That said, the reason for my surprise was twofold. They think that both Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 are going to be out this year! Whoooooaaa there, Nelly. As much as I’d be in RPG heaven were this to happen, I just really can’t see it… though of course there’s that leaked release schedule document which was all over the interwebz last month suggesting 2011 might be the year after all. Perhaps a combination of waiting this long and being generally cynical about everything has made me over-patient.

Anyhow, as I switched my brain into “lurk” mode in work today, I got to thinking about what games I’d like to play – if elephants could fly – this year. Daydreaming is fun! Keep reading after the jump to find out what I came up with.

I already mentioned two of the big-name games I’m chomping my fingernails in expectation for, but there’s plenty more gaming goodness being prepared that I’m closely keeping my eyes on. I don’t expect to be shockingly controversial, but still – here’s my top 10 in awesometastic chart-stylee reverse order:

10. Elite 4
We’re entering the realms of complete fantasy already! Of course there’s no chance of seeing this game any time before 2013 at the absolute earliest, but I have faith in David Braben and Frontier. When this game is released, those X games will finally be shown who’s boss, oh yes indeed.

9. The Unfinished Swan
This game really took my interest when I first saw it mentioned as part of the IGF 2009′s Student Competition. An entirely black and white world where you can find a path only by firing balls of paint to identify your surroundings could lead to an intensely surreal and spooky experience. Looking forward to it.

8. Unreal Tournament 4
Teehee… it’s another pipe-dream, I know. The original UT was a masterpiece of deathmatch, better than any version of Quake, and UT200x was up there at the same lofty heights of success. UT3 was a big disappointment for me; Epic‘s next installment can’t come quickly enough to dull the pain, and for the love of toast, no hoverboards this time, okay?

7. Fez
Shame I don’t have an Xbox to play it on! Hopefully the PC release will grace our hard drives at some point this year. Gorgeous three-dimensionalised pixels form a kooky-feeling platform world. With the potential for secrets and fun a-plenty, here’s hoping that Polytron can finish things up to bring us those trixels these year!

6. Dungeon Siege 3
All of the previous Sieges were solid action-RPGs and proved themselves as enjoyable alternatives to the behemoths of the Diablo family. With Obsidian developing it and Square Enix‘s involvement as publisher, I have high hopes that this one could be the best yet. I mean, surely it must be better than Space Siege, right?

5. Mythos
Oooh, an MMO! Created by accident from Flagship Studios‘ networking test code for Hellgate: London, this was an online action-RPG whose life has been a rollercoaster ride. With a new closed beta imminent, hopefully Frogster can harness the great potential and prevent it from becoming “Koreanized” too heavily.

4. Subversion
Procedurally generated cities, Mission: Impossible-style gadgets, and daring heists with multiple solutions to each problem: Subversion has all this and more. Having been in development for over four years, Introversion are going for something on an epic scope beyond anything they’ve made so far. Could be seriously awesome.

3. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Some people say that Oblivion wasn’t as good as it predecessor, Morrowind. Regardless of whether this is true or not, Oblivion was a fantastic game which could easily be described as the Elite of the fantasy RPG world. Skyrim has its work cut out to continue the legendary Elder Scrolls legacy but Bethesda have proved with their work on the Fallout series that they’re up to the task. This will be BIG.

2. Portal 2
“These next tests require co-operation…” GlaDOS is making a vengeful return and it sounds like the intervening years since Aperture Science’s computer overmistress first made us doubt the existence of cake have made her even nastier than before! With promises of significantly more content than the original game and a tantalising prospect of co-op gameplay where hilarious disaster rewards even the slightest mistake, I suggest you get your weighted companion cube ready… and bring a willing vict- uhm, I mean friend while you’re at it!

