Relevant News
All of the news that are important for our readers, like patches, new game announcements or relevant changes will be posted here.
Wool enters the peer review phase!
Finally, after months of hard work, our beloved game Wool has entered peer review. We’ve put lots of care and love while making this game to ensure every player get as much fun as possible from this game (remember, it will be available at only 80 MP).
We’re currently working on the game trailer, by tomorrow we should have it finished and published on Youtube.
Trust us, you’ll like it. A lot. Even black sheep.
Player gamertag list for online matches
Some users have reported that finding people to play an online match of Little Racers is difficult. We’ve created a list of gamertags to help you find other users eager to race with you.
The gamertag list can be found here.
If you’re interested in appearing in the list, just post a comment on it and we’ll add it right away.
If you have any other suggestions to improve the online experience, just tell us and we’ll do our best.
Little Racers XBLIG Session on Monday 26th
XBLIG Sessions is an initiative formed by many XBLIG review sites, made to allow players pit their skills against the developers of Indie games with online capabilities.
Little Racers is the first game to be featured. If you’re interested in playing some online races with us, just look for races on Monday 26th Oct, 8.30 pm GMT, we’ll be hosting some sessions.
You can get more information and some gamertags in the XboxHornet blog post
See you there!
Presenting our current project: Wool
We are proud to present the first screenshots of Wool, the next game by Milkstone Studios for Xbox Live Indie Games.
Wool is a game with a single objective: Guide as many sheeps as posible to the pen at the end of the level. Obviously, this won’t be so easy: Survival is hard for sheeps with no sense of danger.
If you bark now, the sheeps will probably end up drowned into the lake
To reach this objective, you can use your sole presence, which causes some fear to the standard sheep, and your powerful bark, which makes most sheeps flee from you. But be careful, you don’t want a flock of sheeps running towards dangerous hazards.
Sheeps tend to go in flock, except when they flee
As anyone knows, sheep tend to group in flocks, so usually they can be guided without much problem when there is no danger… except for black sheeps. These sheeps tend to be more individual, and other sheeps don’t like them.
Don't forget about the time limit
Full version of Wool will feature a campaign with at least 30 levels of single and cooperative play for up to 4 local players, and a special versus mode, for only 80 Microsoft Points. Our estimations are that the game will be ready to enter the peer review phase in around a month.
Little Racers sales numbers
It’s been a lot of time since we posted our last sales data, so here’s our latest information for you to know.
Here are the current numbers (as of 09/16/2009):
- Little Racers trial downloads: 50709
- Little Racers full purchases: 2630
- Conversion rate: 5.18%
The following chart shows the download / purchases amount over time:
Little Racers sales as of September 16th 2009
Also shown in logarithmic view, so the relation between downloads and sales is shown more clearly:
Little Racers sales as of September 16th 2009 (Logarithmic)
As you can see, most of the purchases have been done over the first days, with an extra boost when extra countries were made available and the ratings system was implemented on first days of August.
We’ll post some information about our next game in a few days, among other new features on this website, so please stay tuned!
2nd Little Racers Twitter giveaway contest winners announced
Our second Twitter giveaway contest has finished. We’re glad to announce the nicks of the 4 winners, one of each will get a free redeem code for the full Little Racers game:
Congratulations to all of them! Each one should have received their code on a direct message via Twitter. The codes will have a validity of three months, if they haven’t been used by then it we’ll consider them as available for future promotions.
Little Racers reachs 2,500 sales! We’re giving away 4 free codes to celebrate!
Little Racers has just reached 2,500 sales on Xbox Live Indie Games! To celebrate it, we’re giving away 4 free codes of the game.
If you’re interested in receiving one of these free codes, all you have to do is retweet our message on Twitter. On September 12th, we’ll pick the winners at random. Codes will be sent via direct message on Twitter.
Meanwhile, you can try the game on your Xbox 360 and have some fun playing the demo version!
Little Racers Twitter promotion game
Introduction
As you probably already know, today the latest update of Little Racers (v1.3) has been released.
