What a year, is an understatement. This year has had global events that has affected everyone in one way or another. So much has happened and to top it off I also became a father this year too. Although I'm not here to get personal or to tell you what you have already heard in the news a thousand times over. Were here to talk about our community, our success and achievements. Which has unfortunately not been as exciting this year as I had hoped. Due to everything going on it has meant I have had less time. As I don't usually get personal with these things I don't ever make this a point but it is important to keep in mind that not only do I now have a family to take care of, I have a full time job and everything I do here is in my spare time. I only wanted to stress that because the events of this year has impacted my time both with the global events and with personal events. I have worked hard in moving forward none the less although this years updates to the site personally doesn't feel as exciting as previous years.
Especially after the rebuild of the site last year, I promised we would see lots of new features and we haven't. Though with that now being said, we had a few tweaks etc at the beginning of the year and the developer coins and promotion system introduced too. Although my big development, the game API, didn't quite get finished. I had hoped over the Christmas break to get some work done on this but have decided to try and relax instead. So that is something we can look forward to next year but on top of that I have also started another project.
Something that had been on my mind for years but a huge amount of work to take on. The development of a HTML5 game engine. Traditionally a game engine would consist of wrapping a graphics engine with a physics engine and so on. Which was my original plan, as I just wanted to start something and get some excitement for the project going. Although as I was looking into it more the Phaser 3 Framework is just that with all the additional functionality needed rolled into it. I've been watching Phaser for awhile but I'm too used to the ease of use of a full engine such as Construct 2 or Unity when developing games. Making it simple to do things that would otherwise take a lot longer in code alone. Engines are the reason why game development has become so widely adopted, it takes too long to reinvent the wheel each and every time.
So this is something to look forward to in 2021 too as I plan to get this out as early as possible and get feedback. Although I still got lots to think about yet. It's going to be a long journey but it's one that will only help grow our little community and make us stronger.
So I feel with the API and the game engine, we are on the brink of some great things happening. As always I try to make small updates on twitter when ever anything happens and if you follow me there you will know that lots of work have gone into both of these projects already.
Anyway, now my favourite part of the overview is looking over the stats for the year!
Unique Visitors - 99,453
Visitor Sessions - 129,698
Page Views - 248,774
Hits - 4,941,419
Members - 1,393
Games - 506
Tutorials - 22
Dev logs - 118
I would like to say that once or twice a game had been embedded on a page that was getting a lot of traffic. Although all in all that is a drastic change from the overview last year. So really exciting stats and our best year by far. A true testimony to the hard work of all the developers on our platform.
So I want to wish you all a happy new year and keep an eye on things to come
Thanks!
-iDev
