It’s been an exciting past couple of days. Since I was finished with chapter two of my adventure game, Tipping Point, I decided to submit it to a handful of game directories. On Wednesday evening, I submitted the game to about six web sites and then went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that Tipping Point had already been placed on the font page of a couple game web sites. People had been playing the game all night and were already discussing it online looking for help on how to solve the puzzles and etc. I also had about 30 people sign up for the mailing list.
I’ve received emails from all around the world including Poland, Hungary, Brussels, Italy, England and more. Their comments were so positive despite the slow load times (see below). I realize now that I need to be more conscious of non-US/non-English-speaking players. For instance, one part of the game asks you to press the “pound key” on the telephone and several players didn’t know what that was.
Several other game sites added the game to their home pages throughout the morning and before I knew it, I was getting more traffic than my server could handle.
Here are the stats for the previous two days:
– Number of times the game was loaded: 47, 760
– Number of times chapter one loaded: 20,065
– Number of times chapter two loaded: 4,304
– Number of times game was completed: 2,276
– Number of people joining the mailing list: 260
As a result of all the traffic, my server was busting at the seams. The game was taking as long as 45 minutes to an hour to load for some people. Yikes! I spent most of yesterday trying the fix the problem. I managed to cut the size of the game files in half without severely affecting the quality of the game. I basically had to compress the images, videos and sound a little more. I’ll be upgrading my server next week (RAM, Ethernet card) to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
This whole experience has definitely motivated me to get started on chapter 3 as soon as possible. Stay tuned…
Dan Russell-Pinson 