We have improved a bit the website, with minor improvements to the looks, such as the favicon. Also we’ve integrated a bit our Twitter account with the website, so that now posts on the website will be posted on Twitter automatically, and also our last tweets will be shown on the right sidebar.
We hope you like these changes.
Lately I’ve been playing some Community Games made by other developers. I’ve found many of them to be original and pretty polished, but also find that most of them lack something I reallycan’t describe. I’m putting here a list with mini-reviews.
The first Community Game I bought, also one of the most polished CG out there. With a gameplay very similar to Geometry Wars, the game features one single-player mode and many Vs. modes. It has a very interesting life/death scheme: You start the game in life mode, in which a combo meter goes up for staying alive. After some time and defeating three rather easy bosses, you are given the option to enter death mode whenever you like. When entering this mode, the combo you got multiplies by ten and stays there.
So, it’s very important to stay alive for a while in life mode to ensure a good score later in death mode, but if you change too late you won’t have enough lives left to get a good score. Also there’s a text telling you on which position are you on the global scoreboard while you play, it’s very interesting and challenging.
I was able to reach Top 5 when the game came out, now I barely reach the Top 100. Now the game is sold at 400MP, so it’s worth checking out.
First of all: Halfbrick is the name of the company, the name of the game is just “Echoes”.
This game came out pretty recently, with nice art design and production values. The gameplay is interesting: You need to get to all the specified points on a level by walking to them. When walking you leave a trail. When touching one point of the level, an “echo” appears and travels by the path you left. If you touch them you lose one life. So basically it gets harder when you’ve touched most points of the level.
Although interesting, I didn’t find the gameplay fun enough so I’ve not bought it. Anyway I recommend trying it.
A game where you control a fleet and have to survive as much time as possible.By killing you get resources that enables you to improve your fleet or your own ship, so the trick is to kill lots of aliens and spend resources to ensure your fleet survives.
Although I find it rather easy and can get boring after a while, I found it interesting and funny. I don’t know why, but I kept playing for 30 minutes, even it’s the same all the time. Also I don’t know if the game gets harder on each attack wave, I got to a point where it seemed all the waves were more or less the same.
I recently downloaded the trial version of this game. Although small, the game is pretty polished, with simple yet good-looking visuals. The gameplay is fun, basically a 2D arcade shooter where you control a plane which only can shoot forward, and turning takes some time. You can do some maneouvers to avoid fire and get into other plane’s tails.
I think the game has great potential, and personally have bought it, but still it seems uncomplete. It has four game modes, but three of them are almost essentially a deathmatch: Team deathmatch, 2vs2 and 1vs1. The fourth is a mode where you paint into the sky with no defined goal.
In my opinion, the game cries for more long modes, some sort of campaign, or maybe a survival mode where you face waves of increasing difficulty, etc. Also, the game is rather easy, and you can’t set difficulty although you can set the game speed to a higher value.
It would improve a lot with a online multiplayer mode or a 4-player split screen mode.
The most annoying game I’ve found on XBLCG so far. I’ve faced about 4 or 5 upsell screens for a simple 3 minutes play. Really. And only one mode is enabled on the trial mode, one mode you’ll probably get tired of before the demo finishes.
The more you insist, the less I want to buy the game.
This game reminds me a lot to Serious Sam, even the name of the game is somewhat similar. Anyway, I found the game not very good. The visuals are weird. There are some good effects, like the blood (red and green) splat on the screen when you kill a nearby enemy or you get hit by them, but the 3d visuals look like they could get an improvement. I’m not talking about more detailed models, I find them OK, it’s just the textures seem way too simple, also the scenario is just formed by textured cubes. Also the weapons on your hand doesn’t move at all when you shoot or move.
And finally, I found it rather strange that, even when Xbox 360 thumbsticks are analogic, the movement in the game isn’t: You only can move in 8 directions, and you’re either moving or not moving. I find that really disappointing.
If you can live with these things, the gameplay is based on getting combos for killing enemies in a row and getting a high score. There are many weapons to choose from.
The long awaited v1.2 update has started peer review process. We expect the process will take around two weeks, after that the updated game should be available for download. Remember, XBLC games don’t update automatically yet, so you’ll have to download the game again from the Marketplace when it’s available.
Full Change log from the v1.1 version:
And many other minor improvements. We’re specially proud of how the game looks and feels now, the gameplay has really improved from previous versions.
