A Sort Of Homecoming

Back in 2008, when we came up with the idea for MilMo, we envisioned three big core features for the game. The first one was to be the adventure gameplay that you see in MilMo today. We released a basic Beta version of this in December 2009, and it would take another nine months to get to a point were we felt satisfied with the gameplay and for the team to complete the first big world.

Last fall, we began work on the second big component in the evolution of our game; Homes. We wanted everyone to have their own private space in MilMo, a place to withdraw for relaxation or chatting after a hard day's work adventuring. A place for designing and building - and showing stuff to your friends!

Concepts of furniture

From the very beginning we've had super grandiose plans for this feature set, but we didn't want to get stuck in pre-production for ages, so we decided to develop a minimum core feature set and get it in the hands of you players by really early 2011. This seemed like a big challenge, but we decided nothing was impossible.

Speaking as a game designer I was both petrified and thrilled by the gameplay challenges. How do you distinguish between the actions of sitting in a chair and moving it, without adding new buttons to the control scheme? How the heck do you move a window from one wall to another - in multiplayer - without pausing the game or showing editing gizmos? How to let players place small objects without adding complexity to the interface? We looked at several games with furnishing features. Some used intensely mouse-driven interfaces. Others had great gamepad driven furnishing gameplay. I decided to go with a light, context sensitive mouse editing mode and avoid forcing the user to learn new buttons.

Move it!

As development unfolded our Homes feature suddenly seemed to take on a life of its own and everything fell into place nicely. Sometimes MilMo just tells us how it wants to work, and we obey :)

After a fairly short development span - and a super-human effort by our lead gameplay programmer - we released the Homes feature earlier this week. The feature set is far from complete, but we've had tremendous fun playing around with it at the office and we hope you will find it as entertaining as we do!

What will your home look like?

So what can Homes do so far?
Well, you can design your dream Home by choosing from a great number of cool objects such as floors, windows, wallpapers, tables, sofas, chairs, beds and other furniture. You can place decorations such as clocks, paintings, lamps, curtains and carpets. Also, don't forget to check out our über cool music players. The juke box and the 80's ghetto blaster can play 6 unique songs each, adding that special touch to your Home. Pretty much all of the items come in all the different colors you like. Once your Home is complete you can trade Home Keys with your friends. This will let you visit them whenever you like, or throw a party at your own place. The possibilities are endless and there is a lot of fun to be had!

Classy, isn't it?

So what's next for Homes?

The most eagerly anticipated feature at the office right now is the ability to extend your home with multiple rooms. We want you to be able to build skyscrapers, villas, mansions, castles and even dungeons. This is something that we are planning to look into soon. We also have a whole new range of usable items planned, so stay tuned!

I also want to take this opportunity to introduce MilMo's new, epic Adventure: Air World.
Our company has a real head start when it comes to 3D browser gaming (a field of business that will become increasingly crowded, mark my words). This is a lead that we intend to keep. That's why we sometimes stop and reassess how we think about making games. Heading into the new year we decided, for various reasons, that we wanted to reboot the MilMo level design process and art direction.

As the level design team began building the new world, I established 6 requirements for them:

1. Shorter level load times
2. Better looking visuals (though using a lot less memory)
3. More fun gameplay (but no time from the gameplay coders)
4. More keyboard friendly areas
5. Faster development times (so we can release levels more often)
6. Improved rendering performance

The brand new adventure Air World

Some of these requirements tend to work against each other by nature. It is hard to improve rendering performance and load times while making the visuals look better et cetera. Doing everything at once is really hard. But our level designers came through and surprised me when they delivered on each bullet point above. Compared to our previous levels, the Air World maps load and render a lot faster and are more fun to play. We can make more of them in a shorter amount time than before and they look gorgeous! The level design team rose to the challenge by inventing a couple of brilliant new technical art workflows in the process. These workflows are now being investigated and adapted by our character art team with great enthusiasm.

Concepts for Air World

The scenario for Air World originated in a simple idea by our concept artist: What if Atlantis - the ancient and technologically advanced civilization - hadn't sunken into the ocean, but rather broken up through some sort of gravitational reactor meltdown, and started floating ever upwards into the air? Along with some Aztec, Mayan and Greek influences this idea really got our artists and designers - and our brilliant writer - excited, and the result is an awesome journey into a strange and wonderful sky kingdom.


Well, you may have guessed it by now - I'm proud of the Junebud Crew! I'm also overjoyed with this MilMo release and I wish you all a lot of fun with Homes and Air World,

As for the third big, huge and forthcoming gameplay element of MilMo, I will have to get back to you on that one ...

