The second update for Zombie Football Carnage has been approved. You’ll receive a notification when you start playing the game.

This is mainly a bugfix release that addresses the following main issues:

• Fixed P2P score sharing issues (yet again ), now everything works as expected. If you have your local scores filled with people you don’t know (due to the error present in the last update), you’ll have to delete your saved game data to clean the list. Be warned you’ll also lose the improvements you could have bought on the shop. Sorry but there’s no other way to fix this.
• Now the game doesn’t periodically pauses on some consoles due to ingame data saving.

Tags: update, Zombie Football Carnage

During the last week, we’ve been gathering feedback and suggestions from users, in order to finish the first update and make a better game.

The things we’ve planned so far are the following:

BUGFIXES:

• Fixed many P2P score issues, such as not properly loading data from disk or not sorting data on the high score list.
• Some people have experienced random lockups during play. We can’t tell for sure, but we’ve suffered from these as well and we’ve been trying our hardest to find the issue. Since it can happen on the game menu as well, we think it’s related to P2P score sharing, so it should be fixed as well.
• Fixed some minor graphical glitches

GAMEPLAY CHANGES:

• Reduced difficulty of all the 1st quarter waves (So it’s easier for absolute beginners, and a way to rest after a sudden death)
• Increased “The Plague” wave difficulty (It was too easy to be a Sudden Death)
• Reduced enemies movement speed and projectile speed, in order to reduce the game difficulty a bit.
• Increased “Rinosaur Rex” wave difficulty a bit (Rather easy to be a Sudden Death)
• Reduced “Dinobikers Attack” wave difficulty a lot (Too hard to be a 1st quarter)

NEW FEATURES:

• Ask for a confirmation before exiting a game from the Pause menu.
• Added a new background, the Junkyard
• Added some basic instructions when the game starts, so people can learn the basic controls faster
• Added new wave configurations, one per quarter, to increase a bit more the variety.

We expect to finish the patch someday next week. Until then, we’re still open to suggestions and feedback.

Tags: status, update, Zombie Football Carnage

This update includes the following changes:

• UI: Added a delay on some screens (Score boards, Versus game configuration, Mode instructions) to ensure they are read before any player accidentaly presses A.
• UI: Added a Purchase button on the game pause menu.
• UI: Changed the way the user selects a custom pot. Instead of using the two axis of the Left stick, all the variations can be selected with left-right.
• BUGFIX: The Earthquake power up pushes in all directions instead of only to the upper right corner
• BUGFIX: Fixed a grammar error in the Trial mode message
• GRAPHICS: Made power ups a bit brighter to ensure the icon can be seen on dark backgrounds
• GRAPHICS: Made darker backgrounds a bit brighter, also reduced a bit the tint effect.
• GRAPHICS: Added 10+ customization variations.
• GRAPHICS: On Bomb mode, a marker is shown to make it easier to check who has the bomb.
• GAMEPLAY: Reduced a bit Arcade mode difficulty, AI pots agressiveness increases 50% slower, and they don’t do power dashes on the instant the player gets back to the arena after dying.
• GAMEPLAY: Changed spawn positions of players and power ups, so players are on the corners and power ups on the sides. This way, each player start position will coincide with the corner shown on his gamepad.
• GAMEPLAY: On Catcher mode, reduced the penalization for falling (You lose now 1 point instead of halven the score)
• NEW VERSUS MODE: Rambo
• NEW VERSUS MODE: Loot

Tags: Avatar Bump!, update

Now the game has just hit the virtual shelves, we have some things planned for a future update, along with some bugfixes that were reported.

• UI: Add a delay on some screens (Score boards, Versus game configuration, Mode instructions) to ensure they are read before any player accidentaly presses A.
• UI: Show the instructions on the pause screen too.
• BUGFIX: The Earthquake Power up only pushes players to the top right, it should be totally random
• GRAPHICS: Make power ups a bit brighter to ensure the icon can be seen on dark backgrounds
• GAMEPLAY: Change spawn positions of players and power ups, so players are on the corners and power ups on the sides. This way, each player start position will coincide with the corner shown on his gamepad.
• GAMEPLAY: On Catcher mode, lessen the penalization for falling (now you lose 50% of your points)
• NEW VERSUS MODE: Yet to be disclosed…
• NEW VERSUS MODE: Yet to be disclosed…
• GRAPHICS: Some extra customization variations.
• NEW POT MODEL: Yet to be disclosed…

That’s the current list of changes we have in the works. If you have any suggestion or bug you want to report, just let us know by posting a comment here!

Tags: Avatar Bump!, update

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.

Tags: update

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

Tags: contest, MotorHEAT, update

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.

Tags: MotorHEAT, status, update

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.

Tags: MotorHEAT, update, Wool

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.

Tags: MotorHEAT, update

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.

Tags: contest, update, Wool