So my blog has reached 130 posts in just under 3 years. That’s nowhere near as many as some prolific sites but I believe that it’s certainly a good number to be proud of. Most of the posts are quite long and lots have good information for people who are interested in getting into writing Indie/Casual games.

I often receive positive comments and emails from people who tell me that my site has really motivated them. It’s really great to have feedback like that, so thanks very much! Getting feedback like that actually motivates me to keep on posting – so it’s a positive circle of feedback 🙂

I have often considered if I should have two blogs: One for game developers and interested parties, and another one just focused on marketing the games on my site. This is because potential customers could find some of the stuff I post on this blog weird or pointless (for them) – and maybe it’s slightly unprofessional to have it attached to my main game site. I’ve seen some sites with blogs just talking about their game news and offering discounts etc. and developer blogs hidden away elsewhere. This is probably a good idea. However, now that I’m working for Big Fish Games and have removed all affiliate games from my site, it’s less important for me to have a game marketing type blog. So for now I’ll keep on posting everything into a giant melting pot as I treat this site more like my portfolio to be honest.

One more thing, does anyone know if wordpress has a plugin that would allow me analyse my articles in terms of total word count and average words per post etc? (Yes I know I could probably google for this, but you can’t beat a personal recommendation). Thanks in advance.

I sometimes check Alexa to see my site’s Traffic Rank. It normally hangs around 300,000 but sometimes peaks up into the 100,000s somewhere.

For ages now something has perplexed me… Alexa reports that 32% of my users come from Norway! At my Traffic Rank is highest in Norway (really high). See the screenshot below. This is really weird and I have no explanation for it. Perhaps it’s because Alexa isn’t that accurate as it relies on a browser toolbar plugin to record stats, and perhaps for some reason a disproportionate amount of people have the plugin in Norway?

A thread on Indiegamer asked what programming languages people have used. I knew I’d used quite a lot but was surprised when I saw the final list:

Spectrum Basic
BBC Basic
Amstrad Basic
C64 Basic
RISC Acorn Basic
Amiga Basic
Atari ST Basic
Quick Basic

Spectrum Machine Code
BBC Machine Code
C64 Assembly
Amiga Assembly
x86 Assembly (32-bit)

AMOS
STOS
LOGO (on BBC Micro)
OVAL (for Psion Scanners)
Amiga Batch Files (if that counts)
MS-DOS batch Files (if that counts)

Blitz Basic 2
Blitz Plus
Blitz Max

C
C++
C#
Objective C

Visual Basic
Director
Delphi
SQL (if that counts)

HTML (if that counts)
CGI
PHP
Javascript

Spot the gaps … mainly Flash I would say and Java and Perl + some weird old ones (Cobol/Fortran) and a few fancy 90s ones like Ruby and Python, and also other game making languages (Torque, Dark Basic, Game Maker etc), oh and no scripting languages. Hmm sounds like I’m pretty out of touch! 😉

Of course like most people I’ve only touched on some of these and others I’ve spent years on.

I really loved Blitz Basic 2 when I first used it as I’d been using Amiga assembly for ages which gave good results but was damn fiddly, plus Amiga Basic sucked and AMOS wasn’t great. Now I’m using BlitzMax to write games because it’s so quick and easy to use, and it’s as powerful and fast as C++. I highly recommend it for writing games.