Ludum Dare's results are here and the data is still hot: 3,866 submissions, 2,881 of them linked on itch, and 89 of those made with Godot. Only 83 of the 89 Godot games have a Ludum Dare link tho.

For those not in the know about how LD's rating system work, your game can be qualified from 1 to 5 stars in 8 different categories:, Innovation, Fun, Theme, Graphics, Audio, Humor, Mood, and Overall.

You need 20 ratings or more on a category to take part in the final results, otherwise, you just get an underwhelming 'N/A^th' and get left by the side of the road. ~71% of the entries get 20 or more ratings.

Results:

• Out of the 83 Godot games on the list, ~83% (71) got the 20+ ratings necessary for competing.
• The average  Overall result for those 71 games was 677th out of some 4 thousand. Not too shabby. To give you a comparison, the average game made with Unity got position 739th (out of 418 games). In my book, any time Godot beats Unity, I see it as an absolute win.
• There are 8 games with at least one category in the top 10 (Unity has 14)
• There are 4 games in the Overall top 10 (Unity has 2. Another victory!)
• If we take a look at the top 25 and top 100 places in any category, we find 16 and 29 games respectively. For the Overall category, these numbers are still 4 for the top 25, but 12 for the top 100. Think about that: 12% of the top 100 games on the event in the Overall category (arguably the most important one) were made with Godot.

The Games:

Crust - 7th Overall, 3rd Audio, 7th Mood.

Three top 3s, and five top 100s for this 2D platformer

Made by a team of four: Alex Podaras, Theodore Moustakas, Vasilis Kaminaris, Alex Kaminaris

Autumn Hike - 8th Overall, 6th Innovation, 2nd Theme

Another 3 top 10, 7 top 100 games, made by a 4 dev team consisting of Stav Goldstein, Yakier Bunker, Ori Brusilovsky, and Alon Kaplan. This one is a Top-Down game.

Physics Breaking Boxes - 8th Overall

This one was one of Github's staff picks for Ludum Dare 48. Made by Temulgeh. It got 4 top 100 results.

Dome Romantik - 9th Overall

With 5 top 100 results, this game was made by a couple (as in husband and wife) with a bunch of participation on game jams.

Your Average Lift Experience - 1st Humor

This one is "only" 146th Overall, with 2 top 100 results, but it took the first spot in the Humor category. The highest place of any Godot game in the competition.

Also, this dev (katsuhira), an artist that learned Godot making other games on itch, left this nice little note on the entry:

Small personal note: First time going solo in Ludum Dare! Not my first game jam, as I was the artist on my past game jam entries. Learnt how to use Godot and GDScript and now I’m here! This jam was a successful one, in my opinion. It really was fun and because I planned everything correctly: No crunch was needed! I think I can be proud of this game, even if it is a little bit funky and weird.

Github

• As mentioned before, Github selected a handful of games for its staff picked blog post. 4 of which are Godot made games: Chess Hellevator (7th Innovation), Ziggurat (3 top 100 results), Physics Breaking Boxes (see above) and Sleepie Cookie Eatie (5th Audio).
  You can find the source code on the link below.
  As an extra note, I'm going to take a look at all the games selected on the GitHub staff picks' blog posts. to the pile!
  - Ludum Dare 48. Staff Picks

In general, Godot was represented by some amazing developers. Even tho the games are only 83, they got ~70 results in the top 100, or ~0.84 top 100 results per game. Unity, with 418 games, got only 183 top 100 results, or ~0.43 top 100 results per game.

Obviously, there could be many reasons for this, but I'm still calling it a victory and officially proclaiming that Godot kick the hell out of Unity in the event. 🥳

📰 Godot news round-up

Beware of Buildbox

If you are reading this newsletter, chances are you are a Godot developer thru and thru, or at least a big fan, so you have no dog in this fight. But I still think is important to remember how many headaches you are saving yourself by using an open source game engine.

This week, some changes in the Buildbox (a codeless game engine) plan structure got A LOT of attention on Twitter and Youtube because of how batshit crazy it is in terms of monetization:

As referenced on the Buildbox Pricing Page, the “Default” revenue share for the Free Tier is 70% to Buildbox and 30% to you.

70% of the revenue you make with your game goes to Buildbox if you have the free tier, whit a monthly threshold of US$5.00.

So if you make 6 dollars in a month, 4.2 will go to Buildbox.

If you decide to pay for the Plus or Pro versions ($89.99 and $224.99 a year each) you'll reduce this revenue share to ONLY 30%, with a $50 threshold for Plus, or a 10% share, $2,500 threshold for Pro members.

Notice that for free users, they don't even show this on the official pricing table. the 70% revenue share they get is cover by a "Default".

Obviously, this didn't go well with most devs. I saw it for the first time on Kenney's (the game assets creator) Twitter:

And eventually, he even got a Buildbox developer to answer:

Gamefromscratch also picks it up on a couple of videos:

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