Cheers

/Calle


Today's post is made by Calle Lundgren, Game Director at Junebud. Calle has been making games for everything from the C64 to the PS3. He has also had time to help found a successful band and to start up Junebud! He has a hand in everything that goes on at the company - especially MilMo. 

ACHTUNG BUNKER!

Hello, players.

Last week our community manager Sara and I went to Hamburg, Germany for the Causal Connect convention. Junebud sends teams to game industry conventions around the world, like many other game development companies do. Now, why do we attend these things? Good question. Let's use our Casual Connect visit as an example. We brought a cheap camera along for the trip, so enjoy the grainy pics.

Off to Germany! Ola at Copenhagen Airport before boarding.

Before we begin I want to establish some background. When you develop a game you go through a number of phases. First you need the idea, and then you need a of proof of concept. This is usually a prototype. After that you need a crack team of artists, designers, programmers, sound engineers and project managers to develop the game into a production version. In my experience, this can easily lead to what I call “bunker mode”. 

Hamburg at near eight in the evening, and we just found our hotel. We still had four more hours of work ahead of us, networking.

Time to head back out. Ola and Sara back in the hotel lobby, ready for a business meeting.

Bunker mode is when the team is so focused on making a good product that they cut themselves off from the outside world. Safe inside their air tight shell, developers find the focus they need finish the job. If you're lucky you get to emerge from your bunker with a piece of sheer magic, catching the world by surprise. If you're less lucky you may find that other teams made better versions of your game months ago. This is why business and community people need to stay updated at all times.

  

It takes a while to get used to each new convention. Sort of like a new game. Here I am, consulting the mini-map.

The Junebud Crew left the bunker as we deployed MilMo on Facebook in July of 2010. By then we felt our game was cool enough to take on the competition. That led to the next phase: finding good partners to help distribute the game. “Partners” can be marketing experts to help you raise awareness, or it could be someone who provides translation services. It could be full fledged publishers who specialize in licensing a game for distribution on one or more markets. Last, but not least, partners could be someone willing to invest money and help grow your company.

We crossed the John F. Kennedy brücke (bridge) every day on our way to the Convention Center. At 1,7 million people, Hamburg is a big city.

Another big thing at conventions is meeting other developers to share experiences with them. Bunker mode can be dangerous, because you isolate yourself and can lose track of what's going on around you. There are always excellent lectures held at game conventions. Casual Connect is particularly good for Junebud because it focuses on browser games and all kinds of social games. Because we needed to both do business and collect information, Sara and I had a tight schedule. While I spent my time in meetings, while Sara mined the different lecture tracks for useful information.

There's fresh business information disclosed at industry lectures. With long days, It's hard to stay sharp for several straight days of lectures. Sara did a god job!

 

A day at a convention might look like this.

1. Wake up at the hotel.
2. Have breakfast. Breakfast is really important, because it will be a long day.
3. Head to the convention center. If you're lucky you can walk it, otherwise you may have to use a taxi, a tram or a bus.
4. Arrive at convention center. Check that the schedule is up to date and that you know where meeting places and lecture halls are.
5. Have meetings or attend lectures.
6. Lunch (in Hamburg, we were given sausage for lunch, 3 days in a row. Hat trick?)
7. Same as 5, but even more of it.
8. At the end of the lectures, there are mixers being thrown. These are good places to have snacks and meet people, and they typically last about an hour.
9. Get back to the hotel. By now you've usually worked your first 8 hours.
10. Find a place to have dinner. Dinner is often with business partners, so you can discuss future projects.
11. Make your way to a sponsored party. They are usually held in clubs and are for registered convention visitors only. It's a great place to meet people in a relaxed context
12. Get back to the hotel. It's probably around midnight, or later, by now.
13. Get to bed. It's an early day tomorrow.
    
    
      
    

    Me and Sara hit the club floor in style. That's right. Blue Steel!

    
    

    
    

    
    

    

    Lots of friends, new and old. Parties are a great place to swap business cards and meet cool game people from around the world.

We had a very good time in Hamburg. For me, one of the coolest things was to get to meet up with my friend Vlad Micu, web editor for Gamesauce. He also introduced me to my long time hero Ben Cousins, general manger of EA's Easy Studios, the man behind, among other things, the Battlefield Heroes initiative. We all got to sit down and talk about 3D browser games, free distribution and all the challenges and opportunities that come with that package. Very inspiring!

I always try to get a good breakfast. You never know when you'll get to eat again. We ended up given sausage for lunch every day. Ah, Germany.

