Godotes #2 - Tags
[Happy fuck 2020 new year! I hope 2021 treats you better than last year. On a personal note, I hope this will be the first out of 52 uninterrupted issues to be sent this year. Now let's talk business]
This week I want to take a look at tags usage and what they can tell us about the types of games being made using Godot.
Once again, my data comes exclusively from itch.io. ~4544 games from the made-with-godot category.
But before starting, a little disclaimer: Tags on itch (as they are in most places) are a mess. They are not mandatory and is up to each developer to define the most important aspects of their game. There are also many kind-of-duplicated tags around, like "speedrun", "speed-run" and "speedrunning". What I'm trying to say here is this: don't expect a lot of consistency. There are pixel art games and 3d games with no "pixel art" or "3d" tags. Still, with more than 4500 games, the overall results show some clear trends.
The numbers
First, not all the games have tags, but the majority do: ~9% of the games are untagged. From the remaining 91% of tagged games, ~17% use only one tag. and ~57% use 4 or more.
For specifics: There are 2103 individual tags, and a nice 20154 tags used in total. From that, probably surprising no one, 2d is the most used one, by far: ~48% of all Godot's games have a "2D" tag. Followed by a ~27% "Pixel Art" and a ~26% "Single Player"
It should be noted that itch suggests tags to a dev during the submission process. 2D, Pixel Art, and "Singleplayer" (spelled like that) are among the top suggestions. Still, developers don't just put any random tag on their game's description (I assume), so it's safe to say that these tags do correlate with the type of games on the platform.
3D Representation
So far, nothing out of the ordinary, considering the type of game published on Itch in general and the amount of information new developers can find about making games like 2D platformers with Godot. But the 3D tags tell a whole different story about the Godot's 3D situation: 328 games, or ~7.2% of all the games on Itch, have a 3D tag. It's barely on the top 10 most used tags at #8
Now, if you have ever searched for a good, complete, 3D game development tutorial using Godot, that number won't surprise you at all. Skimming through the data on developers using Godot, you can see how a big chunk of them only have one game to their names. I would bet good money that the availability of tutorials to follow have a huge impact on the games developed by new Godot users.
Given how new the engine still is, and how much it's growing, I don't think it's a major issue to have only a small sample of 3D games published. It's just a little sad, considering how amazing Godot 3D systems are.
The top 10 most used tags reinforce the story of "short" and "casual" "2d" games as the main Godot product out there:
(Click here for full size image)
Godot news round-up
Pixelipy (felipemcpxd on Reddit) showed a really cool Platform level editor and dialogue system on this post.
He made it following this tutorial on YouTube : Godot In Game Level Editor
Apeirozoic: Strategy Evolution CCG, Reddit user xkenoma's first Godot game, just got 50K+ downloads on Google Play.
Google Play link
Itch link
Shelton Tolbert's Interactive portfolio. A developer created an interactive portfolio using Godot, playable on itch. I wanted to put a link to the GitHub repo, but unfortunately, it's empty.itch PortfolioGitHub Account
Godot's Wild Jam #29 is starting in a week, in case you want to begin the year with a fun challenge.
Godot 2020 Year in Review (official)
And that's it for the first issue of the year. I'll get back to scrape that data out of...well, everywhere I can.
Have a great 2021!
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