Use wires to make a connection between caller and recipient. [...] It's a rapid fire, high score-chasing arcade gem with gorgeous graphics. Give it a play" - GMTK's video at 07:18 minutes mark.

here's the whole video:

📰 Godot news round-up

• Dialogic versions 1.1 and 1.2 highlights - Devlog - A whole lot of new options and changes for the latest version for Dialogic. Here's a changelog link, in case you wanna take a more detailed look.
• Godot's BoTW Toon Shader - Reddit user XDGregory (Crystal Cookie Gaming on YouTube) published a fantastic breath of the wild shader for Godot. Here's the Reddit announcement, the godotshaders.com post, and then the video with an update, just a couple of days later.
• Gaming on Linux is making a list of linux games on itch.io. - You can Dm them on Twitter if you want your game to be added.
• GOTM.io Jam #6 just started. The theme is Leading a group. There are still 9 days and 9 hours left at the time of publishing.

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