Welcome to the official website of Milkstone Studios. We are a small team of passionate game developers located on the north of Spain whose main goal is to bring back the joy of playing games. Remember when games had more fun and less bloom? We use advanced technology as an addition to the gameplay, but never as a replacement.
Avatar Ninja update now available
An update for Avatar Ninja is now available for the game. It features the following changes:
- FIXED: Max Level reached wasn’t being shown on the High scores section.
- FIXED: Gamepad vibration option on settings wasn’t working properly.
- FIXED: There were some issues with the colored aura that shows when the player crashes while a powerup was active.
- FIXED: In some rare cases, players could use voice chat while P2P exchange was being performed.
- FIXED: The P2P High score warning was mentioning “MotorHEAT” instead of “Avatar Ninja!”
- IMPROVED: Improved a bit in-game performance
- IMPROVED: Improved a bit P2P score sharing performance
- IMPROVED: Increased max P2P score entries from 5,000 to 10,000.
- IMPROVED: More detailed trees in the background.
Avatar Ninja sales reach Top 5
Avatar Ninja is placed 5 on the top Indie game sales last week!
Thanks to everyone who supported us! Expect a patch soon which will address some bugs.
Avatar Ninja! available on LIVE Marketplace!
Our recently announced game, Avatar Ninja!, has been just published on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace!
You can download it directly to your console from the Xbox website
Wool Postmortem published
WaaghMan has just published a Postmortem for Wool. Check it out!
Milkstone Studios featured on”Around The World in 80 Games”
We’ve been featured on the “Around The World in 80 Games” spotlight, where the XNA team interviews developers from different countries.
MotorHEAT Contest Winners
It’s been a long wait, but finally the contest has come to an end and we have our winners chosen. If you’re one of the lucky winners, you’ll have to reply to the message we sent to you during the next week, or we’ll choose another winner.
Best score (1600MP Card)
- Tokyo Cheese (Level 42)
The Last Little Racers code
- NECOLO55 (Level 23)
Wool codes
- DeGrimmis (Level 10)
- SovietSniper32 (Level 13)
- MAS Flawless1 (Level 11)
- WrestlingFan5 (Level 32)
MotorHEAT codes
- soso g (Level 7)
- darthmick13 (Level 22)
1600 MP Cards
- video gal (Level 10)
- My Wife Said So (Level 11)
- Territjjb (Level 27)
- Meritaron (Level 20)
- RAAAAAAAAAAH (Level 14)
- RAGERIPPER (Level 18)
- losmatzos (Level 10)
- BMWSebastian (Level 5)
- SHOUCHOUJI (Level 19)
- JB BMW1989 (Level 16)
- MarCos PoLoTos (Level 13)
- RaKKa vandal (Level 29)
- xxDANNYBOY141 (Level 11)
- Arcturus 3009 (Level 24)
- Mr Nye Sky (Level 10)
- DrLickit701 (Level 12)
- soulcollecter0 (Level 23)
- Lunin (Level 8 )
- REGGY468 (Level 18)
Thanks to everyone who took part!
Sadly for us, the contest didn’t have much effect on the game’s awareness, so we won’t be doing a similar thing anytime soon.
MotorHEAT Score contest details and rules
Now that the P2P Scoreboard is working flawlessly, we’re starting the contest we promised some time ago. We’ve decided to try an idea we had some time ago, if it ends successfully we’ll probably repeat it in the future.
Prizes
Since we don’t have much to offer from start, we’re doing the following: Almost all of our winnings during the period the contest is on will be given back as prizes, mostly in the form of MS Points cards. So, the more people taking part in the contest, the more chances you’ll win something.
*UPDATED* The current prizes are:
- THE LAST Free Little Racers redeem token (we’ve almost ran out of codes), valued in 240MP.
- 4 x Free Wool Redeem tokens, valued in 240MP each one.
- 2 x Free MotorHEAT tokens for your friends, valued in 240MP each one.
- 19 x 1600 US Microsoft Points card, valued in 1600 MP each one
As we said, we’ll add extra MP cards each day, depending on the number of sales (we’ll make them public).
When?
The contest starts NOW, at the same time the patch comes out, and will have a length of 15 days, so it will end on April 1st.
How to take part
There are only two things needed for you to take part in the contest:
- You need to appear in our World Rankings chart. We’ll update the ranking daily on a spreadsheet and make it public, so you can know if you’re appearing and the score we have registered.
- You need to have an active Gold LIVE Subscription. This is necessary to ensure you’re not creating Silver profiles just to increase your chances of winning something.
We’ll set up a server running almost 24hrs a day, so you shouldn’t have any problems to get your score synchronized to our list. Anyway, if you can’t synchronize your score, feel free to send us a picture with the ingame highscore table and we’ll add it manually.
