Postmortem: MotorHEAT
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. Although probably not 😛
Introduction
MotorHEAT is the third game of Milkstone Studios, and it was a departure from our previous game, Wool. Although most people that played Wool liked it and bought it, not that many people bothered to try the demo. From what I could tell, the graphics looked like a flash game that could be played on a website and not a “next-gen” game.
I think that was a bit harsh, because an awesome game like Castle Crashers has that same flash look (and Alien Hominid was actually a flash game when it was born), but part of the job of making games is knowing what your audience wants.
So MotorHEAT was our attempt at producing a game that would have one of the most solid graphics in the Indie Games catalog. Knowing that none of us is a graphic artist, we had to do our best and hope that the result would look good. And I’m very happy with the results.
What went Right
Technology
We knew that this game had to look good, so we had to work a lot on the special FX: shaders, realtime reflections, geometry instancing, and so on. We had some problems with the realtime reflections, not because of the shader itself, but because of the normals in the car mesh. But we used a simple fix that got rid of most of the issues.
Achievements
Indie Games can’t have official Xbox achievements, but we can replicate the concept. This was a game supposed to be played over and over, so well placed achievements would certainly improve the experience. Most were fun to get and we did include some hidden ones that probably made you smile, so I think it was a nice addon done late in the development, that we’ll probably include in our next games.
Sound
I’m the one in charge of making all the sound effects and music at Milkstone so I tried to push also the sound of the game as much as the graphics. This time we used a lot of stereo sounds that really improved the experience and veeery long and varied samples instead of using the old trick of tweaking the pitch to make it sound different (which we still use on some places though). The music was also pretty nice to compose, as I prefer to compose rock or electronic songs.
Polish
All of our games are made with care. We couldn’t ship them otherwise. But in this one we spent probably more than half of the development time trying to improve everything in the game. There are lots of little details here and there and I think it shows. It started as a proof of concept on how we could make a great looking game, but it ended up as a game we weren’t tired to play with.
Feedback
This game is our biggest marketing effort, and we did have a lot of response from blogs, game magazines and individuals. Lots of people seemed to like the game and most of the reviewers gave us a good score. What can I say, we tried to move the MotorHEAT brand everywhere (specially my partner) and it was great to hear those great things from all of you.
What went Wrong
Modelling
I’m acting as the artist here at Milkstone although professionally I’m a programmer. I’m good at doing interfaces and image editing, also at sound and music design. But no so much at 3D modelling. Hell, I’m not even good at drawing. I had modelled some cars before, but those were very simple tests, so this time we had to make a very good looking model for the car that the players would handle.
I spent quite some days trying to nail down the car mesh but it was something that had to be done. It didn’t exactly “went wrong” but I had to work over and over on certain aspects of the car to reach the quality level that we wanted. At least I have to say that the 3D models in this game is some good programmer art 🙂
Online leaderboards
Most of the big features of the game were done because my partner had no work left while I was finishing the modelling tasks. That includes achievements and online leaderboards. The latter was actually quite hard to do, because it was hard to test. When we released the game, the leaderboards weren’t synchronizing correctly. After two patches, we think the problem is solved. But it wasn’t good to have such important feature not working correctly at the release date. At least, the problem was fixed and we’ll use that code on our next games.
Sales
The game was on the Top 10 for some days, and with the good reviews, we thought that we could be there for a long time. But the sales started to go down, for some reason. We couldn’t compete with other simpler and less polished games on the charts, and it was a bit depressing. We’re still not good enough at doing marketing stuff, but we’re getting better.
Contest
We did a contest to try to push the sales up a little bit. We we’re giving a good amount of Microsoft Points to our users, but it didn’t raised the sales by much. It served as a big “Thank you” to our users so I hope you’ll check some of our next projects and will use the points to buy some awesome Indie Games! Also this doesn’t mean that we won’t be making other contests in the future, we’re nice guys 🙂
That’s all I can think of about it. This game started as “just another game” but at the end it really grew on me. Thanks to everyone that supported it and every journalist that liked the game and gave it a nice review. It’s our biggest effort made in the Indie Games yet, so it’s great to see people liked it.
Here in Spain it even won a “Best Gameplay” award on the HÓPlay awards