I learned recently that my "Monkey Muck" demo on itch.io has a much larger reach that I ever expected.
As of Oct. 29 2022 (i.e. in just 6 years), Monkey Muck...
In today's internet landscape, these numbers are incredibly small, but "incredibly small" is still about 100x the attention I expected this demo to receive. It makes me wonder what compounding coincidences led to any traffic at all. I never shared this demo with anyone (aside from linking it on my personal site which I also don't share with anyone), so I have to imagine it's mostly coincidence. Maybe having "horror" in the tags list gave it some attention for people browsing itch.io for horror games.
I think my favorite of the above data points is that the demo is in 14 itch.io collections. As far as I can tell, there's no (easy) way to set up "smart" collections which fill themselves, so this tells me that at least a handful of people thought my demo was worthy of adding to their own personal curated lists. Cool!
This past May, without knowing about these numbers, I went through the exercise of revisiting this demo and adding a WebGL build. My motivation for doing this was purely nostalgia; I wanted to revisit something I'd made years ago and see if it was still tweakable. It was, and I was able to publish the WebGL version on my itch page so that folks could play it without having to download and run a Win32 binary. In 5 months, it's only gotten 4 browser plays, so I'm glad my motivation wasn't anything more. Maybe 6 years from now, I'll come back to Muck's analytics dashboard and see 200 browser plays! Wouldn't that be funny.