At the end of the week we were pretty tired, and it was good to get back to the office. Sara has spent her time making a big presentation based on the lectures in Hamburg, that we will use to spread what we learned to the rest of the Junebud Crew. As for me, I've been busy following up on the exciting meetings. It's been nothing but new meetings, e-mails, LinkedIn and phone since.

After four days in Germany it was time to get back to Sweden. On the train home from the airport, at ten in the evening, we were both pretty tired.

Take care,

Ola

 




Today's post is made by Ola Holmdahl, game designer and CEO at Junebud. Ola's previous career includes teaching game design, doing game design and creating concept art. In a previous life he was a freelance artist and an academic (but not at the same time).

Update 23: New Items

Greetings, MilMonauts,

MilMo has been updated again, so let's get down to business! A new Teleport to Friend feature has been introduced. If you have Telepods, you can use this feature to meet up with people from your friends list! We've also increased all quest rewards a lot. Some medals, however, now yield less gems.

The Swordsman Suit suits most adventurers. So does the haircut "Shockwave".

The mighty Overlord Helm! It's based upon Alice's suggestion from the "make a hat"-contest held at the Forum.
To see the original hat, click here.

Update 23 brings you a whole set of new hairstyles.
Watch out for the Magma Blade. So hot it will make you melt!

The sharp and shiny Storm Blade. Go for the pirate look together with the new Pirate Hat and a fashionable Skull Belt.

Romantic punk. Is there even such a thing?

 Anyway, here's what's new:

• New Teleport-to-Friend feature! 
• All quests have increased gem rewards 
• New, awesome clothes in Cash Shop
• 3 new and cool swords in Cash Shop 
• New quests! 
• New V.E.I.L. quests for members! 
• Faster load times 
• Bug with Epic Sword visuals fixed
• Improved bad word filter 
• Improved GUI for Star Token collection
• The Winterfest event is over

Not bad! Let us know what you think about the new updates. 
We love feedback! Stay tuned for more exciting MilMo updates!

Yours,

Sara

Game Design Student?

How do you end up doing games for a living? For some this might be their biggest dream. For me it was one big coincidence. Unlike some people I know, I haven't been playing games since I was a kid. I didn't grow up with the Nintendo 8-bit. I don't get all nostalgic and dreamy when someone mentions Final Fantasy VII or Monkey Island. Sure, these are great games, but I spent my childhood climbing trees and collecting weird creatures in my basement.

Before I moved to Sweden I lived in the Archipelago of Finland

One Easter I was visiting Oslo, Norway, and my uncle gave me a copy of Halo: Combat Evolved and Red Alert. These two games completely absorbed me for the rest of my stay in Norway, and when I got home to Finland I had to buy Halo. I couldn't get any rest before I knew what happened to Master Chief. A couple of years later, I had started reading the PC Gamer magazine, not only because I was interested in the gaming news and reviews, but because I liked to look at the pictures and dream about what the games would be like. What would it be like designing stuff in the game? What was the story? What monsters would walk the earth in the game world? This was way more interesting to me than playing the actual game. The part I loved was to dream it up, to fantasize and design. The game companies seemed to be hubs of creativity. They had teams of skilled artist, people making up amazing stories and then mixed it all with cool music. Being a creative child, this almost seemed to good to be true. Could you really work with making these immersive products? 

Summer at the Åland Islands is great!

So when it was time for me to go to the University, PC Gamer had an article covering all the computer game educations available in Sweden. Even though I'm from Finland, I googled them up, and finally decided to apply to the University of Skövde (Högskolan i Skövde).

I got in! Then I immediately hit a brick wall. Long story short, the post office lost my confirmation letter to University of Skövde. Suddenly it seemed I had lost my spot at the game design program. This left me with two choices. I could travel to Australia and work for a year (my backup plan), or I could stay and fight for my place at the University. I made non-stop calls for three days in a row. After talking to the post office, the administrators at University of Skövde, the head master and several of teachers, they finally decided I was telling the truth, and so I got in (for real this time)! I was accepted to the computer game development program as an aspiring game designer. What did I know about computers, you ask? Not much at that time. About games? Probably less than you think. I wasn't a gamer. I didn't want to be a consumer of games. I wanted to produce them.

 

During my time at the University of Sköve me and my friends made a game for the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden

 The courses were really hard, I didn't have my own computer and I had moved to a city far, far away from my family. But little by little I started making friends, bought my very first computer and then learned how to upgrade my computer skills. There were like two or three other girls in my class, and about 40 boys. To my surprise eventually I became ”one of the boys”, but that's a topic for a whole different story.

Grown-ups likes trees too!