Although we would be more than happy to continue working on the game, making more upgrades and adding new features, our time is limited and currently the game is not getting enough sales to justify the resources that would take to improve it. So, if everything continues like this, v1.3 will be the last update of Little Racers.
We’re doing our best, trying to market the game in every way possible, but our resources are very limited and can’t invest money on advertising, specially for such a limited market as Xbox Live Community Games is.
The plan
We’ve come up with an idea that could work, but we need some help from our fellow readers and Little Racers fans. To make it simple: You help us promote Little Racers, and we’ll add new content and updates to the game. Don’t be afraid, there’s no money involved in this. All you need to play this promotion game is a Twitter account.
Below you’ll find some of the features that some users have asked for, and some others that we have thought of. Every feature has a cost assigned: That’s the number of tweets needed for the update to be enqueued into our development plan.
The rules
If you’re interested in one (or more) of the items, all you have to do is to post a Tweet with the tags #xblcg , #littleracers , and the update you’re interested in. For example, if you’re interested in the “More tracks” item, you could post a Tweet with the text “I’ve played Little Racers and want more tracks! #xblcg #littleracers #moretracks”.
We’ll check Twitter every day for tweets with the #littleracers tag, and update the item count with the new data. Twitter accounts with less than 10 followers will count only as 0.25 points, and those with no followers will not count. This is to avoid creation of empty Twitter accounts.
It is possible to vote for more than one item if you’re interested, at least until we get some feedback on this contest. Of course, the best way to achieve the required number of tweets is by telling your friends about the game so they retweet your vote.
The available items
- Additional cars. 35 Tweets per car. #morecars
- Tweak: Reduce wall bouncing efectiveness: 35 Tweets. #removewallbouncing
- Additional tracks. 2/50 Tweets per track. #moretracks
- Dynamic camera that follows the player with a higher level of zoom (only for single player matches). 100 Tweets. #improvedcamera
- Ability to set favorite tracks so that they appear more often.100 Tweets. #favoritetracks
- Additional in-game sounds (Different engine and crash sounds). 100 Tweets. #moresounds
- Improve online multiplayer experience (post-race screen): 125 Tweets. #onlinemultiplayer
- Graphical improvements (Bloom, smoke distortion, etc.). 150 Tweets. #bloom
- Weather effects: Rain, Night, Wind, Snow… 150 Tweets. #weathereffects
- Improve game menus (font readability, improve usability of some sections, etc.). 175 Tweets. #improvemenu
- Background game finder to look for online opponents while playing single player. 1/250 Tweets. #backgroundfinder
- Online lap records. 200 Tweets. #onlinerecords
- Challenge mode, with missions like “Beat this lap time”, “Win this race”, “Win and don’t crash”, etc. 250 Tweets. #challengemode
- Drop game price to 200MP: 2/500 Tweets. #dropprice
- Track editor: 1/750 Tweets. #trackeditor
- Single player career mode: 1000 Tweets. #careermode
Please take in mind that, even if the item gets enough tweets, it won’t be done right away, it will take some time to develop etc. Also, the required number of tweets could change over time, depending on the impact of this promotion on sales.
Of course, if you have any kind of feedback or idea about this promotion attempt, or some additional items that we could add to the list, we’re more than eager to listen to it.
Thanks for your time,
The Milkstone Studios Team
Little Racers 1.3 available for download
v1.3 update for Little Racers is available for download. You’ll have to redownload the game since updates aren’t automatic yet in Xbox Community Games.
You can do it directly from this link, or in the Xbox Marketplace in Community Games -> Racing & Flying -> Little Racers.
This is mainly a bugfix release. It features the following improvements:
Bugfixes
- Fixed crash issues when the connection couldn’t be established while trying to join a game from an invite or via the find games section
- Fixed crash when directly starting the game from an accepted invite
Improvements
- In networked games, other cars’ horn is silenced when a car reaches the finish line.
- Now cars can be controlled with the D-Pad.
- Improved upsell screen.
- Fixed minor translation issues both in spanish and english.
This is probably the last update of the game in the near future, we’re focusing on 2 new games, we’ll post updates on their development soon. Also we’ll be starting a special promotion attempt on Little Racers soon, so please stay tuned.
