LAUNCH!

Aurora has been successfully launched.

I'm 12 hours into my "first day free" promotional thingie, and so far 64 crazy people have paid me for a free game, which means I've already broken even on my minimal development costs! Tomorrow at noon the game starts costing $5 for everyone.

The reddit thread was helpful in finding bugs, too. The most common one was a crash when the player didn't have Windows Media Player installed. It seems that XNA uses wmplayer.exe to play its music, which I can't package with the game easily. Luckily, installing WMP seems to solve the problem. The second most common bug is still out there, stalking my potential customers, unfortunately. A lot of people are having late-game performance problems, too.

I implemented some of the ideas in the comments, such as a keyboard zoom function and a colorblind mode. People keep suggesting things I want to try, but I know that if I start to work on them, the game will never truly be "done". One idea that's been bouncing around in my head is to just leave Aurora in its current state and start work on a cross-compatible, higher-performance sequel. A bunch of people have already offered their help for such an endeavour.

For the next couple days, though, I'm just going to focus on riding the momentum and making this a successful launch. Even if everything tanked from this point forward, though, I think I'd be satisfied. I didn't dare to hope it would get so much attention on reddit, or that it would make it to so many sites on the first day. I've got to be happy with that, and I am.