We're now 1 week into the launch of Idle Hacking, and it has been a much stronger launch than I had anticipated. This game has been a solo passion project with many false starts for years before finally reaching the state the game is in today.
At our peak, we've had over 450 unique users online between Steam and the website, and as of this moment there are 975 accounts that have been online recently enough to maintain their offline activity. We've had more than one update per day since launch, but it's now settling into a brief update once per day cadence as UI/UX is taking priority to continue to make the game look better, and more intuitive for the players.
It hasn't been all positives. We encountered our second downtime issue today, this time it was resolved within a few minutes, putting our launch week downtime at about an hour and 12 minutes total, mostly stemming from the March 22nd deadlock that occurred in the middle of the night. The cause of both downtime incidents has been corrected, and today's downtime confirmed that the new automated incident detection is working to keep downtime to a minimum.
In these incidents, the automated Steam login system would fail to recognize a response, and fallback to requesting a username/password, which is optional and not something most Steam users have for this game. In the future, I've updated the login form to handle Steam timeouts more gracefully, and instead of falling back to a username/password, it provide a simple Retry Login button which will utilize Steam's built in authentication.
Sorry for the inconvenience these two incidents have caused. This has been a solo development project and the growth in the first week of launch has been above and beyond what I ever expected to see from this small passion project.
Going forward, the plan is to maintain a once-daily update cadence to continue to improve things for Steam, web, and mobile users. Planned restarts for updates are currently a mostly painless process, where the game automatically reconnects within 20-30 seconds with the updates immediately visible regardless of which platform you're playing on.
Expect more updates related to ongoing fixes/updates, as well as a long term roadmap that will lay out the current plans for how the game will continue evolve over the coming months and hopefully years to come.