update
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.
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.
Changes on the MotorHEAT patch
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.
Wool has been updated, contest soon
An update for Wool has been made available. The two main features of this update:
- P2P High scores (They will be only available if you have a Gold profile and the full version of Wool).
- Now you don’t have to go back to the stage select screen after completing a level
Due to the P2P high scores feature, your previous high scores will be deleted (but not your progress).
Thanks to the P2P High scores, we can now hold a contest and give prizes. We’ll do it soon, meanwhile you can start training and pushing your scores, as they will be valid once the contest begins.
Remember that P2P scores can only be updated if you play the game at the same time that other people, so don’t worry if you can’t see other people scores yet, we’ll setup a server once the contest begins.
Little Racers has been updated
An update for Little Racers has been made available. It features the following changes:
* Removed songs with potentially offensive lyrics, and added some new songs.
* Fixed the lobby UI when an online game has 7 or more players at the same time.
With this update, the game should be available again in the UK Marketplace.
Wool has been updated
An update for Wool has been made available. It features the following changes:
* Improved a lot UI performance, specially on the level select and high scores section, and when a level is finished
* Some other minor issues fixed
We have other update that will become available later which adds a new feature: Online high scores.
Little Racers 1.5 available for download
v1.5 update for Little Racers is available for download. It should ask you to update automatically when you start the game.
The update includes the following changes:
Improvements
- Fixed a crash issue on the network lobby
- Added a new track, Revolution, with a design proposed by Chris(chiz sniper).
Little Racers 1.4 available for download
v1.4 update for Little Racers is available for download. It should ask you to update automatically when you start the game.
The update includes the improvements made for the Dream Build Play 2009 contest submission:
Improvements
- Fixed some server timing issues when playing online races
- Improved cars trail, now it’s more beatiful and the colors are better represented.
- Removed version number from splash screens, since now updates are automatic.
- Improved menu usability in some sections of the game.
- Added two new tracks: Diagonal and Plainville . Both of them are fast and wide tracks.
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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