Little Racers 1.2 available for download
Finally, after a troubled review, the v1.2 update is available for download. You’ll have to redownload the game since updates aren’t automatic yet in Xbox Community Games.
You can do it directly from this link, or in the Xbox Marketplace in Community Games -> Racing & Flying -> Little Racers.
Remember the changes for this revision. The most important ones are the freezing fix and the incorporation of the Multiplayer mode.
Full Change log from the v1.1 version:
Bugfixes
- Fixed freeze issues that happened on V1.1, they were due to the Sound.Play() framework bug and memory leaks.
Gameplay tweaks
- Lightened car textures to improve visibility and details.
- Reduced engine volume
- Handicap effect is more smoothed to reduce the “stats hiccup” that it could produce
- Set a minimum speed below which the car doesn’t reduce speed when crashing
- Now cars going over a wrong side can’t collide with other cars. They get a ghost effect when this happens.
- Crashes don’t affect car attributes at all (before they did for half second).
- Improved cars grip.
- Cars are slowed a little more when skidding
- Cars can turn a little better when skidding.
- Reduced a bit max car speed.
- “Random” Car class only selects classes between E and A, to avoid too slow or too fast cars.
- Lessened wait time after choosing cars to 3 seconds
Improvements
- Improved a lot game performance on crowded races.
- Improved ingame font readibility.
- Improved upsell screen.
- Sign in screen shows the sign in level needed (Guest on local games, Signed in on System Link, and Gold over Xbox LIVE).
- Reduced gamertag text size on sign in screens.
- Improved the song start system when starting a race.
- Player icons aren’t show on race countdown
- Improved skid particles
New features
-
- Online Multiplayer mode
- System link, Xbox Live
- Integrated championship mode, can be restarted over and over.
- Joining system much like Race Driver GRID: You can join while a race is in progress but cannot race until the current race finishes.
- Allows host migration
- Allows invites
- Quick join and find game features.
- Public and private session features.
- Added dynamic obstacles to many tracks, they serve two purposes: Add more movement on screen (races were a bit “static”) and serve as walls, but less clausthrophobic.
- When a crash issue is found, the game tries to show the exception message on screen instead to giving a Code 4 directly.
- Added one extra particle effect on crash
- Added intermitent vibration when going off track or over the pianos.
- Added a cloud system to add some extra variety to tracks.
- Added 2 new tracks, “Derby” and “Asphalt”
- Now the time difference to the car in first place is shown when finishing a lap.
- Car color configuration is saved automaticallly for each player.
- Race configuration is saved automatically.
- Added a tips section that browses all the loading tips available.
- Added ingame sounds for events like race start, race finish and last lap.
- Now cars leave a colored trail when going fast.
- Added a detailed trail when the car is going in first place.
- Added a section about car attributes on the how to play.
And many other minor improvements.
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Games
- Avatar Ninja gets an "Audio Review":
http://twtn.gs/bu42010/09/10 08:15 - Avatar Ninja! on Top 7 sales for Aug 30 week! #xblig2010/09/10 08:08
- We've been told that you can try Wool and MotorHEAT right now on the Hó Play International Videogames Festival! Please give us your votes!2010/09/09 10:57
- Retro game of the week: Duke Nukem 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4a3_wazRPA2010/09/06 06:59 - For those who didn't notice, our games Wool and MotorHEAT are finalists in 3 categories at the Hó Play International Videogame Festival!2010/09/02 08:27
- Check out this nice review of MotorHEAT!
http://fb.me/FdZoypY22010/09/02 08:34 - Our games Wool and MotorHEAT are nominees at the Hó Play International Festival!
http://twtn.gs/bkr2010/08/31 09:01 - Retro Game of the Week: Jumping Flash! by Exact and Ultra (PlayStation)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2hukvZ0zBw2010/08/30 12:35 - Retro Game of the Week: Transport Tycoon Deluxe
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HluOjdtxmNU2010/08/23 06:05 - Congratulations to @brenes, he's the lucky winner of the 1600MP code!2010/08/21 12:11