Growth Management – development log #216

What a way to start the year! Fabian, our new game systems designer, joined the team, and a favorable review on PC Gamer expanded the community by a good 300%.

Martin

Similar to Michi, I spent my first working days of 2020 playing catch-up. The PC Gamer article caught us by surprise and while we didn’t face any fundamental technical issues - the servers seemed to cope with the influx quite well - the spike in traffic rattled the tree quite a bit and out fell several bugs that went unnoticed so far.

Also just like Michi, I did some preparing for next week’s kick-off meeting with Fabian and Frank (we’re changing the rules: new hires’ names have to start with an F instead of an M from now on). One of the main topics of the three-day meeting will be game design and the recent rush of new players and its side-effects (full exchange planets, for example) will be informing our discussions quite substantially.

Last but not least, I started work on the long-overdue chore of migrating our backend server to the latest version of the actor framework we’re using. It comes with a bunch of new instrumentations that should help with analyzing server issues, among other things.

Julian (Mjeno)

Happy 2020, guys! Imagine my surprise earlier this week when I joined the game and saw close to 300 connected users. Someone soon identified the PC Gamer article to be the source of all the new community members. So again, welcome to the new players! Happy to have you guys here.

For me, this meant a lot of support work, as some people didn’t get their confirmation e-mails, had their payments rejected, wondered why their license status didn’t update etc. Apart from that, we are still getting applications for our Community Manager job ad, which I’m still catching up on. If you applied a few days ago, don’t worry - we will get back to you very soon!

Fabian (Counterpoint)

Hi! I’m incredibly excited to have joined Prosperous Universe as game systems designer this week. Given the complexity and uniqueness of the project as well all the documents and ideas I already went through the last couple days, it will be quite the challenge. That’s part of why I’m here though. It’s what makes things interesting in the first place, right?

For now I’m getting accustomed to the game, documentation and tools. Not least to prepare for the 3-day workshop we’ll be having next week. Really looking forward to meeting the team in person!

In case you’d like to learn more about who I am, find me on Twitter via @Ludokultur. My profile has all the links. Also don’t hesitate to contact me on our Discord if you have any questions (I’m the new guy with the dev role called “Counterpoint”)!

Michi (molp)

Happy new year everyone! I started this year with catching up what happened in the last week and a half. I tried to stay away as far as I could from any PC during the holidays and only checked occasionally what was going on the game via my mobile phone.

As you can image the PC Gamer article and the resulting influx of new players kept me busy for the rest of the week. These events tend to wash up errors and bugs way faster than during “normal” times and so I was bug hunting the whole time. We had one especially nasty bug that almost lead to a core meltdown and Martin and I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. We now have an idea what might cause it, but we do not have a definitive fix yet.

Besides all the bugs I spent some time preparing a meeting in simulogics HQ that will happen next week! For the first time Martin and me will meet the two new guys in person! More about that next week!

As always: we’d love to hear what you think: join us on Discord or the forums!

Happy trading!