Topics: Overall interest in cocos2d is waning. Unity and libgdx fighting for 1st place. Sprite Kit skyrocketing from day one.
This sums it up. Now for the details. Since my last game engine popularity measurement I tried to improve and streamline the process.
Game Engine Popularity on Stackoverflow.com
For stackoverflow.com data I’m searching for tagged questions created in a specific month. The search query looks like this:
[cocos2d-x] is:question created:2013-11
I repeated this for every tag for every month as far back as there were questions with the given tag. Continue reading »
Google Sponsored Link: Cocos2D Explained
The iPhone Game Kit:
Currently 50% off at $49.
It says: What You Get:
- an iPhone Game Dev Book
- complete game source code
- cocos2d
- lots of game art
- publishing guide
- free upgrades for life
Site is hosted on two different domains: iphonerpgkit.com and iphonegamekit.com
My thoughts
I tried the game and it seems to be a ISO Map RPG style hack and slash game. It’s probably ok for a starting project if you plan to do a RPG hack & slash. Most of its content seems to be prebuilt tilemaps. From a technical perspective the combat system and D-Pad controls could be interesting.
My impression: impressive marketing effort. Effective sales pitch. Typical single-product sales pitch website (no relevant free content) which makes me cautious though. Including free cocos2d and free game art in “what you get” bullet-point list is technically correct but misleading. Info about the guy behind this is unimpressive (made a game in 1995?). But there’s a forum and questions get answered.
UPDATE:
I bought it, skimmed over the code. Clearly structured, consistent coding style. The PDFs are aimed at beginners and they are well written, overall 144 pages. Over 4,000 lines of code and plenty of assets used by the game. It’s not a bluff package and a serious amount of work has been put into this.
UPDATE 2:
The key point to take away is this: he is marketing it directly for beginning cocos2d developers: “You get to Learn Cocos2D”. But the iPhone GameKit is from my point of view most interesting to those who want to create a hack & slash RPG for iOS devices in general and learn how to use CCTMXTileMap specifically.
Over 9,000 visits in the past month with 40% new visits. 40% of that traffic is driven by google, close to 30% is direct traffic (which I believe includes Twitter) while cocos2d-iphone.org sends less than 10% of the total traffic. My own and recently neglected blog (last post May 23rd) gaminghorror.net still sending about 5%.
I am having a hard time making anything out of it actually, I have been running only one other notable website before and the focus and traffic stats were wildly different. If anyone would like to share and compare numbers I’d be happy to do so. Especially I’m interested if the ratio google vs direct traffic vs cocos2d-iphone.org is comparable to your numbers, or possibly totally different. I also don’t know what numbers can be considered good, ok or bad numbers, especially in context of cocos2d related websites.
The short little peak on July 10th was when I sent out the Newsletter announcing the closed sales period of the Starterkit, the plateau on July 19th was coming from the public announcement of the Starterkit. It’s notable that both resulted in the same number of visits but the Newsletter spike was very short-lived since most people are reading their emails within 24 hours. A funny self-made statistic: I’m able to convert approximately 0,0034% of website visitors to Starterkit customers. How is that for a conversion rate?
I did notice two things, which both surprised myself. One is how cocos2d-iphone.org accounts for less than 10% of the total traffic. The only time I saw a real spike in traffic from cocos2d-iphone.org was with the blog post announcing the Learn cocos2d website. That’s when the website was all fresh and new, and everyone went there at once to check it out. Interestingly, that wasn’t a spike followed by a severe drop-off by several hundred %, instead it created just over twice as many visits as the website gets on average anyway. The other thing I’m stunned to see is how the total number of visits curve over the whole time is astoundingly flat, especially for a website which is less than 3 months old:
Double-Rainbow all the way! But what does it mean?
I have no idea, mostly because I have nothing to compare it to. Maybe you have some thoughts or website statistics you’d like to share?
Here are the full learn-cocos2d Google Analytics results from the last 30 days as PDF:
Analytics_www.learn-cocos2d.com_20100625-20100725_(DashboardReport)
I hope you’ll find that interesting. I know, it’s data alright … boooooring. 😀
