Little Racers has just reached 2,000 sales on Xbox Live Indie Games! To celebrate it, we’re giving away 15 free codes of the game.
If you’re interested in receiving one of these free codes, all you have to do is retweet our message on Twitter. On August 10th, we’ll pick the winners at random. Codes will be sent via direct message on Twitter.
Although we would be more than happy to continue working on the game, making more upgrades and adding new features, our time is limited and currently the game is not getting enough sales to justify the resources that would take to improve it. So, if everything continues like this, v1.3 will be the last update of Little Racers.
We’re doing our best, trying to market the game in every way possible, but our resources are very limited and can’t invest money on advertising, specially for such a limited market as Xbox Live Community Games is.
The plan
We’ve come up with an idea that could work, but we need some help from our fellow readers and Little Racers fans. To make it simple: You help us promote Little Racers, and we’ll add new content and updates to the game. Don’t be afraid, there’s no money involved in this. All you need to play this promotion game is a Twitter account.
Below you’ll find some of the features that some users have asked for, and some others that we have thought of. Every feature has a cost assigned: That’s the number of tweets needed for the update to be enqueued into our development plan.
The rules
If you’re interested in one (or more) of the items, all you have to do is to post a Tweet with the tags #xblcg , #littleracers , and the update you’re interested in. For example, if you’re interested in the “More tracks” item, you could post a Tweet with the text “I’ve played Little Racers and want more tracks! #xblcg #littleracers #moretracks”.
We’ll check Twitter every day for tweets with the #littleracers tag, and update the item count with the new data. Twitter accounts with less than 10 followers will count only as 0.25 points, and those with no followers will not count. This is to avoid creation of empty Twitter accounts.
It is possible to vote for more than one item if you’re interested, at least until we get some feedback on this contest. Of course, the best way to achieve the required number of tweets is by telling your friends about the game so they retweet your vote.
Improve game menus (font readability, improve usability of some sections, etc.). 175 Tweets. #improvemenu
Background game finder to look for online opponents while playing single player. 1/250 Tweets. #backgroundfinder
Online lap records. 200 Tweets. #onlinerecords
Challenge mode, with missions like “Beat this lap time”, “Win this race”, “Win and don’t crash”, etc. 250 Tweets. #challengemode
Drop game price to 200MP: 2/500 Tweets. #dropprice
Track editor: 1/750 Tweets. #trackeditor
Single player career mode: 1000 Tweets. #careermode
Please take in mind that, even if the item gets enough tweets, it won’t be done right away, it will take some time to develop etc. Also, the required number of tweets could change over time, depending on the impact of this promotion on sales.
Of course, if you have any kind of feedback or idea about this promotion attempt, or some additional items that we could add to the list, we’re more than eager to listen to it.
v1.3 update for Little Racers is available for download. You’ll have to redownload the game since updates aren’t automatic yet in Xbox Community Games.
This is mainly a bugfix release. It features the following improvements:
Bugfixes
Fixed crash issues when the connection couldn’t be established while trying to join a game from an invite or via the find games section
Fixed crash when directly starting the game from an accepted invite
Improvements
In networked games, other cars’ horn is silenced when a car reaches the finish line.
Now cars can be controlled with the D-Pad.
Improved upsell screen.
Fixed minor translation issues both in spanish and english.
This is probably the last update of the game in the near future, we’re focusing on 2 new games, we’ll post updates on their development soon. Also we’ll be starting a special promotion attempt on Little Racers soon, so please stay tuned.
We have got feedback from some people, and experienced the problem ourselves too. In some cases, when trying to join an online game, it crashes to the dashboard with a “Code 4” error.
This error happens when the connection can not be established, we’re not sure yet about the reasons for this. Also it seems that accepting an invite when the game is still not loaded also causes a crash.
We’re working on a patch that should treat both errors aproppiatedly and show a message instead of crashing.We’ll try to determine the reason of the failed connections too.
