DEVLOG #11: 1st Playtest Complete
🎊🎊 A WELL-EARNED SUCCESS! 🎊🎊
Around 40 people showed up for our 1st Playtest and about 25 concurrent players were able to join simultaneously. We had a fun time seeing people fight bugs, comment on broken things, and extract resources.
Mailgun Shot Us!
We were on the free tier of mailgun, which capped us to 100 daily messages, despite having a 3000 monthly limit. Early-on in the playtest, we battered our limits , got rate limited and it took us a moment to discover what the issues was! But everyone stuck with us and despite a few mail issues, and! nearly everyone was able to get into the server… eventually.
Server Analytics
FOR THE NERDS — With around 25 concurrent connections of users, there was no dramatic uptick in server resource usage for our game engine. We did, however, have one crash. We saw symptoms , but the server auto-healed quickly and I was only able to prove/recover from the logs what happened. Basically a run-away process kept crashing so the server restarted itself. It has since been fixed ;)
Quark Engine Server CPU (%)
CPU stayed pretty consistently b/w 35-55% regardless of world activity. We are currently hosting the engine on a Fly.io virtual machine with very low stats - I believe a 4-core processor. So, an upgrade is an easy opportunity.
Quark Engine Server Memory (%)
Memory stayed consistently between 1.5 and 2.25 GB. One of my greater concerns was that a memory leak caused by growing state would overwhelm the server and crash things. As we can see, that did not happen. The spikes and dorps you see is from the server starts/restarts not from the playing itself.
We are growing!
Thanks to your efforts. Discord growth now up to 50 users. No bots at all. Real flesh-and-blood humans digitally represented by avatars and invested in the development of Quark.
Website Traffic Analytics for March 2026
We also have seen that due to our push for the playtest, our website analytics are currently on fleek. 268 unique visitors is a good start!
Bugs, Bugs, & Beyond
The major takeaways from the playtest were straightforward:
People found the basic gameplay loops fun! Most people commented that they enjoyed mining, extraction, trading, and buying ships.
The game succeeds in aesthetically pulling peeps in. Most people commented on the graphics, sounds, and general worldfeel as being interesting, intriguing, and satisfying.
The game struggles in narratively pulling peeps in. Most people were not clear about basic facts about the galaxy or clear on how to start playing or succeed in the game.
More tutorial is desparately needed. By far, the most common critical feedback we got was that people felt “dropped off” in the world with no clear objectives. I knew this would be a problem, but I underestimated how alienating it would be to new players!
The server canhandle load && self-heal.
What’s Next?
2nd OFFICIAL PLAYTEST @ May 16th at 9:00 PM
Come join our next playtest and help us develop even further. We’ll be releasing all new gameplay features that far eclipse what we accomplished in the first playtest. RSVP on our discord so we can know who’ll be there!OPEN PLAY | SHOWCASES , weekly on Fridays at 1:00 PM CST
Starting this Friday, we’ll be doing weekly check-ins with the community, where we show what we’re building and allow people to test/share feedback/chime in. It’s an opportunity for community building and also just to hang out and see how things are shaping up. Join us tomorrow!New Infrastructure Coming!
Stay tuned for all new features beyond the bug fixes!