I just finished up my second quarter of game development and have fresh round of statistics to share with you all. Numbers never lie and the numbers say that while my productivity stayed consistent, less time was spent on programming and more was spent on game design. My marketing efforts stayed about the same and both the blog and Twitter readership grew at a slow and steady rate.

Productivity Status

The overall amount of time that I worked was almost [identical to the first quarter](), but how I spent that time was much different. The first quarter was all about learning game development and programming the groundwork for my game. In August’s productivity graph below you can see that design, learning and business took up 3 times the amount of time spent on software development.

GameDev Stats

If you look at my GitHub commit log, you’ll a lot less activity in this quarter compared to the last quarter. There is an upswing in development in September, and I expect development to stay around that level for the next couple of months.

As you saw in the productivity status section, time spent programming was limited because of game and art design. A solid two or three weeks were spent on figuring out exactly what type of game I was going to build and what style of art to use. I also contracted an animator and an illustrator, both of which took time to hire and direct. Here’s a breakdown of how the core artwork is progressing so far.

• World Map ¹⁄₁
• Battlegrounds ⁷⁄₂₀
• Character Concepts ⁸⁄₁₈
• Animations ³⁄₁₈

Even though programming stalled a bit, I’m still pretty happy with the progress of the game so far. If I can get most of the artwork and core game mechanics finished the next quarter, then I should be in good shape.

Twitter Stats

I wasn’t too excited about using Twitter at first but it’s really becoming the best way of marketing the game and this competition. Twitter is the #1 referrer to this blog and it’s a method of quickly reaching thousands of gamer fans and indie devs.

I’m excited by my Twitter growth and at this rate I hope to hit the 1,000 mark before the game releases. I had a hard time with Twitter at first because I didn’t feel I had much worthwhile to say, but I’m more comfortable now that I have artwork and actual gameplay to show. I think my engagement and follower numbers have increased because of the improved quality of my tweets.

Google Analytics Stats

Our readership has continued to trend upwards at a slow but steady pace, and I’m perfectly happy with that.

There are a few spikes because of Reddit, but for the most part new readers are gathered a few at a time. We’ve seen both the quantity and quality of comments increase in this last quarter, and although blogging takes a lot of time, it should be worth the investment.