Minefold

Woah! After opening Minefold as an invite only beta two weeks ago everything has been a blur. The response to Minefold has been phenomenal and we couldn’t have been happier with how it’s gone. That being said Dave and I have been working around the clock to make the “Minefold experience” even better.

Stability

In the first week we had a two evenings of downtime as we adjusted to the reality of running a system with users other than ourselves. We were fully expecting to stumble upon some hiccups and we think we passed that test. Not only were we alerted and able to respond to outages quickly, we provided in depth outage information to players.

Since then, we’ve managed to maintain near consistant uptime since then thanks to a herculean effort by Dave. He’s been working hard automating our systems and now we have a “staging” version of Minefold that we can test features on before showing them to the public. He’s also managed to tackle a bunch of edge cases in our system. Our number 1 priority is keeping the system available, even when out and about!

Design

I’ve been working on sprucing up the design a little. Minefold is now sporting a fairly unified style. Nothing major, just another coat of paint.

Current players

We noticed people were logging into the game to check if any of their friends were playing. We’ve made this process easier by building “currently playing” lists into the world pages and the dashboard. It shouldn’t take more than a quick glance to see where your friends are playing.

Chat

The chat system has been a great way for people to follow along and catch up with their world, however chatting on the website and chatting in the game felt really disconnected. We’ve fixed that. Now when you chat in the game, your messages are reflected in real time on the website. Also, when you chat on the website your messages are pushed into the game so your friends can see them.

We believe that the web site should be a real-time reflection of what is currently happening in game. Over the coming weeks you’ll see a bunch of cool features that reflects this philosophy.

One more thing

We’ve been blown away with the number of people who have asked for invites to Minefold. However, if you are one of those people you’ll know we’ve been a little slow handing them out. We didn’t anticipate the response we would get and have prioritised building new features. Until now. Billions of Golden Emails just flew out our door to everybody on our waiting list. We are also letting players invite their friends. If you scroll to the bottom of a page and enter your friend’s email they’ll receive an invite instantly. We are also continuing to give away an hour of playing time for free while we are in beta so it’s never been easier to play with your friends.

Thank you for the fantastic fortnight and we can’t wait to see you in another.