All those little flags are players!
So it's been a crazy week. Only a week? Maybe it's been two crazy weeks. It's been crazy! Growtopia set a new record yesterday of 1,000 users online at the same time (it went beyond that, but 1000 sounds nice, and we didn't reach 1,100... that I know of!). So as you can imagine, it's kind of exploded. What's really scary/crazy/cool/whatever about it is that we are doing
terribly in the App Store rankings, and we're getting almost no press coverage. Now that doesn't sound cool, and it's not. But what's cool is that we have this immense, ever-increasing growth of players,
despite not having the press in our corner or anybody big talking about us at all. It's purely organic word-of-mouth growth. We have had brief mentions on some of the major iOS and Android sites, but in each case it was just one little quick "this game is coming soon" and nothing more, so we're definitely not riding a wave of PR here! Relatively speaking, we don't have very many players, but the ones we do have are online
for hours. We have made the most addictive game ever.
So the craziness isn't just sitting here and marveling at the numbers rising. It's more the craziness of constantly battling hacks and fraud (don't try either one, the system auto-bans people who try! And hoo boy, do we get emails about it!), constantly helping people, constantly monitoring issues as we resolve problems with the server and its ability to handle such a ridiculous number of players. And of course developing the major updates that we want to get out there anyway. There are a lot of core game features we still haven't even put in! Wish we had time to really focus on the new stuff, because that's the fun part.
I had so many plans of other games to work on, and other things I wanted to do with my life (I am trying to study music! That's the educational goal I came up with), but Growtopia grows and consumes every inch of my life. I literally wake up and turn on the logs and do my first checks. Anything else I do, I come back every few minutes to check the email, logs, etc. When I go for walks with my wife, or we eat together, Topia is the topic. It just always changes to that. There's just so much to be done with it, and so much to think about, it's really overwhelming. I wouldn't want to live like this forever, but it's very exciting for now. And I'm not the one who's really working hard - my partner Seth is doing all the serious work. I just make goofy little pictures.
I think I'm gonna have a real problem with 1 Game A Month, because I can see the rest of this year being consumed in a frenzy of Punch. Build. Grow. And you know, that might be okay.