How are winners chosen
We want everyone to have a chance of winning something, but also to reward players who have invested more time playing the game, so we’ve come up with the following rules:
- You get as participations as the level you’ve gotten to in your best score. For instance, if you made it to level 23, you’ll have 23 times more chances of winning something than somebody that didn’t pass Level 1.
- You’ll get additional chances if you tweet (+5) or make a blog post (+10) about the contest. Please let us know if you’re doing it.
- The winners will be selected once the contest is over, we don’t have the exact date yet. They will receive a message via the LIVE messaging system, to confirm their identity. Once they reply, we’ll send them the code for the item they’ve won.
- If they don’t reply in a week, another winner will be chosen.
- The player with the top score will get a 1600 MP Card directly.
- One prize per winner at max.
- Milkstone members (WaaghMan/Soy1Bonus) won’t be eligible for any prize.
Good luck!
The contest starts NOW, so feel free to download the game (or the update) and start racking up your score!
The spreadsheet with the current scores is available on Google Docs
MotorHEAT patch coming soon!
In a few hours, the 2nd MotorHEAT patch will be put into peer review.
This patch features some minor bugfixes, and the P2P World rankings fix. This time for sure!
Full changelog:
- Fixed P2P score synchronization when more than one hosting game is found.
- Fixed P2P score synchronization when the first gamepad doesn’t have online permissions, but another one has.
- Now the same song won’t be played twice in a row. Also the performance when starting a song should improve a bit (although there’re still some hiccups).
- Fixed big road signs not being shown.
MotorHEAT P2P World rankings issues explained
As many of you already know, the first patch for MotorHEAT came out yesterday. The changes are the ones featured in a previous post, and 3 new achievements (2 of them are secret, go find out!).
Sadly, the P2P World rankings system isn’t working flawlessly yet, but it now works a bit at least. We already have 525 scores synchronized from other users, and the number is increasing at a steady rate.
Once we noticed that they weren’t working allright yet, we kept working on it until we found the issue/s.
So, what is/were wrong with it? Many things:
- (Already fixed)Clients didn’t wait until all the scores were received before disconnecting. That’s the reason because they worked sometimes, but when they reached a point where data needed more time to be sent (about 200 scores), they just stopped receiving anymore.
- (Already fixed)If something bad happened while connecting or sending data, the P2P score system would stop working during all the game session (although all the other features of the game would keep working all right).
- If you don’t have a valid Gold profile signed in on the first controller, the P2P Score system will never be able to find or create sessions. This is not an extremely rare case, specially if you have some music game instruments always connected.
- (The worst one)If after a search, the game finds more than one active sharing session, it will try to join both at the same time, which causes the P2P Score system to crash and stop working until the next time you run the game.
We’ve already fixed issues 3 and 4, but we won’t be able to submit a new patch until next Monday.
Our apologies about these problems, these two cases are hard to test with a small development team and we didn’t find them until now.
The current version of Wool (which uses the same World Rankings system) is also suffering from the 4 aforemented issues, so maybe we’ll release a patch which fixes them.
MotorHEAT Soundtrack
Some people has asked us to release the soundtrack of our latest game MotorHEAT. Well, here it is! The menu music plus the 4 in-game songs . All with a creative commons license so you can use them as you want, as long as you don’t make profit of it. Hope you enjoy it!
Follow us
Games
- All #xblig sales seem to have dropped to just 10% their usual value yesterday... Really strange2010/07/30 16:25
- Retro game of the week: Ice breaker by Topo Soft (1990)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfumQVwZU2o2010/07/26 09:16 - We'll be giving a conference on #euskal encounter 18 in 90 minutes (11:30 local time), so if you're there be sure to come and say hi!2010/07/23 07:36
- Surprisingly the Avatar Ninja costume is sold at more than 3 times the price of the game :p2010/07/19 08:52
- Check out this Avatar Ninja review by @MasterBlud
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZs65H4-fl0 It features an authentic Ninja Gi!2010/07/19 08:18 - Retro Game of the Week: Evolva (PC)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWzoiGlApxM2010/07/19 06:12 - Avatar Ninja got to Top 3 sales last week! Who could've guessed?2010/07/15 07:33
- There are 11 fanmade videos of Avatar Ninja available on Youtube, wow!2010/07/14 06:04
- Retro game of the week: Raptor - Call of the Shadows (Apogee)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYa2g9_5Ss42010/07/12 07:35 - MotorHEAT reviewed on TeamKobun.com
http://xboxindies.teamkobun.com/index.php/motorheat/2010/07/12 06:56