Until the patch is issued, we recommend you to join a game via “Quick connect” instead of “Find Games” or accepting an invite. The quick connect option does not cause the crash, it just creates another session if you can’t connect to an existing one.
We want to thank everyone that is out there playing online, we’ve had lots of fun racing against you.
Finally, after a troubled review, the v1.2 update is available for download. You’ll have to redownload the game since updates aren’t automatic yet in Xbox Community Games.
Remember the changes for this revision. The most important ones are the freezing fix and the incorporation of the Multiplayer mode.
Full Change log from the v1.1 version:
Bugfixes
Fixed freeze issues that happened on V1.1, they were due to the Sound.Play() framework bug and memory leaks.
Gameplay tweaks
Lightened car textures to improve visibility and details.
Reduced engine volume
Handicap effect is more smoothed to reduce the “stats hiccup” that it could produce
Set a minimum speed below which the car doesn’t reduce speed when crashing
Now cars going over a wrong side can’t collide with other cars. They get a ghost effect when this happens.
Crashes don’t affect car attributes at all (before they did for half second).
Improved cars grip.
Cars are slowed a little more when skidding
Cars can turn a little better when skidding.
Reduced a bit max car speed.
“Random” Car class only selects classes between E and A, to avoid too slow or too fast cars.
Lessened wait time after choosing cars to 3 seconds
Improvements
Improved a lot game performance on crowded races.
Improved ingame font readibility.
Improved upsell screen.
Sign in screen shows the sign in level needed (Guest on local games, Signed in on System Link, and Gold over Xbox LIVE).
Reduced gamertag text size on sign in screens.
Improved the song start system when starting a race.
Player icons aren’t show on race countdown
Improved skid particles
New features
Online Multiplayer mode
System link, Xbox Live
Integrated championship mode, can be restarted over and over.
Joining system much like Race Driver GRID: You can join while a race is in progress but cannot race until the current race finishes.
Allows host migration
Allows invites
Quick join and find game features.
Public and private session features.
Added dynamic obstacles to many tracks, they serve two purposes: Add more movement on screen (races were a bit “static”) and serve as walls, but less clausthrophobic.
When a crash issue is found, the game tries to show the exception message on screen instead to giving a Code 4 directly.
Added one extra particle effect on crash
Added intermitent vibration when going off track or over the pianos.
Added a cloud system to add some extra variety to tracks.
Added 2 new tracks, “Derby” and “Asphalt”
Now the time difference to the car in first place is shown when finishing a lap.
Car color configuration is saved automaticallly for each player.
Race configuration is saved automatically.
Added a tips section that browses all the loading tips available.
Added ingame sounds for events like race start, race finish and last lap.
Now cars leave a colored trail when going fast.
Added a detailed trail when the car is going in first place.
Added a section about car attributes on the how to play.
If you follow our Twitter account, you might already know that the review process is stalled at 75%.
Why is that? The review process for Xbox Community Games (also known as Indie Games) states that, if the game is translated to many languages, each language has to be reviewed before getting accepted. That’s perfectly logical and understandable.
Our game is translated into english and spanish. That means that we need some spanish Premium users to review our game (2 people if we’re not mistaken). Sadly, it seems that not even one spanish reviewer has tried the game since the review started about two weeks ago.
That’s the main reason for the v1.2 update delay (around two months since it was finished).
It’s sad, but it seems that right now there’s no reason to translate our games into spanish, even when it’s free for us since we’re native speakers. It’s not Microsoft’s fault, we agree with the review process, it’s just that there aren’t many spanish reviewers out there. We’re doing our part of the job, and review other games in spanish as soon as possible.
Our apologies for the update delay. We’ll notify you when the game is available as usual. We just don’t know how much time it can take.
A rare error that could appear on race finish has been the reason of failing the update. This issue will be fixed right away, and next week we’ll post the update again for review.
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