First week: second look

Its been about a week since I made first public release of ARTSG, and statcounter.com says I have 218 unique visitors. However, since that site tracks unique visitors using cookies I know that number is a bit inflated, and includes my IPs as well. Doing a unique count of the raw logs gives ~144, which means I had about 140 unique visitors or so.

My first screenshot (the most commonly clicked on) has 61 views, which means about 40% of users clicked on the screenshots - not bad!

And finally, the number of downloads was about ~10. I actually had 6-7 people download the game and make comments on either blizzforums.com or allegro.cc. Those really helped, and I've already put most of those enhancements/bug fixes into the game.

So now I am continuing on with my plan from the last post - I need to improve the screenshots a bit in order to get a few more people to download the binary. To that end, I have changed the background texture (thanks to a great program called 'Genetica', I suggest anyone who creates textures to check this program out), as well as updated some of the unit graphics using Blender. They are still not yet pro-level, but a bit better than before.

Another problem is that since most of my game advertisements are via normal message boards, the traffic generated by those will naturally decline as each post gets pushed farther down each list. Fortunately allegro.cc was nice enough to list me in their depot, and I've already gotten ~20 hits from there, though there is also a 'recently updated' section of their depot, so I expect my traffic to decrease from that source as well.

So where else? Maybe sites like download.com and tucows? Or maybe I should wait a bit longer?

In any case I'll try to make my next post a bit more about the details of development, because all this web-access and advertising talk probably bores some of you (:

Until next time...