An Interview With Milkstone Studios

Milkstone Studios are a small team of Spanish developers intent on “making fun games whilst having fun doing them”. With three titles under their belts, I caught up with their head programmer Alejandro González Fiel shortly after lavishing their most recent title MotorHEAT with praise to find out a little about their development process and their newest title Avatar Ninja.

Nukezilla: OK, firstly, could you tell us a little bit about your team and studio setup?

Alejandro González Fiel: Milkstone is mainly formed by two people: Miguel Herrero, and me.

We work from home and don’t have much time to spend, since we’re doing this on our hobby time. Although both of us are programmers, he usually does most non-coding related tasks (graphics, SFX, music’¦) and I do the coding part.

We’ve also received help from our friends at some points, such as in Wool‘s level design and beta testing.

NZ: How do you find inspiration for your games?

AGF: Both Miguel Herrero and me are pretty experienced gamers, with a passion for playing both good and bad games. We mantain a list of ideas that could be converted into games and write them each time an idea comes to our mind. When the time to select a new idea comes, we look at the list and select the one we think that’s the best, given the time and resources available.

NZ: How long does an average game’s development take?

AGF: We’re focusing on short development cycles to ensure games are finished (it’s hard to work during hobby time if you get bored). Most of our games have taken around 3 months of development.

NZ: The graphics engine utilised by MotorHEAT was a massive step up from both earlier releases – what encouraged you to make the leap from 2D to 3D?

AGF: Our main objective with MotorHEAT was to release a game with really high quality 3D graphics, since most of games on the Indie Games channel are rather simple.

We’re already very experienced with 3D graphics in our main jobs, and the only reason we didn’t do it before is due to the lack of modellers. The engine we developed is very focused on 3D: the first game that used it, never released on Indie Games, was a 3D spaceship game.

NZ: Alongside releases like Decimation X, MotorHEAT seems to be championing the Indie Games channel as a hotbed for somewhat of an arcade renaissance. Do you think that the channel has genuine potential to house the type of simple, addictive games that both the Live Arcade and retail largely ignore?

AGF: For sure. As in every other marketplace, the amount of truly innovative games on the Indie channel is low. Most of them are remakes or are inspired by already invented gameplay (ours aren’t an exception).

Since the games’ size (in terms of variety and length) should be limited (due to relatively low sales numbers), I think Indie games should focus on simple and polished gameplay, with high production levels.

NZ: Your disappointment surrounding the sales of both Wool and MotorHEAT has been openly expressed on your website. Do you feel that the low sales of both titles is because of marketing problems on either Milkstone’s or Microsoft’s part, or is it something deeper within the setup of the Indie Games channel?

AGF: Wool was our mistake, we won’t blame anyone other than us for that. People just don’t like sheep herding games! We’ve recently posted a Postmortem on our site with our conclusions about the development process and the game.

MotorHEAT is another story. We think the game really is good enough, gameplay wise, to stand among the top Indie games. We’ve done our best to market the game, but mostly to no avail. It’s hard to tell people on a website (or any other media) ‘œThis game is great! turn on your console, go here, then here, then here, and try the demo!’

I’d say it’s in part Microsoft’s fault, but not for not marketing enough the channel. The main problem is the dashboard itself: It’s just not equipped to browse between almost a thousand different games. As with Apple’s App Store, it’s very top-centric. If you’re on the top 20, you’ll sell a lot. If you’re not, you’re doomed. Our game is rated #43 on the channel, but we only get 15 trial downloads a day.

Some things that I think would improve Marketplace usability are: A ‘œtop grossing’ list, to help games that are not just 80MP to have a chance (since all other lists are just ordered by download numbers), a search function, related games and recommendation system, more items in the top charts, a random picks list’¦

Really, there’s a lot of work to be done here, and in my opinion the console with the best marketplace will be the one that will win the war for the next generation.

NZ: You ran a competition to celebrate the release of MotorHEAT with a slew of MS Point prizes, is this something that you’d consider again for future titles?

AGF: Not in the short term. Problem is, we’re not big enough to be heard when we shout that there’s a competition with lots of prizes to be given, so it’s unlikely to get enough people to try the game to justify the investment in prizes etc.

NZ: Could you tell us anything about the newly released Avatar Ninja?

AGF: It’s a reaction game with simple gameplay and good graphics, but increasingly challenging and with world rankings – a bit like MotorHEAT but with different gameplay. It’s not better though.

NZ: With the Indie Games channel becoming somewhat of a dumping ground for Avatar themed titles, what will Avatar Ninja do to separate itself from the crowd?

AGF: There are two ways in which Avatar Ninja shines over most Avatar themed games: graphical quality and production levels. It’s our fourth game and we’ve learned how to do clean and pretty user interfaces, and we make good use of particle systems and lighting to improve overall graphics’ quality.

Gameplay could be better. We went with a control scheme that was maybe too difficult to improve with more gameplay elements, but it should be challenging and could get you addicted anyway.

NZ: Your persistent online ranking system implemented in both Wool and MotorHEAT is extremely impressive – is it code that you keep close to your chest, or is it something which you’d be happy for other developers to use?

AGF: Our P2P score system is just a heavily modified version of the one available here. We redid the design from scratch, but kept the connection logic etc, so that it would fit our needs (more flexibility to add different levels, checksums, etc.).

We don’t have any problem in sharing the modified version with other people if someone asks for it. It’s just that we don’t have much spare time and it’s not very well documented. That’s the reason we’ve not posted this and some other components on our website.

What we don’t plan on publishing anytime soon is the whole game engine. It would require too much time and effort to document it, make tutorials, give support, etc.

NZ: Any other games in the pipeline that you could tell us about?

AGF: Our next game will be probably another avatar game designed for multiplayer and party games. Following that, we have more original games in mind, but they’ll take longer so it will depend on how sales go.

NZ: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, and we wish you every success in the future.

Milkstone are the creators of Little Racers, Wool, MotorHEAT and the newly released Avatar Ninja.