The last couple of weeks have been rough in my spare time. That, coupled with a vet emergency caused me to miss the sending of the past issue. To crown it all, I recently started a new, very time consuming project.

Basically: I'm swamped with work.

This means that I'm gonna have to make a few changes to Godotes.

The idea of the newsletter was to make weekly, small reports on some aspect of the Godot scene. It could be simply the number of games, or developers, to pricing and game jams. Anything goes.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. It's a lot more time consuming than I expected.
   The Original Plan was to spend a few hours getting the data,  putting it in order, then write a couple of paragraphs and be done with it. And when I have free time, that's really all there is to it.
   But when I don't have the time? Then suddenly even choosing a topic becomes a big deal, because I need to take into account the time it will take me to get all the data I need. The issue I'm currently working being a great example: Youtubers making Godot content: There are a ton of them. But most of them don't just produce Godot videos, nor do they have a consistent update schedule.  
   Even ordering them is a little bit of work. If I wanna have something like the number of 2D and 3D tutorials published on the last year, or the average view count for the videos, I have to at least have a decent excel sheet.
   Now, I could just make a list based on size or something, and I probably will. But I want to have a little more than just what anybody could find with 10 minutes of searching.
2. I'm going to run out of topics
   This one is getting clearer by the week: At some point I'm not going to be able to find new topics to work with. There's only so much I can get out of Itch's data and the few games I have from Steam.

There are already two Godotes issues published with one week delay because I just couldn't find the time to spare. And I'm not even on issue #8 yet!

So, what does all of this mean?

It means, numbered issues of Godotes  (mini-reports) are going to be published every two weeks instead of weekly. That will give me the time to prepare a better report without any rushing.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm only going to send two emails a month, just that the issues published between reports are going to be much less demanding of my time. The idea now is to pick up a theme from the week, this could be a new game getting published, someone talking about their sales, or a new update for the engine, and run with that. Give it a little more attention than just a passing comment

Also, and this is kind of an announcement of its own: Every three months I'm planning on publishing a "special edition" for the newsletter, containing a Quarterly report to have an idea of the general growth Godot had on that particular period of time.

The first one is coming on April 2. It will contain the data about new games published so far during January-March 2021 and how are things looking compared to the same period the year before. New games published on Steam or mobile, and hopefully much more. I'm expecting it to take a lot more time than a normal issue, and that's why I'm only doing it 4 times a year.

The schedule for the next couple of weeks will look something like this, starting next Friday:

• Godotes #8 - Youtubers
• Normal Godotes issue, no big topic
• Godotes #9 - Probably about Paid Courses, following the Youtubers issue
• Another normal issue, no big topic
• Special Edition - Godot Q1 (January, February, and March) report

And that's that.

I'm not sure if this will be disappointing for some of you or not, but I apologize if it is. At least I can promise better issues with the extra time I'm going to be able to put into them.

Before jumping to the news round-up, I wanna bring some attention to a few of the Gotm.io Jam #1 entries, because I finally had time to sit down and play them and they are INSANE.

I'm talking specifically about Kaboom Swing, Mission Cover-Up and Wallker Demolition Co., the Top 3.

All of them are 2D Platformers but with very different mechanics and amazing art styles and gameplay.

Kaboom Swing, the #1 overall and winner of two categories, Originality and Gameplay (gotm's  prizes are given to the top-rated game of each category, so the game made $40 for ) was made by havana24, a super prolific developer with an entire section for awards on game jams on his website.

His go-to engine is apparently OpenFL, and this was in fact his first time using Godot, which is just insane. I'm not sure if it was the prize money or just the idea of trying Godot that made him participate, and I don't care, I just really hope he keeps doing it, because there's no such thing as enough developers using the engine.

Mission Cover-Up, also the winner of two categories (Sounds and Look), and I guess the other $40, was made by a first-timer on itch. A software engineer called Khan.

If the money is, in fact, the key factor for bringing talent like that to Godot game jams, I really hope gotm.io keeps at it, because is clearly working.

In fact, the quality of the top games was so amazing that the #3 overall, Wallker Demolition Co., didn't win any money, despite the fact that in many, many other jams it would have gotten the #1 spot with ease.

It was made by Escada Games, a "small Brazilian indie game development group" formed by Delta-Key and Rafael Pimentel

The jam ended on February 1st, and you can watch a video with some of the games here

Also, today was announced the Theme for the Gotm.io Jam #2 ($100 Prizes). It was Speed and there are still 9 days and 13 hours left on the clock at the time of publishing.

📰 Godot news round-up

• Youtube - A dev trying to make a game with Godot in the time Unity takes to start running on his computer:

• Sales - Then game Paralyzed reached 100 sales on Steam.
  This shows just how widely inaccurate predictions like Steam Revenue Calculator (and Godotes #7) can be.

• Official - A couple of new articles from the godotengine.org blog talking about the Release Candidate for Godot 3.2.4 and "Why isn't Godot an ECS-based game engine?"
  I'm not even gonna pretend I know what the second one is talking about. Other than "Nodes are good" (they are!), I don't have a whole lot of knowledge on the subject. But the first one have me hyped up. Node Copy-Paste support and my personal favorite: Colors!

Just take a look at that!

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