We’ve successfully ported Infinity Danger and Zombie Football Carnage to PC, and now they’re available in our store!
We have a special offer going on: Each game is priced $4, but if you purchase 2 of them, you’ll get them for just $3 each one. And, if you purchase 3 of them, it’ll be just $2.5 each one. So feel free to pick the combination you prefer, and you’ll get them at a discounted price!
Check them out!
Remember also that you can download the demo by just going to the corresponding game page.
Tags: Infinity Danger, MotorHEAT, Zombie Football Carnage
We are currently in the process of porting some of our previous games to PC/Windows, and we’ve set up a small web store in the product pages. Although there are still some things to work out in our website to make it easier for visitors to check out the games, the store should be completely functional. You can use credit cards or a Paypal account.
For now, only MotorHEAT is available in the store, but we plan on getting Zombie Football Carnage and Infinity Danger very soon. You will have demos at your disposal as well.
And, to celebrate, we’re starting with a 50% discount on the MotorHEAT full version! Just use the MH_RELEASE code when asked for a coupon and you’ll get the game for half the price! This will only work until Sunday Nov 13th!
Click here to view the products available.
You can download the MotorHEAT demo on the product page: http://www.milkstonestudios.com/motorheat/.
Please bear in mind that, although we’ve tested the game thoroughly, it’s our first game available for windows, so some issues can arise during gameplay or during setup. If that’s the case, please contact us and we’ll help you! Also remember you can try the demo before you buy the final game, to ensure it works properly :).
Tags: MotorHEAT, Zombie Football Carnage
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
Tags: MotorHEAT
It’s been a long wait, but finally the contest has come to an end and we have our winners chosen. If you’re one of the lucky winners, you’ll have to reply to the message we sent to you during the next week, or we’ll choose another winner.
Best score (1600MP Card)
The Last Little Racers code
Wool codes
- DeGrimmis (Level 10)
- SovietSniper32 (Level 13)
- MAS Flawless1 (Level 11)
- WrestlingFan5 (Level 32)
MotorHEAT codes
- soso g (Level 7)
- darthmick13 (Level 22)
1600 MP Cards
- video gal (Level 10)
- My Wife Said So (Level 11)
- Territjjb (Level 27)
- Meritaron (Level 20)
- RAAAAAAAAAAH (Level 14)
- RAGERIPPER (Level 18)
- losmatzos (Level 10)
- BMWSebastian (Level 5)
- SHOUCHOUJI (Level 19)
- JB BMW1989 (Level 16)
- MarCos PoLoTos (Level 13)
- RaKKa vandal (Level 29)
- xxDANNYBOY141 (Level 11)
- Arcturus 3009 (Level 24)
- Mr Nye Sky (Level 10)
- DrLickit701 (Level 12)
- soulcollecter0 (Level 23)
- Lunin (Level 8 )
- REGGY468 (Level 18)
Thanks to everyone who took part!
Sadly for us, the contest didn’t have much effect on the game’s awareness, so we won’t be doing a similar thing anytime soon.
Tags: MotorHEAT
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: MotorHEAT
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
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
Some people has asked us to release the soundtrack of our latest game MotorHEAT. Well, here it is! The menu music plus the 4 in-game songs . All with a creative commons license so you can use them as you want, as long as you don’t make profit of it. Hope you enjoy it!
Tags: MotorHEAT
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
- Canada: 4/5 (26 ratings)
- France: 3.5/5 (25 ratings)
- Germany: 4/5 (38 ratings)
- Japan:4/5 (38 ratings)
- Spain: 4.75/5 (14 ratings)
- United Kingdom: 4/5 (93 ratings)
- United States: 3.75/5 (175 ratings)
Sweden and singapore are not rated yet
Tags: MotorHEAT