It might be a big coincidence that I ended up taking computer game development, but there's nothing random about how I was drawn to such a creative industry. By now, I realize how much hard work there's behind a game. It's not just about dreaming or doing all the things you love. Sometimes making games is tough, tiresome work. But the feelings of giving you, the MilMo players, a new update, makes it all worth while! Every time. 

Yours,

Sara

  

P.S Inside info about MilMo? Twitter.com/Saxen8

Sara is the Community Manager at Junebud. She also works with Quality Assurance (QA) and social media. She's got a bachelor's degree in game design, but likes the social part better than tweaking numbers. She usually spends her time moderating the forum, testing the game and planning new events. 

Jogar!

Hello, players. Today I want to talk about all of you, the people who play MilMo. If you've been using MilMo for a while, you've probably noticed that there are more players around these days. If you're a new arrival (the game has grown a lot during this last month), I want to extend a warm welcome. As I write this, MilMo has over 400 000 monthly active users on Facebook, and several more on milmogame.com and on Orkut, the leading social network in Brazil and India.

Reaching out to players is one of our top challenges, believe it or not. To play MilMo you must first know the game is there. The media flow is a competitive place, packed with noise, so getting exposure is either hard or expensive. 

 

MilMo in Portuguese

So let's take a step back and think about these things. Where do you learn about the games you play? Maybe a friend offers you a recommendation. Perhaps you see an ad somewhere on the Internet. It could be you read a review, or regularly browse something like the Featured Games Dashboard on Facebook. Whether you find a game you want to try or not when you do these things is the final link in what can be a long chain of events.

When we first released MilMo in December 2009, we used Google Adwords to create awareness. Perhaps you're one of the people who found out about the game way back then? The nice people who had been with us through Alpha also helped bring in a lot of their friends, of course, but it was great to see so many new users try the game with fresh eyes. Some of our early players made YouTube movies that helped spread the word, and we eventually got some early reviews on different game sites. Much to our surprise, we received nice reviews in Brazil, and in the spring of 2010 we had a huge influx of Brazilian players!

                        If you use Google, this will be old hat

After we released on Facebook in July of 2010, we put resources into Facebook Ads (duh) to see what would happen. The results were pretty good with lots of new people learning about MilMo. We were also helped by the fact that MilMo was a new entry that sorted near the top in our category in the Facebook games directory. That exposure meant that a bunch of players noticed our title. A lot of the Facebook players were people who hadn't played 3D MMOs before, so it's been nice to find that they seem to like it. A lot.

Google's Orkut is huge in Brazil and in India

Recently, we have begun a new round of expansion, which started when we released MilMo BR on Orkut. On the 17th of December 2010 we launched the Orkut version. MilMo BR runs on its own set of servers and is entirely in Portuguese!

MilMo's European servers, that service milmogame and Facebook

The big boost in user numbers on Facebook and milmogame.com also came in December, but was unrelated to the Orkut launch. Since the middle of last month, we've seen MilMo grow from tens of thousand of active users to hundreds of thousands. Though this has put some strain on our servers, it is amazing to see this kind of growth!

There are a lot of considerations when making games, but few are as important as reaching out to your audience. A game without players is like a party without people: a sad thing. Thank you for playing MilMo and populating the ever-expanding MilMoverse. It's going to be a fantastic journey.

All the best,

Ola

Today's post is made by Ola Holmdahl, game designer and CEO at Junebud. Ola's previous career includes teaching game design, doing game design and creating concept art. In a previous life he was a freelance artist and an academic (but not at the same time).

MilMo on the Move

We're extremely happy to be able to finally launch MilMo in Brazil, fully translated into Portuguese. Our Brazilian publisher, Mentez, has been great to work with and we're sure they will treat MilMo to a fantastic launch. The game is now available on Brazil's largest social network, Orkut and on www.milmo.com.br/ (ofcourse, neither of this will affect MilMo on Facebook or milmogame.com).

MilMo has been popular among Brazilian players from the very beginning. At first we found this a bit peculiar, but soon we found that some of the games that inspired MilMo are very popular in Brazil (for example Maplestory and Super Mario Bros). We also found that Brazil has a strong gaming culture, a fairly modern computer fleet, very computer-literate players and some 70 000 Internet cafés!

Now on to some news in MilMo Update 22!

The Flea Circus and the Kitchen

First off, we have two new and awesome levels for you, which unfolds more of the Mice & Maniax storyline and its dark mysteries. The strange and wonderful Flea Circus is finally open to the public (prepare for classic platform game craziness). Beyond it, we venture further into the mad scientist's house and try to survive the hellish Kitchen. Of course, all of this means new NPCs, creatures and tons of quests!

