Happy birthday! Echoes of Somewhere has now been in “active” development for a year. Let’s look back on the year!
This first year of working on this project has been absolutely amazing! I have gotten to know amazing people! I have gotten to travel and visit places and venues I would not otherwise have seen. Working on the project itself has been great fun as well! Being able to advance a solo dev project at this speed has been a great experience. And continues to be.
Project stats
But now, let’s take a look at some stats! This is what the end of the year is all about! So let’s look at some stats shall we!
Blog stats
I published 61 blog posts this year. This is 1,15 posts / week. I tried to do one a week but seems that on some weeks I got too exited!
The blog has had over 200 000 visits. I am not sure if this is a lot or a little? To me it sounds like a decent group of reads for the first year!
Top 3 reader countries are as follows: 1st United States, 2nd United Kingdom and 3rd Germany! Congratulations!
The most popular blog post was the very first post! with 100 000 reads! This was followed not very closely by the post about modeling a utilitarian robot character and the third place goes to the AI powered fluid simulations piece. I do not expect any post ever to beat the virality of the first day!
On X, the most popular tweet got over 500 000 views. Again, a lot or a little, I haven’t a clue! But this is what we got!
On Hacker News the project got on the first place for a few hours and on Reddit the posts do decently. upvotes seem to average around 400, but I have no idea what that means either!
The project has been covered on a handful of magazines and blogs, such as PC gamer, multiple time on 80LV, Adventure Game Hotspot and Premortem Games. It even made the front page of the biggest gaming magazine of Finland (naturally not as the cover image!).
I have done a talk of the project 6 times in 3 countries. I have been on 3 podcasts and invited to many more, but I have not been able to do all of them due to being busy. I will try to be more available, but it is hard.
I have also had numerous meetings with numerous AI companies and have tried to help them to the best of my abilities. All while working full-time on a MMO sandbox game. It has been a busy year!
Itch.io demo stats
I released a demo of the game on itch.io last week. By the time of writing the demo has been downloaded about 220 times. The announcement tweet has over 50 000 views. As you can see, the conversion rate of X/Twitter is not great!
The Itch.io page has a thousand views and 4 reviews, all of which are 4 stars.
Steam version of the demo is being set up, but I have some major updates & accessibility options added to the game that I might want to finalise and release an updated demo, so I am not going to rush it.
Work stats
I used GitLab for version control on this project. This far the project has 324 commits (and counting) and 2 branches. The project size on disk is 6.3 GiB. The first commit is 21st January, when I transferred the project from GitHub over to GitLab. I think my free tier space ran out at GitHub.
So far, I have created 5 characters for the game and around 15 rooms fully explorable in Unity. I have written (and re-written) 17 shaders, 8 custom actions for Adventure Creator and 21 C# scripts (I can not be bothered to find out how many lines of code there is). Also 5 songs have been composed for the project.
In Midjourney, I have generated over 4000 images for this project.
I have spent around 300 hours working on the game this far. This averages to about 1 hour every day, but on most days I have not worked on this at all. One full weekend amounts to 2 weeks of 1 hour days.
Currently, the game has around half an hour of gameplay done. Most of the time in the production has gone to building and polishing the tech pipeline for the art, figuring out the locomotion and working on the UX. Most of this work is now done, so cranking out gameplay content is now a lot faster coming the second year.
The future of the blog?
As said, this first year has been amazing and the project continues! The blog has been fun to write. But I am going to be making changes. Instead of posting a new entry every week, I will transfer over to bi-weekly cadence. Posting every week has been great, but it does take away some time from the development. But then again, posting every week has kept me engaged with the project every week. If the pace of development begins to slow down because of posting only every other week, I will switch back to posting more often.
As I only post a major update on the blog every other week, I will be posting some small advancements to X and reddit. Small updates that do not justify a full on blog. I will figure it out! The main goal is to take away some of the workload of blogging and redirect it towards game development!
Anyway, this was my year! I hope your’s was great as well! We will be back online in January! Next year will bring about many changes!
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