A month after release

Its been over a month now since release, and I've learned the following things:

- By posting advertisements on several game and Starcraft-oriented message boards, I was able to get a nice amount of unique page hits to the game's web page (+550)
- There was a good amount of interest in the game's screenshots. Since I changed the images several times in the last few weeks, so its hard to get an accurate count, but the total number of image clicks is around ~450
- The download count was very low, around ~40-50 total downloads.
- A few weeks ago I added the ability to track how often people were playing the game (which can be disabled with a command line flag). From this I learned the following:
- Most people quit after a short period of time, after 3-20 minutes and just a handful of games (~1-3)
- One really nice person in Texas played for a whole 3 hours (!!). Thanks whoever you are!
- There was a good amount of game starts without game ends, which means the game may have crashed (or been closed forceably). In the future I need to be more careful to test on several machines to catch potential crashes.

The most important thing I learned here is I can attract a good amount of people with enough advertising, so I just have to make the game more interesting and more pretty so more people want to download, and play longer (:

To that end, I've decided to do some 3D programming. I'll discuss that in my next post.