First week of open beta

It's been already 1 week since I officially launched the open beta for Golemizer. So far the feedback is quite positive and the comments screen after logout has proven to be quite useful.

Having a way to easily allow players to send feedback is priceless. Not much have created an account on the forums but I received near 100 comments from the comments screen.

Some stats just because I like stats:

- Total characters created since July 8: 97
- Total characters: 268
- Players that have logged in today (July 16): 31
- Most players logged at the same time (checked every 30 minutes): 10
- Total golems crafted: 166

To my great pleasure, not much have gone wrong. The worse bug was that from time to time, the client was freezing for some people. It turns out it was because the javascript code was a bit too fast and slow at the same time. When opening windows, there was time when the code was trying to update containers that weren't available yet. I removed the animation of windows scrolling up and down and did some tweaking and the problem now seems gone (at least, I haven't received more reports of it since I did the changes).

I also improved the code of golems to follow a player and attack a target which should make the tutorial a bit smoother. Those clockwork gnomes were a bit too random to make a good impression.

One thing a new player will notice is that there's a lot of houses. A lot. It's a bit messy and reminds me of early days in SWG, before players' cities.

Talking about cities, this will probably be the first big addition to the game. I want to give players more creative power so letting them build their own cities is a nice way to get started. Players are pretty much limited to setting up houses and merchants right now but with the city system, I want to allow them to use stuff like roads, wells, fences, lakes and such.

More details about players' cities will come later as the design is not yet totally completed.

So to conclude this post, I'd like to thanks all players that helped by either sending comments after logging out or by posting on the forums. This feedback is really important to help improving Golemizer, to take this open beta to official release.