Welcome (Finally!) to Godotes #9. Probably a little later than usual, because scheduling things is clearly not my forte. On the other hand, I got my first Covid vaccine shot this week, so I'll probably live long enough to learn how to schedule things correctly.

This week's issue will be somewhat of a continuation of Godotes #8, but focused on the paid side of tutorials and courses.

Disclaimer

Unlike tutorials on Youtube, paid courses are extremely easy to find. Partially because I already knew a couple of them (GDQuest's and Heartbeast's) and partially because Udemy is such a juggernaut in the courses industry that it would have been extremely difficult to miss.

The thing is, also unlike Youtube, there's no standardization on how to assign a grade to a particular course because they are on different sites and use more than one system.

And the same goes for pricing: Because so many Udemy courses have that wonderful marketing strategy of putting a high price on a course and then discounting 99% of it to make it look like a great deal, I have no way of knowing the real price users paid for them. As a result, I'm going to skip most of the price talking points.

Also: This issue is an Affiliate Links free zone.

Suffice to say, with fewer than 70 paid courses overall, this issue won't be a long one, so let's just jump to the question I'm going to try to answer with the data I have:

• How do the courses brake in terms of language and themes?
• Who are the biggest creators?
• what are the "best" courses?
• Can you learn enough with the available courses to become proficient in Godot?

Courses by type and Language

Surprising no one, ever, the majority of courses are in English and they teach mostly 2D

Outside Udemy, all the courses are in English, but on it, an amazing 28 out of 51 courses (Godot Topic on Udemy shows 52, but one of them is a Construct 2 course) are on a non-English language. Mostly Portuguese and Spanish, a couple of them in French and I think one in Russian, if I'm not mistaken.

As one could expect, most of the courses range from beginner to intermediate level, with only a couple of them on the spectrum of what a noob like me would call advanced.

Biggest creators

The total number of creators took me by surprise, as I wasn't expecting so many of them to make courses on Udemy. And yet, I think a couple of them rise a little higher than the rest, if anything else, by the particular positioning of their courses on sites like Udemy and Skillshare.

• First, because it really couldn't be anyone else, is GDQuest.
  Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced, it doesn't really matter, because you'll most likely find something of value on their list of courses. Nothing too shocking, considering what they already do for free on Youtube and their website.
• gamedev.tv won the Udemy game with "Discovering Godot: Make Video Games in Python-like GDScript" because of the lucky/brilliant url they got: udemy.com/course/godot. I have no idea if they were the first ones to make a Godot course in Udemy, or simply no one took advantage of the opportunity to claim the 'Godot' course URL before them. Either way, kudos to them. The course has over 15k students so far, and almost 3,700 ratings. Not too shabby
• Zenva Academy. This guys are everywhere. I knew them years ago while learning Phaser, a Javascript game library. I think they also have a Node.js course I'm familiar with. And now Godot. They have enough Godot courses to put them at the top of the list. A couple of them are on Udemy, but most are on their platform ($20 a month)
  
• There are only 14 Godot courses on Skillshare.com, and 6 of them are made by Michael Mcguire. Controlling ~43% of the Godot market on a platform definitely puts you on this list.

Best courses

I have no idea. I can't go around talking about the quality of courses I haven't even taken, so I'll try something different: I will put a couple of the courses I think are the best overall, using only either popularity (googling opinions) or my own personal bias. Do not, and I can't stress this enough, expect any kind of objectivity from this mini list.

• GDQuest Ultimate Godot Bundle (All courses). In their own words:

It’s a pass for all our present and future Godot courses, at a lower price. [...] you’ll get new courses and updates at no extra cost, so your purchase’s value will only go up.

I don't have to much to add, really. They are Number 1 on my book for a reason.

• 1-Bit Godot Course by Heartbeast. This one started with a successful Kickstartet campaign and for what I can tell, is still one of the most recommended courses overall, and although you can find people not so in love with it, a lot of the comments are like this one:

The course is just amazing, tbh. It exceeded my expectations. Ben goes over every line of code he writes, and even let's you see mistakes to help cement what you learn.
I had already done a Godot tutorial or two before starting the course, but I decided to go over the basics. Turns out I learned a lot even from the two first projects, which are very beginner friendly.

• Discovering Godot: Make Video Games in Python-like GDScript. Not only do they have the best URL on Udemy for a Godot course, they also have a ton of very favorable opinions (and 15,496 students with 4.6 stars) and probably more experience in the courses business than even GDQuest.
  Gamedev.tv creators have courses on many game development related subjects and hundred of thousands of students enrolled in them ("over 637,196 game developers worldwide!")
• Desarrollo de videojuegos con Godot Engine: Kings and Pigs. This one is a personal pick, just because I love what he's been doing with Godot tutorials lately. César León is a Youtuber and owner of indielibre.com. A small, Godot focused website.
  The course (obviously) is in Spanish, and it uses the Kings and Pigs asset pack made by pixelfrog. Spanish is my mother tongue and pixelfrog's work is awesome, so extra points for that.

If you are starting with Godot, do you have enough available resources to 'Git gud'?

Yeah.

Most of the courses out there are beginner focused or beginner friendly. If you wanna learn about Godot from scratch, you have way more resources than intermediate devs trying to become professionals (whatever that means).

And if you wanna make the jump from free Youtube content to paid high quality courses, you have a pretty damn good variety of options to choose from.

On a personal note, I'm really excited to see the next batch of courses, when Godot 4 gets here.

aaaaand that's it!

I need to start preparing the Q1 report now.

📰 Godot news round-up

• Official - Godot 3.2.4 will be renamed Godot 3.3. The decision was made because of a versioning change for Godot 3.x:

When we released Godot 3.2 in January 2020 and shifted our focus to Godot 4.0, we expected that the 3.2 stable branch would be the last milestone before 4.0. The 3.2 branch would receive maintenance updates (bugfixes, usability enhancements) but major features would have to wait for the next major milestone.
Yet there's a number of new features which could be safely backported, and we accepted to merge a significant number of those in the 3.2 branch. We've actually released a quite feature-packed Godot 3.2.2 update, blurring the line somewhat regarding what to expect of such 3.2.x releases. And now after 6 months of development, the upcoming Godot 3.2.4 is looking to be a huge feature release - still preserving backwards compatibility with 3.2.3, but the amount of new functionality is huge and not well-served by a "patch" version bump.

There's also a Release candidate 6 for the upcoming Godot 3.3 already.

• Official - Soft bodies are implemented for Godot 4.0

• Support - Effekseer Adds Godot Engine Support

When working on your game, Effekseer is implemented as a module and adds new EffeckseerEmitter nodes for both 2D and 3D projects. These nodes allow you to load and play particle effect sequences authored in Effekseer in your game. Simply create a new node and drag and drop in the Effekseer generated file.

• Reddit - Cheat sheet for scaling modes. Made by thefizzynator on Reddit.

Documentation

• Gaming Industry - Google will reduce Play Store cut to 15 percent for a developer’s first $1M in annual revenue

Google is reducing its long-standing 30 percent cut, which it takes from each Play Store digital purchase for all Android developers around the world, on the first $1 million they make on the digital storefront each year, starting on July 1st.

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