The new testing round and town signs news

The new testing round
Hi everyone! Finally, the first new tester group of 100 players has been invited. Everything seems to be going quite well, except for the fact that I get some reports that some of the players are not able to launch the game, or to get into the gaming world. I don't have such problems myself, making them extremely hard to fix, so I'm kind of worried what's going on there. Fortunately, everything seems to work fine for most of the people, and I see some nice new names in the highscores, my own testing server is still up and running, so you can imagine I'm quite happy with the way things are going. Expect the next group of 100 new testers to be invited around this weekend. If everythings keeps going okay, the third (and for now, last) group will come the week after that.

Asking people for answers
Speaking about testers, you may remember that one of the most important questions I'm trying to answer at the moment is why a relatively large number of them try the game for 2-3 hours or so, and then seem to forget about it. I recently read a an article written by the founder of a succesful start-up who faced a similar problem, and found the answer to this problem by simpling emailing the question to the people concerned... so that's what I'm going to do as well. And because I think I'm going to do this often, I've decided to automate it right away: I spend a lot time this weekend writing a script that connects to my own database and to gmail.com, and can send an email to all recently invited persons asking them to say in a few words why they lost interest. It's a personalized email, and a small one-time thingy including apologies if people don't want to get emailed; I don't want to look like a big commercial advertising company, I just want my question answered.

Town signs
And of course, I've been 'playing around' a lot, working on all kinds of little projects that the new graphics engine Glux makes possible. One of the things that are really starting to take shape is town signs:

You may remember from [last week] that I'm trying to make towns a little more visible as identities in the game... and what can make a town identity more clear than a town sign. It's created like this:

It can be put inside your home town, and immediately shows the name of the town it's standing in. It took quite some code to make the sign scale (for really long or short names), but almost everything seems to be working all right now. Except maybe for the fact that displaying a town sign does seem to slow the game down a bit, but I'll look into that later!

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