The crazy rush of the release is finally behind me, and now I get to look back on the whole experience and wonder how I lived through it. I can see it now... telling my kids years from now, "ARR! Back in my day we used to release indie games and sleep maybe a combined of 10 hours in the first week! Uphill! Both ways!" Which... honestly wouldn't be far from the truth.
There are times when being a lone developer of a project like Windward is a great blessing that makes me giddy with the thought of how clever I am not having to deal with a corporate structure and anyone breathing down my neck. I know how everything works, so I know what to do in order to fix something or add a new feature in the shortest amount of time possible. Then there are times, like actually releasing the game, when I wish I could clone myself a few times over; the times like when I just put up a patch and hundreds of people suddenly ran into a problem that simply didn't exist when I tested everything. I am left running around panicking and frantically trying to track down the cause of the issue and fix it in the shortest amount of time possible without going insane from being awake for over 30 hours straight. On that note, have you ever tried to lose weight? I recommend releasing a game. I lost 8% of my body weight in the first week simply because I didn't have time to eat!
So yes -- fun times!
Well, let's get down to some numbers. The first week of release has seen a concurrent peak of nearly 3500 players, with roughly 15% of them playing online on public servers. One of those servers that had a peak of maybe 25 players throughout all of beta and was deemed "rock-solid" quickly stated having issues once the number of connected players passed the 200 mark, leading me to spending the first few days almost exclusively focused on fixing the server stability. Fortunately that went over well, and by the end of the weekend there were over 300 players connected to the server -- which happened to be running on my own computer. In my home. With a typical household cable modem connection.
Needless to say, I blew through my 500 GB monthly bandwidth cap in about 3 days.
Well, no matter! There were more important things to worry about, like discovering that most players who played online seemed to prefer to play it as an MMO on one densely populated server, rather than spreading out like I thought would happen. Now keep in mind, the game was designed to be a co-op game for LAN parties, ideally meant to be played in groups of 2 to 12 players. I never expected that I would have over 300 of them on the same server; dozens of them in the same regions. In fact, one of the first few days of release there was a Heroic Instance running with over 50 players in it, which was using twice as much bandwidth than the rest of the 200-or-so players combined. Needless to say, player limits were one of the first changes I had to quickly implement.
Another thing that quickly became obvious was that the server back-end was really lacking important administration features -- banning trouble-makers in particular. Yet another thing I had to scramble to implement in the first few days, keeping me away from the one feature that has been bothering me since the first day -- the chat window's lack of scrollable history. With everything else going on I didn't get to implement that one until the second week...
Fortunately as the influx of players started going down, I was able to relax a little and work on features that I felt were missing from release. Among them were the ability to design your own factions, create much larger world maps, and even the most recent one -- the addition of PvP battleground instances.
Hell, I was even able to get a proper night's sleep -- all 9 hours of it for the first time in weeks! Ahh... let's never do this again. Next time -- clones. I swear.
For a full list of patch notes, click here. The patch notes since release are the first 9 pages. Not bad for 3.5 weeks!
See you on the high seas!
-ArenMook