The Open Gift Dialog and some new Premium Items

This Holiday season the team has had great fun developing the long awaited Gift feature! In the Premium Shop, you can now click "Gift" on an item to get it for one of your friends. The recipient will get to open your present with a fun animation. Accompanying this feature is a batch of new cool premium items in the shop; weapons, holiday hats, samurai helmets, space marine outfits: you name it!

We're also launching the Winterfest Event on Seastar Resort and Kraken Island. It comes with a whole range of new Winter Medals. Collect them all and win the glorious Snow Gun!

Winterfest on Seastar Resort, and the new Profile Window

Another great new addition is the Profile Window, where you can view the details of any player. It displays information on title, membership, personal message, mood and any collected medals, tokens and reward items.

If you are playing on Facebook, you will notice that with this release, MilMo is officially switching from June Coins to Facebook Credits. Credits is the new official currency on Facebook (see how many you have in the top right corner of your browser). They are very easy to get a hold of, and they work in any game (!) on Facebook, including MilMo.

Vouchers can be upgraded to greater and greater value

With the Facebook Credits came an interesting design challenge. As we weren't allowed to give away Facebook's Credits, we couldn't convert your June Coins into Credits, and we couldn't give away Credits as Star Token awards for members. Because of this, we have come up with a new Voucher system that is part solution, part new gameplay system. A voucher is a small ticket that exists in four values: Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum. Bronze can be upgraded to Silver, Silver to Gold and so on. Star Tokens now award you Vouchers and your existing June Coins have been exchanged for Vouchers. To make sure we introduce the new system with a bang, we've given you Vouchers worth four times the amount of the June Coins you had!

Have Fun,

Calle

 
Today's post is made by Calle Lundgren, game designer and project manager at Junebud. Calle has been making games for everything from the C64 to the PS3. He has also had time to help found a successful band and to start up Junebud! He has a hand in everything that goes on at the company - especially MilMo. 

Channels of Communication

Since we decided to bring back Junebud's Twitter to life two weeks ago, I want to say a few words about communication. How do we, the people at Junebud, communicate with our players when we want to share news?

In the beginning there was only the homepage. Most people go to the homepage of a company if they want to find out if the servers are down, if there's a sale coming up or an update around the corner. A nice, informative and clean homepage is a great place to start. Under the category “News” you will find all the latest news and happenings within the MilMo Universe.

Next up, we've got the Forum. One big difference between the Forum and the homepage is the ability for the players to give feedback. The other difference is space. As you might have noticed we get more detailed about new updates on the Forum. Usually the post on MilMo's homepage links directly to the Forum post about what's new. This is our way of keeping away walls of texts from MilMo's homepage.

OK, so the Forum and the homepage are our two main ways of getting the news to our players. On top of that we've added the newsletter feature. The MilMo Newsletter is delivered once a month, more or less. We create these colorful, informative newsletters when we feel like we have some big news to share with you. For example: we released one when we first introduced the Shop. Managing newsletters is a delicate balance. No one likes spam, but we want our players to know whats going on. It's always a bit scary to press “send”, knowing that thousands of players will get the letter. If you messed something up, there's no way of undoing it.

Speaking about spam, that brings me to Facebook. Of course MilMo's got its very own Facebook page. Today, most companies are expected to have a site on Facebook. Facebook is the place where we share our news as briefs. It's the art of copy writing. We post status updates about once a week, so no spam. As for the Forum, players and visitors have the ability to give feedback. We might not answer all of the feedback (that would be impossible), but you can rest assured we're always lurking in the background, reading.

So, what's Twitter all about? Click here to find out

Another great source of information is Junebud's dev-blog and Twitter. Since you are reading this it's safe to assume you already found your way to the blog. This is a place for you to tell us about our thoughts when creating MilMo. What inspires us and what to expect in the future!
If you don't want to sign up for the official newsletter, Junebud's Twitter is a great option. Our Twitter is updated every time something happens to the game. Wheather it be an update or a competition, a server crash or a new, fun event, we'll post it. The reason we chose to bring back our Twitter was a suggestion from our players. They missed a way of immediately knowing when the game is updated.

The point of hawing multiple ways of communicating with our players is to make it easy for you to find your own way of staying in touch with MilMo developments. If you don't have Facebook you can always follow us on Twitter. And if you feel Twitter is not your cup of tea, then feel free to visit our homepage or forum instead to keep up with the news!

Stay tuned,

Sara

P.S If you want a sneak peak of what's going on behind the scenes of MilMo, you find my own Twitter right here.

Sara is the Community Manager at Junebud. She also works with Quality Assurance (QA) and social media. She's got a bachelor's degree in game design, but likes the social part better than tweaking numbers. She usually spends her time moderating the forum, testing the game and planning new events.