The History of MilMo: 2009

Hello MilMonauts,

It's finally time for the next part of the "History of MilMo" blog post series! You can read about 2008 here, and the Brazilian Portuguese version of our text here. This time we will take a look what happened back in 2009. This was the year Junebud finally released the closed beta version of the game, just before Christmas.

A collection of MilMo avatars from 2008 to the beginning of 2012

2009: The Closed Beta Goes Live

At this point MilMo was still a mix between realistic looking materials and cartoony avatars. The water found in the pool at Seastar Resort (or Summer Island as it was called in 2009) was way more realistic than today. The same can be said about the ocean.

They are a bit rough, but the avatars are staring to look more and more like the modern MilMo avatars.

Picture of early Seastar Resort from inside the Unity editor.

Seastar Island was a mix between the modern Nikonos Island and what came to be the chat level Seastar Resort in 2010. There are also some details from Lightmill Island, like the mill.  As you can see the buildings were all white, but the structure of the buildings and the flower shaped umbrellas still remain today. The trampolines were removed later on, and the buildings made orange.

Girl avatar at the old Seastar Resort before it became a chat level.

The boy is holding an early version of the bat. Can you see the big rhubarbs in the background?

At Summer Island. The game is now less than half a year from the closed beta release. These trees never made it to the final version of the closed beta.

A girl avatar smiling by the pool.

The two main goals of 2009 were to release a playable beta version of the game on milmogame.com, and make sure enough talented people joined the Junebud Crew. We wanted to create a balanced mix between experienced game developers and new, young talent. If your crew only exists of veterans you will not get new, fresh ideas and find out what's hot and whats not. On the other side, if you have a majority of juniors there's a chance a lot of confusion will arise since there's not clear vision or experience of how to handle previous challenges. It's one thing to make games for fun or at school, but another ting to make them for living. 

Early concepts for different MilMo islands. Some of them made it to the game, some did not (yet?).

Above you can see some early concepts of Summer Tide Saga islands. At this time Summer Tide Saga was just called the "Summer World". At least six of these islands can be found in-game today: Swamp Island, Rose Island (the old one), Sage Oak, Lightmill and Alien Ruins. The first level concept art ever created actually shows Visitor Island, but the island itself was released almost 1,5 years later. When we released the MilMo beta in late 2009 it only featured one island, the Summer Island.

Early version of Kraken Island. The water is still pretty realistic, but the characteristic MilMo clouds are there!

The game starts to look more and more like the MilMo known today. Do you recognize Jay from the MilMo Comics?

Now it's only about 1 month left for the game until we let players in. Note the lack of interface, only an early version of the shop button is visible.

Swamp Island and Rose Island. One month left to the closed beta launch.

At this point MilMo as we know it is starting appear. The water is not as realistic anymore, the chunky trees are being replaced by more MilMo-ish ones, the avatars are starting to look smooth and the art direction is more consistent. We wanted to create a unique look for MilMo. It should be possible to identify the game with one single screen shot taken anywhere, on any level.

The MilMo forum goes live in late 2009. The main function of the forum back then was to help players report bugs (which they were really good at!).

The very first splash screen ever to be used at the at milmogame.com

In December 2009 we finally launched the first version of the game. At this point we had no idea the game would be translated into Brazilian Portuguese. There was only one MilMo available, and you had to sign up and get a beta key in order to play. There was no world map, no friend list, there were coins instead of gems, a very basic medal track and only 1 island. It was time for the first players to start exploring what we had built for the past 1,5 years. The big challenge of 2010 would be to expand this tiny island world start finding and fixing all the bugs.

Next time I will guide you trough 2010. Stay tuned!

Yours,

Community Managers Sara & Ivan

Previously in this series:

1. The History of MilMo: 2008