1. Torchlight 2
Runic Games astonished a lot of people with the quality of their underdog smash hit last year and they’re soon going to answer the only major criticism of Torchlight‘s superbly distilled click-kill-loot gameplay. With internet play for up to 4 adventurers at once, a new overworld, weather and day / night cycles, and several other refinements, the sequel seems destined to achieve something close to perfection. If Runic can work their magic again and steal the jump on… well, you-know-what, then the balance of power upon the action-RPG battlefield could be seriously upset. Watch yourself, Blizzard. These flickering shadows of Torchlight might scare your pet demons away…

Goals

• Write more interesting stuff for the site. Hmm. Yeah, I didn’t score 42.8 / 50 in my Vagueness Studies degree for nothing. To be honest I’m not even going to try and analyse this properly since “interesting” is completely subjective. I’d do a post count comparison between 2008 and 2009, except that the blog hasn’t been running long enough for that… let’s just skip this one, shall we?
• Finish Dalyn’s Quill. Oooh! Yep, I can put a tick in this box. It went smoother than planned, which I suppose it would’ve had to in order for it to ever get finished…
• Enter a competition. Errr… nope, no cigar here. I haven’t been checking the SoCoder weekly workshops enough!
• Release a 3rd game. Though I have a couple of proof-of-concept prototypes and plenty of ideas, I’m nowhere near anything that could be called a new game. I’ve not touched the BlitzMax IDE in several months and, sadly, a collaboration with Mauft came to nothing too (’twas my fault). Another fail on this one. Who knows what might happen this year though?
• Learn how to use 2D physics. Nope. This was always a long-term goal and I put it on the list somewhat frivolously, but I still want to get around to it some day.
• Get 30,000 unique visitors to the site during the year. Ha! Well… considering the lack of everything else in this list, I’m still pleased to say Zolyx.co.uk received 12,932 unique visits last year according to Statcounter, an average of 35 a day. I’m not too disappointed – but I want to beat that this year!

Now, onward into the guts of the fact and figures behind Zolyx’s first full year of operation!

Facts and Figures

Let’s kick off with the graph of the entire year’s visitors, courtesy of Statcounter…

Statcounter has been great for me since the Firestorm Productions days, but alas their log size on free accounts is limited, meaning I can’t check back and tell you what those spikes were for Because of that very reason, a few months ago I set up a Google Analytics account to get a more permanent record of what’s happening. Since the 1st of October, this is what it had to say for itself:

So, I wonder where all these people came from… and why the surge of interest in early December?

• The small one was reaction to my Wii Cave Story rant via a link on IndieGames.com. Lesson: It seems I should be more controversial!
• The big one was after folks on Spanish site genbeta.com discovered Millenipede. They seemed to like it!

Confirming this, here’s a top 5 rundown of traffic sources and search keywords:

But that doesn’t tell the whole story! Look at this top 25 list:

Let’s pick through it a little…

• The good folks on arcadecontrols.com tickled me pink me with their comments that Millenipede works well in a proper arcade cabinet. Awesome stuff!
• Minecraft-related stuff (including what became the Museum) was briefly hosted here, and got linked on Notch’s Tumblr blog and the TIGForums.
• Crivens. And crikey. People on Facebook know I exist! Not good! Fortunately there’ve only been 17 of them so far…
• 14 people came in through ow.ly links I’ve been using since I started up with Twitter. Better than a kick in the teeth.
• Yay, I got Dugg! Or was that me Digging myself? Scandalous… the site only just survived the influx of 7 visitors!
• Amusingly, not shown on the graph, I also got an indirect mention on Rock Paper Shotgun when someone mentioned my Inner Space article in a comment.

All this is pretty much backed up by the top 10 list of popular pages:

Nothing particularly remarkable there. Except, perhaps, the small detail that Millenipede is roughly five times more popular than Poing… newer is better, I guess, or maybe just a little more well-publicised

Moving on to something completely different, I wonder what the list of visitors by country looks like… oh, wait! I can use this handy electronographic visualisation to find out!

