I seem to have been bitten by the devlog bug. I'm not sure how many people read the entries I write, but I logged in to poke around my analytics and saw that Harlowe's Eve, a tiny Twine project with barely any character graphics or animation, hit 10.8k browser plays, which kinda got me interested in trying to figure out how it managed to beat my one year old project, Douya and the Golden Scroll, out of the water in plays.

Now, before I begin, let me just say that whatever I'm about to post here requires the reader to take more than a grain of salt with. If you're here as a developer to gain any possible knowledge as to how to make games that people will actually click on and play, know that even I'm mystified by it myself. These are mostly wild guesses on my part.

Anyway, on to the analytics! The fun part about analytics is guessing how stuff works through a pattern. Some successes are calculated, which makes these handy if you're out trying to make stuff people want to play. So I clicked on the highest referring URL for the game and discovered that:

Most of the other games featured in the highest referring URL were mostly set in modern-day and fantasy eras.

That's right - my game may have stood out simply by virtue that it wasn't set in a modern-day setting or a fantasy isekai one. There's some likelihood that it'd garnered more curious players because it looked out of place. I say, "curious" because the game itself was a text-based mini one that doesn't have a lot of graphics or programming. I was pretty upfront with my screenshots too - nothing but empty rooms, long boring text against a black screen, etc.

I take it from the success of TV series like Bridgerton, Black Butler and Moriarty the Patriot that a good number of folk are interested in 18th-century English settings in general, but a lot of storytellers and developers don't really make them. One reason could be that they're notoriously difficult to write and get right - you'd have to do a lot of research about peerages, culture and politics to do so. Even I find these settings difficult to make stuff for, really, so I can't really blame any developer from shying away from them.

So if you're planning to develop an 18th-century/Victorian yaoi game, let me know what the stats are like! It could be very interesting!

Anyway, moving on, we have our next wild guess. I'm gonna guess that folk are clicking on my game and playing because...

Damon, the main character, actually looks a lot like Draco Malfoy.

Now, I hadn't realized that when I drew and colored Damon. In fact, his name wasn't even Damon in the novel I was planning to write; it was Hunty. I wasn't much of a Harry Potter fan growing up either - while I was coloring him, I was sort of thinking of Alois Trancy.

But you know, Draco is popular. So is the franchise he's from. I may not follow it closely, but even I know who he is. He's the blond dude everyone wants to bang........ or rather, pretend to be and get banged dressing up as. That's right, sister, I'm in your head. I know what you do on Fridays.

Draco also wears green. Well, mostly black as we can see in the picture, but I see some serious green action going on in his tie there. You get the drift.

Speaking of seriousness...

Harlowe's Eve is actually one of my more serious games.

In short, it's a game that doesn't have poorly-rendered monsters banging anime Chinese men who look like girls like my other ones are. If anyone knows me they'd know I'm big on dumb jokes. The only other game I've made that isn't one big dumb joke is Liebestraum, which I personally consider to be very off-brand for me.

At any rate, what this means may be that folk who play games on this site might be looking for serious games instead of funny, dumb ones. The background in Harlowe's Eve is black and the mood is swanky. When put side-by-side with my other games, it kinda stands out. Damon's snarky grin doesn't look anything like any of the friendly protagonists I've created and favor.

Still, it doesn't really answer some of the questions I have in regards of the browser plays. So I took out my cards and asked a question.

And you know, the cards are as blunt as usual.

If you're not a tarot reader yourself, let me explain. I was really, really hoping to pull the Nine of Pentacles and clap myself on the back for being ~talented~, but the universe decided that it wasn't going to lie to my face. What these two cards mean is...  wait for it...

People have gotten stuck at the warning page and were refreshing it over and over again in hopes of getting past it.

That's right, people. It's not because my game was impressive or anything, or even because Damon looks like Draco. It's because a lot of folk probably got caught at the warning page by, you know, NOT reading the warning properly. They probably kept clicking at the same link over and over again, and when that didn't work, they hit F5 and ran it again, which brought the play count up, while the visits, likely logged by IP, remained static.

It does answer the question of why I have half the visitor count for Harlowe's Eve compared to Douya and the Golden Scroll, but have twice the amount of browser plays than it does. Seriously a big ouch, but I'll take it as the most logical explanation for this mystery.

So now you know what to do. Make a warning page that nobody will carefully read, hide a link there, and gain those sweet, sweet sexy play counts which will propel your game to the front of the Popular page.

Over and out! Cheers~