After week 49’s unexpected deviations from my actual plans, last week I was finally able to wrap up (the first phase of) the backend work I mentioned over the past couple of weeks.
About half a decade ago, we started to rewrite our central account management service from scratch. The existing one wasn’t up to the task anymore and we wanted to reduce code duplications between the Prosperous Universe and the AirlineSim systems. But we also wanted to make it easier to send automated email notifications to users, something that (for reasons I cannot remember) wasn’t easy to do in our previous setup. As it happens, we never got around to that last bit. Other things just always felt more important. Like working on actual game features 
But as much as fun as that might be, I need to keep the business side of things in mind, too. By that I mean that AirlineSim needs to attract new players, ideally convert them to paying users and then make them stick around. That last bit always sounds a bit questionable, but you know us: We don’t resort to predatory tactics around here as other online (and in particular free-2-play) games might. And one fairly harmless and imo helpful way to avoid frustration for existing players (which potentially might make them leave) is sending out a friendly reminder when their credits run out before it happens.
For the past two weeks, I spend a good part of my time on implementing a new system within our account management service that supports exactly that sort of thing: It allows to define arbitrary types of notifications, under which conditions they need to be generated, how often a user should receive it at most etc. I brushed up our email templates, standardising their content, making sure they are internationalised and they contain the right information besides the actual message. Last but not least, I invested quite a bit of effort into tooling to properly test these things, including making sure that each notification works in all the different languages we support and that they are really only sent under the circumstances we intended.
The first two notification types implemented so far are a “credits exhaustion warning” for AirlineSim and a “PRO license expiry warning” for Prosperous Universe. But we’ll add more types over the coming months. If you have a good idea for what might be useful to users, please let me know! And before you ask: Of course you will be able to disable any of the non-transactional notifications if you don’t wish to receive them
Even though I had to deal with two sick kids last week, I got around to a bunch of others tasks, most of which aren’t devlog material. But I did manage to fix one long-standing bug thanks to a user’s very detailed bug report. The respective patch will likely hit all game worlds later this week!