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
WaaghMan has just published a Postmortem for Wool. Check it out!
Note: This is a personal post written by me. I’m not talking in the name of the Milkstone Studios team, their opinions about the project could be different.
Introduction
Wool has been our second project since the birth of Milkstone Studios, and we got the development process, and the engine, much more streamlined. Our hopes about the game were high, but they haven’t been fulfilled (only 750 sales in 4 months).
What went Right
- Overall polish
We think Wool is one of the most polished games of the channel. We did extensive betatesting to achieve a fun and challenging gameplay and level designs. We listened from other user’s opinions on the early phases and decided to focus on improving the overall experience instead of adding content “with no soul”.
An example of this can be found in the sound and music department, with lots of different and well-placed sounds (special mention to the “stampede” sound effect when many sheeps run at once). - GUI
Using what we learned from Little Racers’ GUI system, we redid from scratch the entire GUI system… Twice. It was a high amount of work, but it paid off in the end. The GUI system is very centric on gamepad UI interaction, and the usual structure of a game menu, with a largely customizable visual design.
All of our later games to date have been using the same GUI without almost any change, so we can say it’s powerful enough for our goals. - Level editor
During Wool development (and other projects that didn’t see the light…yet) we developed a map editor which enabled us to create and edits levels from scratch fairly easily.
The editor was designed to be very flexible, so it will come handy when developing other 2D games in the future. - Paving the way for future games
Between the release of Little Racers and Wool, most of the time was spent in improving our game engine to easen the task of creating new games, so our future projects wouldn’t take that much to be developed.
Things such as game menus, loading/saving, game records, etc. can now be reused on our future games with almost no effort, so we should reduce our development time a lot from now on.
What went wrong
- Product placement
Since we created a high quality game and released it at a low price, we expected the game to be very successful. What really happened was: By default, not much people like sheep herding games, no matter how polished or fun they are.
So, despite a rather high trials/sales conversion ratio, the game rapidly dropped of top charts with low sales numbers. - Little to no feedback
Consequence of the first fact, we didn’t get much feedback, good or bad, about the game, which meant that we didn’t even know what the problem was with the game. - Graphics
As in Little Racers, we’ve done our best to compensate our lack of graphic skills, with a fair success. Graphics variety is low, but everything fits and it looks good when in movement (can’t say the same for static screenshots…)
How the game did
- In sales terms, Wool has been officially a failure. Although ratings and the few comments about the game are positive, it’s a genre which nobody likes.
We can consider it as a niche game that’s really fun in coop sessions and can give a really fun experience for some hours for just one dollar.
Feel free to comment on the article!
We’ve been featured on the “Around The World in 80 Games” spotlight, where the XNA team interviews developers from different countries.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
We’re currently working on a patch for MotorHEAT, which addresses the P2P world rankings bug, and adds some improvements based on feedback.
Some of the changes that we’re including are the following:
- Fixed World rankings not updating correctly
- Now boost can be activated with gamepad buttons in addition to the right trigger
- DPad only controls primary color on the car customization screen
- Increased bonus items rotation speed so they can be spotted earlier.
- Increased space on the high score list so high scores or long gamertags do not overlap.
- Increased score obtained by passing cars around 350% (was too low compared to the bonus you get for remaining time when completing a level). This also improves the “Extra multiplier” bonus benefit.
- Increased the score obtained from the “extra score” bonus item from 100,000 to 500,000 (so it’s more useful).
- Improved the “extra boost” bonus: Now it gives you 4 full bars of boost. Now the boost effect is longer than the one obtained with the invincibility bonus (common sense).
- Game starts with the boost bar filled (so the wait until first cars appear isn’t that long)
- Game starts with an extra 15 seconds (so you can crash about 2 times on the first level instead of only 1).
- The award “Heated” now allows 7 minutes to reach level 15, instead of 6.
All these changes are being done in an attempt to even the benefit of bonus items, and to ensure that people that risk when passing cars are rewarded properly. The scores obtained on this patched version will obviously be a little bit higher, since many things are giving more score now. We’re doing this to ensure that your old scores don’t need to be deleted, although you’ll be able to reach higher scores easily.
We’re still working on some extra changes, but these are the only ones related to gameplay and scores. Probably.
