Naming new rocks after people news - Olvand

The new update
Hi all, the new update is out! Like I promised, 100 new players were invited, and everything is going quite well. Going into the woods on a server and discovering houses people built everywhere, or seeing new people rise in the [highscore] was definitely worth all these weeks of development. The only thing which gives some problems is the fact that there seems to be a bug in the server software: when some people log in, the whole thing just crashes. Servers mostly restart themselves when crashed, but the server admins tell me they sometimes encounter 20+ windows open, meaning the server has restarted 20+ times :/. It doesn't mean you cannot play (most players can still play locally), but it's of course not a good thing. I hope to have discovered the cause next update.

Paint and new rocks
I've slowly started work on the next update, in which I will develop functionality related to towns even further. One of the things that will include is paint. How exactly paint will work and how to craft paint will be topic for another blogpost, but for now I'll say there will be three new types of rock: a blue one, a red one and a yellow one. These rocks will serve as base material for paint in the respective color.

At the moment, there only are four types of rock underground, which means the amount of rock types you can discover underground will almost double. I really hope this will encourage people to spend more time there, cause I personally think creating underground passages and discovering all kinds of new things along the way is quite fun.

Thank you, server admins
Speaking about the server admins, you may remember that I promised to name something after them in the game [when I was looking for volunteers]. That time has now come, because these new rocks need names! I chose my most important helpers:

• Johnlier, server admin of testserver2. He really helped me out when I had some trouble with server bugs, and had to do hotfixes AFTER I already invited a lot of new players, by being extremely fast and having a server up so people could play almost instantly. He stopped volunteering earlier this year, but I'm still very thankful for what he has done for the game. I've emailed him about the name, but he hasn't responded yet.
• Tomasolsson, server admin of testserver1. Tomas was there right from the beginning, was one of the first people to get a server running, and still updates his server until this very moment. I estimate 40-50% of all Olvand playing sessions have been done on his machine, so naming a rock after him is the least I could do. Tomas already agreed to name his rock Olsstone.
• [Gamesketch.net], a super-friendly community of game enthousiasts. They run servers for various games (Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Counterstrike), and decided to make Olvand one of those. If you want to play games with nice people (and who doesn't), I really suggest you give them a visit. And what's best of this all, is that they actually gave me full access to their server, so I can update and restart the server myself, or investigate what causes bugs in the server software. Talk about being super handy ;). We haven't agreed upon a name yet.

So, like a real Lannister, I'm going to pay my debts and reward the people that have meant something to the game. Again, thanks guys :).

If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].