2018 Review
2018 was a good year for Salt the Earth, and we'd like to take a moment and look back at all the progress that's been made. This article will cover viewership statistics as well as all of the changes that have been made to the game since the start of 2018.
Viewership Review
Firstly, we'd like to review some of the statistics regarding Salt the Earth's viewership. Lets begin with the salt-the-earth.com website. Our website in one year had:
- 2,017 Sessions
- 1,733 Users
- 9,031 Page Views
- 4.5 Pages per Session
We're very proud of the exposure our website has gotten in the last year, and hope to make next year's number's look even better! Now, on to IndieDB:
- 2 Started IndieDB on: 7/12/2018
- 12 Articles (not including this one)
- 4,786 Views
- 19 Watchers
- Highest Rank: 7
Our other social media accounts aren't doing quite as well (in regards to numbers), but we feel confident sharing these statistics anyway:
- Twitter Account finished the year with 54 followers
- Youtube Account finished the year with 11 subscribers
- We have currently over 21 developer streams on our Youtube channel
- Our TIGSource forums thread has had over 872 views
Development Progress
As of the writing of this article, I've been working on Salt the Earth for roughly 933 days (by my best estimate). Since then, I've had 1,492 Github commits to the project. Looking back through the last year's commits, there are so many improvements to notice.
We've added multiple new units, including but not limited to:
- Undead Titan
- Cyclops
- Orkhan
- Warmonger
- Artillery Golem
- Stone Golem
As well as countless new abilities, many of which aren't listed below, but some of which you'll recognize from our previous IndieDB articles:
- Gravity Bomb
- Mass Teleport
- Bonestorm
- Necrogenesis
- Firestorm
- Eslye's Glory
- Hellbeam
- Abyssal Eruption
- Maelstrom
In addition, in 2018 we added the following:
- The entire Demon race and all of its units.
- A major (almost 4 month) ability script and visual overhaul.
- Multiple new maps (including the forest altar, the ancient battleground, and the magma chamber)
- A system to synchronise animation attack speed with the unit's attack speed.
- Multiple improvements to how units path, collide, cluster, and avoid obstacles.
- A major overhaul on which shader's are used in the game.
- Improvements to the UI both inside and outside of the game.
- A cinematic mode to disable UI elements completely.
Lastly, we've been proud of our progress in promoting the game on social media platforms such as IndieDB, Youtube, and Twitter, as well as our Developer Streams and keeping our own website up-to-date all the time.
It's good to reflect on the progress we've made, but 2019 is here, and its time to share our plans for the new year. In (rough) chronological order, our goals for next year are:
- Finish the ability overhaul sprint (Mid-January)
- Push the game to steam (End of February)
- Scale out multiplayer architecture (Mid-March)
- Start closed-beta testing (End of March)
- Continue to iterate and improve on the game, adding new abilities and maps.
- Open the game to open-beta testing (Mid-June)
- Prepare for game launch
- Open the game for release (Q4 2019)
To anyone who's left a comment, liked, subscribed, followed, or shared any of our posts, we'd like to say, than you so much. You make this solo developer very happy to do his work. Please stay tuned for more updates, we hope to make 2019 the best year yet for Salt the Earth.
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