This is from a series of posts I wrote about Fantastic Contraption when I originally released it. They were originally published on our travelogue but I have back dated them and moved them over here where they fit in more.
Just a quick post to keep everyone who’s interested in the game updated on what’s goin on.
Crazyness is going on.
StumbledUpon.com stumbled upon the game on friday to the tune of 3000 hits. Which got me some more blog links. Then, sometime while I was out of the house sturday, StumbleUpon came back with a vengence and funneled 20,000 people into the game. Which was a shock. The last three days have all seen an order of magnitude increase in traffic. That’s three orders of magnitude in three days and five orders of magnitude in the six days since we went up.
It’s been up for only 6 days! So here’s something interesting. The path to 20,000 hits:
Day 1&2:
First Andy put a post up on his blog, v-log, magazine.
Our first piece of non-friend press was a mostly plagerized post on a small Puzzle Blog
At this point I was getting 10s of visitors a day.
Day 3&4
Then a flash games site, Coin Castle, put up a link with a screen-shot.
This jumped the traffic up to 300 hits a day.
Day 5
Flash Game Blogs, another flash games site, posted a short review. It was positive but lamented the 10$ price for getting the full game. Which jumped the traffic up again. This also led to a brief StumbleUpon burst of 3000 hits.
Day 6
I left the house and all was well, we were on pace to break the 3000 barrier. Mostly with the flash games site traffic (a few more sites have linked us).
When I got home around 10pm I found that StumbleUpon had come back and packed the server to the brim. Which was great. But it also kind of destroyed the server. People were still playing but server requests, like saving and loading levels, were slow and spotty.
Something like 400% of the bandwidth is Jame’s great music. So I had to take out the 7meg main-loop and replace it with the short 600k menu-loop. Which was an order of magnitued decrease in bandwidth usage. And allayed the responsivness problems.
Amazon runs a sort of data-warehouse. Their calculator recons the music was going to cost 500$ a month to host. They aren’t the cheapest around but if anyone knows a cheap place to store a few terrabyres of upstream traffic a month let me know (note that those ‘unlimited bandwidth’ plans are bs).
So I have no idea what’s next. I mean we’re on day seven of the ‘soft launch’ and have 6 thousand hits by 10am. Mostly from StumbleUpon. I don’t know if the StumbleUpon traffic is going to peter out or ramp up again. God help us if we get dugg or something.
I will say that we are far from making a fortune off of this traffic. We couldn’t pay any significant hosting bills with the money comming in (although there have been a few purchases).
So, my ass is strapped to this roller-coaster. I guess we’ll see what happens.
