Usability and first impressions

So it's been a few hours after I submitted my 2pTD tower-d game to digg. Things I've learned so far:

• 6 diggs after first submission, only ONE actual visit to the page (my guess is these are paid or volunteer moderators)


• only 2 or 3 people actually played the game :(


• because I did something stupid: I placed "New Game" above the "Single player" button -- the result is people get to the waiting for another player message and then leave (because no one else is playing!). Can't say I blame them!


• those that did play were interested in apparently getting their score in the high scores gallery


• python is a bit heavy even for this small use -- it never seems to release any memory. I chose to use one python process for all sessions because of the python startup time and resident memory size; I could startup individual processes for each session but would quickly run out of memory taking that approach (not to mention the startup time of python). What I'd really like is to be able to have an individual memory pool for each session but only have one python instance and just cleanup a sessions pool when completed. My implementation is probably to blame for any memory issues here.


• Not that I expected it to be, but it wasn't a smash-hit... back to the drawing board.


• If it did get lots of traffic the site could get killed by bandwidth usage. Weighing in at 1,883,094 bytes the SWF file is quite large. Then add in the bandwidth used by the actual game and it starts to become significant.


• There is a general lack of interaction -- there should be chat capabilities or at the very least forums