I would’ve given more notice, but because of the silly terms of service of my ex-host, I wanted to move away as quickly as possible to avoid them removing the site rather than me doing it in my own time. Apparently, hosting any file bigger than 1MB was against their terms… *gasp!* So although the likelihood of them cancelling my account was small (since I’d been running with them smoothly enough for a couple of months), they were still within their rights to do so. I really didn’t want to take any chances.

Obviously I can’t predict the future and it’s still early days with this new host but, well, let’s keep our fingers crossed, eh?

UPDATE: Turns out the Millenipede Leaderboard had been broken since the first host move. Wow. I suck! Seems like it has some scores on it nowadays that are slightly unrealistic! I must get around to revamping it some day…

Okay, so the TARs will still be a regular feature, but there’s no possible way in any existing universe that I’ll finish all of the reviews before the voting period closes as I was first aiming for. Does this matter? I suppose it does and it doesn’t. In the incredibly remote likelihood that you were reading these reviews to decide what games to vote for, then yeah, it’s a bummer. But otherwise there’s no hard feelings, right?

The weekend should see at least a dozen more entries get cross-examined in the virtual witness box, then back to the three or four at a time at various points during the week until they’re all done later in February.

Yeah… I think it’s possibly a tiny bit uninspiring around here at the moment. It feels a bit like hospital decor, trying to be cheery in a way that isn’t forced, scary or mind-melting boring. And completely uncontroversial.

I’m wringing every single drop of creative juice from all of my 2.5 brain cells to attempt to remedy this situation! It’ll take some time. Meanwhile, some posts that have interesting content are just around the corner too, I promise.

While you wait, play  Realm of the Mad God from Wild Shadow Studios (and post feedback on the TIGForums), ‘cos it’s fantastic. You may even see me there later when I’ve had enough of tinkering here for the evening…

Took longer than expected, but that was down to my overall cackhandedness at this sort of thing. Oh well!

The host switch should happen at some point fairly soon, and this’ll be the last post on the old webspace. I’m fairly confident there won’t be any major disruption – I’d like to keep the Millenipede highscore functionality working throughout, but if you’re deadly serious about getting the world’s best highscore, I suggest you wait a couple of days for the changes to fully take effect…

Anyhow, I’ll keep this post updated as things trundle along.

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!

Despite this, I believe I still have some way to go in order to get myself on webpagesthatsuck.com’s Ugliest / Worst Websites of 2009 list. At least I hope I do…

Anyhow, super special awesome original theme, GO! Come the change in host, I’ll be changing the theme too. Twitter has told me this must be so. Fun times ahead, eh?

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.

I hope your holiday season went well. It’s been a pretty good year for indie games and I’m expecting another great list of titles in 2010. Stay tuned and I’ll try to give my usual sporadic coverage of yesterday’s boring news… today! There’s a ton to look forward to – Fez and a deluxe version of Spelunky for XBLA, Night Sky and the much-hyped-and-might-arrive-soon Cave Story for Wii, and who knows what else there might be for PC gamers!

In any case, we can kick the year off the way we want it to continue with Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV very soon – he’s announced that it’ll be released in just over a week on the 10th of January. It will be available from thelettervsixtim.es and will cost a mere $15 / £9.30ish. Or you can still preorder the game for just $10 (by donating with the Paypal link on the Distractionware blog) until January the 3rd. Great stuff!