It is now two weeks after making the Nebulinc demo public and uploading the website. I admit to a minor obsession when it comes to looking at the website activity statistics. Besides frequently checking these statistics, I did find plenty of time to make progress with the actual game development. Read on for more details.
Website activity statistics
A total of 183 visitors stopped by the website. Now generally speaking, this is not that much. However, if you factor in that 14 days ago the names Nebulinc and Frostypants were just known by a select few and out of nowhere 183 visitors came, that to me is a good start!
When I started the Nebulinc project, I made the decision to go multiplatform. Not only to reach more gamers, but also to get a feel for how my game appeals to a particular platform. My expectation was primarily Windows, then Android and a little bit of Linux. As you can see in the pie-chart my expectation was incorrect.
This is one of those times that I am happy to be wrong. Android got the most interest and giving the amount of Android devices out there, this means great potential for the release of the full Nebulinc game. Personally, I am a big fan of Linux so it excites me to see that there is almost as much interest for the Nebulinc demo on Linux as there is for Windows.
Valve plans on pushing the Linux platform with their upcoming Steambox and the recently released Linux Steam client. For me this means that I am definitely going to put great emphasis on making sure the game runs smooth on a wide variety of Linux distributions. Sofar, I just tested on Ubuntu and derivates (Lubuntu and Mint).
Development progress
During the past week I made good progress with the game itself. Most of it was under-the-hood type of work so there is not much interesting to show with screenshots and videos this time.
I upgraded the libGDX game engine to the latest stable release (0.9.8) for two reasons: (1) This version supports a controller extension that includes the Ouya controller. Later on I will switch over from JInput, which is the library I currently use for accessing controllers, to this libGDX's controller extension. This allows me to add Ouya support down the road! (2) This version has a more functional Gdx.Net library, which I will need down the road when I implement online leaderboards.
Besides the game engine update, I prototyped the 2 new enemies for mission 3, came up with an idea for the endboss in mission 2 and implemented the unlockable upgrades for mission 2. Steady progress. Can't wait to continue!
