Preparing for European Launch

Our ultimate promotional goal is still to get a featured spot in the Google Play store or Apple App Store.  When/if that happens, then hopefully we'll see a big spike in number of downloads and signups.  that number will, of course, be proportional to the number of people who see the promotion.  So in order to make the largest number of people see that promotion when/if it happens, we want Monster Cache to be available in as many countries as possible at that time.

The only reason we haven't made Monster Cache available outside of the US up until now is because I was worried about that adding a lot more monsters to the database would slow down the performance.  We already have 21 million monsters in the database for the US.  The queries are pretty quick, I have indexes built for the main search parameters.  Still, I wasn't sure how many more millions it would take before slowing down.  So I moved the monster searching query to a stored procedure to try to speed it up.  Its hard to tell how much it helps since the query takes less than a second, but I don't think it can hurt.

A lesser consideration is the space needed in the database. In SQL Azure, we pay by the GB, so adding another few million monsters might make it an extra $5-$10 / month.

And last, since we can't really test out the new monsters I'll be placing in Europe, I wanted a way to be able to view the placements of new monsters.  So I built a new monster viewing administration tool.  Its almost the same Google Map code lifted straight from the game, but I can move anywhere I want, zoom however I want, and see monsters of any level.

Now that the monster viewer and stored procedure are in place, I'm almost ready to generate the monsters!  Its a bummer that the timing has worked out such that its now middle of Fall.  Not sure how many people will want to roam around looking for monsters if its cold and snowy soon.  But at least its ready so I can generate them at any time now.

The signups from the first round of emails to geocachers seem to have stalled now.  We're at 151 users on the Legends board from about 493 total signups (31% of signups find one or more monsters).