Spain and the USA love me! But my home country, dear Blighty, ranks 4th and can only be bothered to give me a piffly 261 visits

• The award for the fastest readers in the world goes to Chile, taking a mere 13 seconds to fully digest the contents of whatever they visit!
• Germans, on the other hand, need a full 2 hours to comprehend what they’re looking at. Huh, and you guys claim to be efficient…

Rounding things off is this cheerful-looking graph of Feedburner RSS subscriptions:

I couldn’t configure it to keep purely to 2009, and again, it doesn’t have a full year of data. But look! There’s a distinct upward trend there. Encouraging! Hopefully I can make the place awesome enough for you folks to continue this. The sky’s the limit…

What about the stats that actually matter to an indie game developer, you might be asking? The stuff like game download counts and whatnot? Well, y’see, I don’t actually keep a direct track of that, though with the impending change of host I will be adding some decent server-side stats to my requirements so that I can start to do just that. No count will be perfect, as stuff can always appear on other sites, but you’ve got to make the effort, haven’t you?

This post has been a bit of a monster, possibly the largest ever in the history of the blog – another lil’ statistic to sneak in there. With any luck you found at least some of these stats interesting.

I want to sum up by thanking you, wherever you may be right now, for visiting – ‘cos none of this silliness would be possible without you! I hope you enjoyed your stay and that you’ll drop by again soon!

My particular grudge is nothing to do with this site, but it’s something I feel narked about enough to switch away from them.

In any case, updates should continue as per normal in the meantime – should there be any downtime I’ll try to warn you about it.

“This should be easy enough,” I thought. “It’s only a simple platform game. C’mon, how hard can it be?”

So… yeah. It seems like modern commercial games have made me soft. SMB is, without any flicker of hesitation, the hardest game I have played in years. It takes your soul and slowly squeezes the will to live out of it. When it’s done doing that, it proceeds to grind the remainder into tiny fragments. And whatever is left gets fed to a Goomba.

And yet, after scouring every level for secret coins, 1UPs and warp areas, I’m pretty close. At least I hope I’m close. I can get to 8-3 with about five lives (or sometimes more on a good run), but then the real soul-crunching insanity kicks in. Turtles were never meant to wield hammers! For the love of all that’s good… it’s not right!

If I finally figure out the pattern and manage to beat 8-4 – which so far I’ve only reached once with but a single life – and then discover there’s some insanity like a grand finale boss fight, well, let’s just say that innocent inanimate objects, other people and even cute fluffy kittens would not be safe from my nerdwrath.

This game will not beat me… it won’t… mustn’t give up… grumble, mutter, curse…

1. Watch stuff on YouTube. My personal favourites being anything in the Let’s Play… category. If you like retro games, and in particularly like watching other people suffer while playing retro games, my recommendation is DeceasedCrab‘s complete playthrough of La-Mulana. Yes, he does include Hell Temple. And yes, it’s quite frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious
2. Play random browser games. “You wake up in a room, but you have no idea how you got here. And wait – the only exit seems to be locked…” There’s more to online games than escape-the-room stuff! For example, the Java-powered Powder Game and Stick Ranger by DAN-BALL are famous around the net for good reason, and there’s also stuff like Desktop Tower Defense and Tumbledrop to suck up those idle minutes.
3. Find juicy loot in an MMORPG. My personal bad habit is World of Warcraft, but there are plenty of others (some – like Runes of Magic – are completely free). You could even mix an MMO with browser games and end up with Runescape. Hey, these days you can play it fullscreen with all manner of bells and whistles, so don’t turn your nose up just ‘cos it’s been around for ages!
4. See what other indies are doing. There are plenty of blogs and forums with interesting stuff that I check frequently, as well as the site of other indie developers. I won’t mention any specific ones because they’re pretty much all over to the left, just there, under “Fellow Developers” and “Links”
5. Create stuff. Okay, maybe this isn’t actually wasting time, but it can still use up lots of it There are more and more online tools around lately with which you can create and share content with others. A couple of my favourites that I stumbled across recently: FontStruct, a TTF font creator, and SumoPaint, a light-looking but fully-featured graphics app. There are also downloadable gems like MoonEdit, something Mauft told me about. It looks like a text editor, but it’s “multiplayer” – up to 14 people can edit a document simultaneously over the internet. Funky!

