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:
- Host public game: Equivalent to championship mode. Each player gets points for his position at race finish, plus one extra point if he manages to get the best lap time. This mode allows the host to set some parameters, such as lap number and car class. Everyone will be able to join the game, even at mid-championship (with the handicap that it implies).
- Host private game: Just like public game, but only friends of the host are allowed to join.
- Quick join: This option does a search for available games and, if one or more is found, it joins to the one that offers the best network conditions. If no game is found, a game with some fixed parameters (10 races, 12 max players, random car class, no handicap) is created.
- Find: This mode shows all created games with some info on the creation parameters, and allows the player to join one of them. I’m not implementing a search function since I don’t think there will be so many simultaneous games to make it necessary. If the online mode renders very successful and the need of a search function arises, we’ll add it.
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.
Tags: Little Racers
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):
- Little Racers trial downloads: 37182
- Little Racers full purchases: 1575
- Conversion rate: 4.23%
- Gross earnings (400MP = $5.00): $7875 ( 5946€ )
- Microsoft 30% share: $2362.5
- Our share: $5512.5 ( 4162€ )
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.
Tags: Little Racers
Little Racers v1.1 is available for download. The changes from the first release are the following:
- Fixed not-so-rare freeze crash (was due to badly managed memory usage).
- Added 3 tracks (Pennyville,Valhalla,Snakepit) and modified one of the original ones (Ikena)
- Added 6 new cars
- Reduced demo limitations, now the only limitations are time and level number.
- Added reverse, now cars can go backwards
- Added more tips and quotes to the loading screen.
- Improved ingame HUD a bit
- Added an option to repeat the last race (except for championship mode)
- Added a button to go back to the last safe point of the track (if you get lost)
Since the Community Games updates aren’t automatic yet, you’ll have to redownload the game for the changes to apply. You can do it from the Xbox Live Marketplace
The V1.2 version, which should include online multiplayer, is being developed right now. Thanks for your support and interest.
Tags: Little Racers
Little Racers has been reviewed on XNA Roundup
Tags: Little Racers
Little Racers demo has been reviewed on IGN Communal Shower.
Tags: Little Racers
So IGN has “reviewed” Little Racers demo, and their conclusions are that the game is a Rip Off from Ironman Stewarts’ Off Road… well, I don’t really know where to start.
I could understand if they said it was a clone of Super Sprint, it’s obviously based on the game perspective and track layouts, but Off road? Come on, for god’s sake…
Apart from that, they scold the game for not having power-ups. I’ve told it many times, the game doesn’t have power-ups because it’s a RACING game. I do not recall Need for speed, Colin Mc rae, GRID, etc. having any kind of power-ups during race. This is no Mario Kart. Why should LR have them?
They obviously started the game hoping it was Super Sprint, and were disappointed when they found it wasn’t, but anyway they attacked us for being based on its layout.
If you think the game is similar, I encourage you to play Super Sprint again, you’ll probably change your opinion.
Tags: Little Racers
Recently, Little Racers’ demo download numbers have reached the astonishing number of 25,000! Since it has been available for about 15 days, that makes an average of almost 2,000 downloads per day!
Also, on another topic, we’ve decided to delay a bit the online multiplayer mode to ensure it works flawlessly, and we’ve focused on finishing the first update, which addresses the freezing bugs some people were experiencing.
This update should be available soon. The full changelist will be posted soon, but the major changes, apart from this fix, are the 3 new maps available, all of them wider and simpler, as almost all of the users asked for them.
Tags: Little Racers
