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.
- Canada: 4/5 (26 ratings)
- France: 3.5/5 (25 ratings)
- Germany: 4/5 (38 ratings)
- Japan:4/5 (38 ratings)
- Spain: 4.75/5 (14 ratings)
- United Kingdom: 4/5 (93 ratings)
- United States: 3.75/5 (175 ratings)
Sweden and singapore are not rated yet
Lots of people are having fun right now while playing MotorHEAT. We’d like to give you some tips to help you get higher scores and reach higher levels:
- Don’t crash: Obvious but you can end up forgiving about safety and trying to get Expert scores all the time. Although the reward is good, losing 10 seconds is way worse. This leads us to the next tip:
- Ideally, you should be all the time with boost enabled (and not crashing). To achieve this, you’ll have to risk and pass nearby cars, to fill your boost bar. Expert passes fill a lot more your boost bar than Good ones.
You should avoid risking while your boost bar is full enough. - Control your boost: If you feel like you can’t react fast enough when using boost, remember that you can control the boost level with the right trigger: If you press it only at 50%, you’ll get half the bonus and it will last twice.
- Always look forward: Be prepared to react to what is coming, and not to what you have already passed.
- Take special care with white cars: White cars can change lanes at any time, and you won’t know which lane they will change to until they start to move. Trying to do an Expert pass to a white car is usually a bad idea.
- Try to get all the bonus. These can usually be seen from a far distance, specially for the brighter colors. Also remember that bonus boxes are always rotating (The red box, invincibility).
- Get the maximum potential of the bonus you get: Multiplier, Invincibility and Boost bonuses depend on you to get the maximum benefit:
When getting extra multiplier you should be more careful to ensure you don’t crash and lose the multiplier.
When getting invincibility, you should AIM for the crash, since it gives you an Expert score and fills up your boost bar. Take care when the powerup is ending.
When getting boost, avoid cars for some time and just do a quick sprint. - You get additional points every time you reach a new level, based on the remaining time, so the better you do at first levels, the more time you’ll have left and the more points you’ll get.
- On night and fog levels, be specially careful, you’ll have less time to react, so don’t risk that much.
MotorHEAT gets a head start into Xbox LIVE Indie Games
You’ve got the ultimate racing car, and an unlimited road to drive on. What else do we need to say? It’s all about driving. Lightning fast. No brakes, no limits.
OVIEDO, SPAIN, Feb 26, 2010 – The latest and bestest product developed by Milkstone Studios is about to be released in Xbox Live Indie Games.
Tired of the same realistic racing games over and over, Milkstone has used all its resources at their disposal (two, actually) to build what could be described as the ultimate “drive-fast-while-dodging-cars” game, also known as MotorHEAT.
Taking inspiration from old school classics you probably haven’t heard of (OutRun, Enduro or Road Fighter), they have empowered the original idea with graphics and sound that will blow your mind and sensational sense of speed, perfect for today’s gamer. Fire up the power-ups and avoid the traffic cars while you get amazed with day/night transitions and the boost effect. And don’t worry if you crash, you’ll see some flashy graphics there too.
Furthermore, to ensure your friends stop talking to you, you can remind them how awesome you are from within the game, and also check your score globally, while you’re playing, with the best drivers around the globe. Will you be able to reach nº1? For how long?
In addition, MotorHEAT keeps that atention to detail and sheer quality that Milkstone Studios is known for. Have we already said that you can even paint your car like you want to make it fit your style? Let’s checkout some trusty reviews:
“MotorHEAT cars are more realistic than the one in my garage” – Alejandro González
“I wish real-life highways also had powerups” – Miguel Herrero
MotorHEAT is (probably) available NOW at the Xbox LIVE Indie Marketplace at a retail price of 240 MS Points.