Uhfgood’s Game Reviews has reviewed Little Racers. You can check it out at the original article
We’re currently working hard on the v1.2 update, trying to get it available to you in the least time possible. Some of the improvements that this update will bring have been already discussed here, and some of them have been discussed on our Twitter account.
Anyway, here’s a list of the most important improvements since v1.1 :
When will the update be available? Our estimations are that the update should be available in about 3-4 weeks. Although almost all functionalities are finished now (The only ones that are still not finished are the online mode and many improvements in the menu system), we need to do a proper testing to ensure the game works flawlessly.
Meanwhile, we encourage you to rate our game in XBLCG.info . You’ll need a Microsoft Passport account to do that.
Here are my decisions about the upcoming online mode of Little Racers.
The multiplayer section will allow players to select whether they want to play on System Link or Xbox Live. After that, the player select screen is shown (this screen will only allow profiles able to play in the selected mode: Signed In for System Link game, and Live profiles for Xbox Live game.
After this screen, there are some menu options available:
And that’s the behaviour I’ve chosen to add for the LR online mode. I’d like to know your thoughts and suggestions about it. It’s probably too simple, other games such as Gears Of War 2 have more options and more complex quickjoin behaviour, etc. , but I think that for a game that won’t probably get more than 10 public games at the same time (that could mean around 120 players), it should be enough and there’s no need to make this section more complex.
After almost one month in the virtual shelves, we’re posting here our sales and downloads data:
First, we’d like to note some interesting related facts: Little Racers development started in the late December, so it took around 3 months of development before final release. Although the quality level could be higher in some points, we’re proud of what the game shows (except for bugs).
Also, due to the amount of music in the game, the game size is greater than 50Mbytes and that means that you can’t choose 200 MP as the game price. Even with that handicap, Little Racers has managed to be on the Community Games Top 10 on every week.
Our estimations / objectives for the game were around 1000€ for each month of development, that is, 3000€ net benefits (around $3500).
Now here are the current numbers (as of 04/23/2009):
We still don’t know the tax rate of our share, so we can’t tell for sure what the net amount is, but it seems like our goal has been met.
The following chart shows the download / purchases amount accross time:
Also shown in logarithmic view, so the relation between downloads and sales is shown more clearly:
Although the sales numbers have reached its minimum these days, we’re still working on the online mode and other improvements proposed by users. After that, we’ll focus on our next game.
We’d like to thank everyone who tried the demo and, of course, those who bought the game.
Recently a new website has been created on http://xblcg.info/ that allows users to browse and rate all the available Community Games (including ours, of course). We encourage our readers to log in into the website (you’ll have to use a Microsoft Passport account) and rate all their games they’ve played. That should be useful to let other users know what games are worth the try and what aren’t.
For 4th consecutive week, Little Racers has selled well enough to make a place in the weekly Top 9.
Also, we’ve finally managed to get a working multiplayer version. It will still take some time until release, since there’re many things to improve and check for stability issues etc, so please be patient.
While Waaghman is working very hard on the Little Racers patches and updates (yes, he’s working full time on the online mode), I’m coding some tools and editors four our next games.
I already did some tools for another game that we started (and it probably won’t be finished) and it served me as a learning experience. One of the most annoying things of it was the different kind of things formed that part of a level. We had tiles, but also random geometry, player locations and some other things. The code was becoming a real mess that growed on each new iteration.
This time I’m making a generic level editor, and trying to keep the code clean. The idea is simple: a level has a size, and it can contain layers (just like in photoshop). So you can have a layer which represents a tilemap, and another one that shows the player positions, and all of them are independent.
Right now, the basic framework is done, and I’ve got some layers working. Of course, it has been designed to load and save the levels to XML. Most of the layers that are missing are just modifications of the ones I made, so it shouldn’t take long (but if I’ve learned something through the years is that everything takes more time than expected).
MilkEditor Work in Progress
I want the editor to be easily customizable, so it can load external layer-types through dlls, so we’ll be able to use the editor on different games without compiling the full thing. It wasn’t a high priority feature, but in C# it was done in less than half an hour.
I have to say that I haven’t had much problems while developing in Windows Forms. Usually, doing this kind of app is something boring, and you end up with lots of little hacks to make the layouts work as expected. But this time, there are tiny ugly things here and there, but everything is much more clean than usual, and I’m pretty proud of it. I’m actually enjoying developing this tool.
When I finish this, there are other more ‘in-depth’ tools that I have to make. But those are really small apps to simplify some specific tasks. I’ll post about them when I have some new material to show. See you later!