Full Screen Mario dev completely floored by fan response
The one part of Full Screen Mario’s development that completely took me by surprise was how difficult it was to release the thing properly. There’s a huge difference between finishing a project and getting other people to play it. I’d put the game up on GitHub and fullscreenmario.com months before it blew up, and even posted it on Reddit without much response. You’d be surprised how competitive some gaming subreddits can be (though not nearly as bad as 4chan’s /v!). It was only after an r/javascript post that the game started to attract more attention, and once BoingBoing posted an article, a bunch of news sites got wind of the game and all of a sudden the server had to deal with 30k hits a day. I ended up tapping Cloudflare for CDN/caching to handle the unexpected traffic, and thank heavens it was “only” a day’s worth of visitors ruined. The week after discovery saw an extra 100k unique visitors a day, surpassing 500k unique visitors and 2 million pageviews on a few days, for a total peak of 2 million unique visitors and 6 million pageviews the following week. It's dropped down to about 100k visitors a day as of this blog post, but I'm still floored by the terrific response the game's received. - creator, Josh Goldberg
Check out the full feature on how this project was made here
Check out the full feature on how this project was made here