Gosh. I didn’t think this post would be so big. Never mind, eh…

Dalyn’s Quill is approaching usability but is still weeks away from being released. I feel sure that I said somewhere that this would be a quick project to tide me over ’til I come up with a plan for my third game – if this is quick, I’d hate to see what slow looks like! Self-criticism aside, stuff is getting done – just in a very bitty and inconsistent way.

Soon it will be time to decide on whether to extend the Poing! PC Community Levelset drive or not. I’ve got a few nice levels from one of Poing’s original beta testers (thanks, Maurice & family!), but nothing like enough to make several new sets like I was hoping. Whatever happens, though, all is not lost! I’ll dust off the editor and make a couple of new sets myself if it comes to it

Somewhat inspired by The Favored, I had a browse around Cymon’s Games pages and started playing around with Code::Blocks (including MinGW C) the other evening. C is a world apart from BlitzMax, but is capable of literally anything if you know how to work it. Sadly in the years since learning it at college I’ve been to sleep a few hundred times and my codesmithing talent on that front is utterly abysmal. I do have this occasional aching to make an ASCII roguelike-ish adventure saga that has, in my head at least, a solid and entertaining idea behind it – and since Blitz is horribly inefficient at doing that sort of thing, taking some first steps on the road to learning C (again) and PDCurses for text output seemed like a good idea.

Maybe some day I’ll try to write up this grand idea of mine so you folks can have a chuckle at it For now, I must be off. Until next post, then…

Breaking news! IT’S BACK!
RGCD #5 is now available!

And with it comes a spifftastic and star-studded selection of reviews, articles and extras covering a year’s worth of retro gaming. You thought it was dead, didn’t you? I’ll admit that I was thinking the same at one stage. Fortunately it is not so! James Monkman and his band of merry men have come up with the goods and, after some turbulent times, the mag should hopefully be back on a regular update schedule again.

Thrustburst is the featured game (though if I had my way it would’ve undoubtably been Qwak instead), with reviews of Rana Remake, Noitu Love 2, 3D Starstrike, Self Destruct and Rom Check Fail amongst the many PC titles you can read up about.

In the authentic “modern retro” corner there’s Sirius, Loops of Zen, Sub Hunter, Animal Party, Wizard of Wor (for the Speccy!), Plutos and the trip-off-the-tongue Crocodingus in Cube Island to name but a mere few.

This just scratches the surface! Honestly, there’s more stuff in it than I could cover in a week of posting – 45 articles and over 47,000 words, to be exact – so get your browser over to the RGCD homepage to download your copy today for a right proper blast from the past.

Oh, and if you look carefully, you’ll see some of this mysterious “writing work” that I was on about the other week, since yours truly is now a RGCD contributer. It was indeed a very cool thing to be given the chance to write for one of my favourite retro mags. Why James wanted to involve a nutter like me we’ll never know… I suspect it may be best not to wonder too much on that

Anyhow – happy reading, ’til next issue!

Happy New Year!

It’s a time when a lot of people will be thinking about what their New Year’s resolutions should be. But keep in mind: New Year’s resolutions can be bad for you! Whatever you decide you want to do this year, I wish you good luck and success all the way.

These aren’t resolutions, but here are just a couple of things off the top of my head that I’d like to get done this year in no particular order:

• Write more interesting stuff for the site
• Finish Dalyn’s Quill
• Enter a competition
• Release a 3rd game
• Learn how to use 2D physics
• Get 30,000 unique visitors to Zolyx during the year (yeah, right!)

Last year was disappointing in one way (with the cancellation of Mordor: Return to Dejenol) but good in another (the really positive feedback I got from Millenipede, especially from v1.2.0). Although Firestorm Productions did its job well, the move to Zolyx was worth it, and there are fewer artificial hits coming to the site every day. Yep, even now, the fallout of the collapsed Binary People publishing deal for Poing! PC is still being felt – but not for much longer I suspect.

Anyhow, have a jolly good 2009 and comfort yourself in knowing there are only 358 shopping days til next Christmas…