Crate Expectations

By: Guest Reviewer

On: March 29th, 2010

[This is a guest review by PerrinAshcroft. If you’re interested in writing an article for TIGSource, please go here.]

Crate Expectations is an Xbox Live Indie Games title released in October last year. It didn’t receive a lot of coverage at the time which is a real shame. XBLIG is a strange service with an eclectic mix of the great and the terrible and sadly real gems such as this can just sink into the depths of Xbox menus never to be seen again. The developer recently released a patch for the game and so now seems as good a time as ever to shed some light on this lovely game that may have passed you by. I even contacted the developers to see if they could tell us a little more about their experience developing for XBLIG.

Looking at screenshots your first impression is probably that this is a Sokoban-style block-pushing puzzle. That was certainly what I’d thought, but the reality is very different. Create Expectations is actually a fiendish multiplayer strategy game. While the goal of the game is simply to spawn your blocks and push them along a sliding surface to the exit, there’s no real puzzle to how you’re going to get there. The real challenge of the game comes from the other players, whether they be AI or ideally your friends, as you find ways to get your blocks to the exit while simultaneously stalling and screwing over your opponents attempts to do the same.

At its absolute best this becomes a chess-like process of thinking multiple moves ahead. Deciding how many turns will it take them to reach the goal and figuring how can you increase that number for them. You can spawn ice blocks that will disrupt them for a few turns or even sacrifice some of your own blocks, leaving them static while they halt your opponents’ progress. A massive selection of maps each presenting different routes and bottlenecks means there’s a huge amount of depth to the tactics and strategies to employ in winning.

In terms of graphics and level of polish the screenshots almost speak for themselves, it’s clear the developers put as much care and attention into this as any commercial title seen on Xbox Live Arcade.

So what’s the catch here? Why didn’t this game make a bigger splash when it came out? Well I think this game was always going to have a hard time reaching the kind of players who’d love it. It has the look of a casual puzzle game but is in fact something for people into multiplayer strategy. While the AI is perfectly sufficient at kicking your ass if you set it hard enough, this is like Bomberman in that the real fun comes from playing it with two mates in the room, screaming at them when they’ve just totally shafted you.

If you’re the type of person who’s enjoyed sessions of Worms or Bomberman and can bring a few friends over to play a competitive game like this, then there’s a lot of joy to be had for only 240 Microsoft Points. I would certainly suggest you dig into NXE menus and hunt for this title.

Finally, I contacted the developers to see if they’d answer a few questions about developing the game. Rather than talking specifically of the game itself I thought it would be more interesting to find out about their experience developing for Xbox Live Indie Games and the lessons they’ve learned:

Where did the idea for Crate Expectations come from? Any other games that were influential in deciding to make it?

Duncan: I’m probably going to come across as quite cryptic by saying this, but the idea was mostly a result of the circumstances under which we had to make it! I’ll spare you the boring details, but initially we had a very small time window in which to develop the project, so we scoured through game ideas we’d had in the past to find something simple and fun that could be done justice in as little as a week of development. Crate Expectations was a distillation of a larger design that Alex had been dreaming of for some time that seemed to fit the bill.

Alex: I originally came up with the idea behind Crate Expectations quite a while ago but it really was fleshed out when we started actually making the game. We wanted to make the kind of game that we wanted to play and we wanted to play something competitive, huddled around a TV in a cosy fashion but with the option to really play dirty as well. Crate Expectations kind of became a mash up of four player chess and the crate-pushing puzzle game, sokoban with a hefty spiking of something really evil like Sorry. Local multiplayer is very important to us in our games and we’re really glad that it seems to be coming back in style!

How big was your development team and what kind of prior development experience did they have?

Duncan: The core team at Haiku consists of myself (Duncan), Alex, and Jock. One designer who pretends to be a programmer, and two programmers who pretend to be designers. We had enough dirt on ex-colleagues and talented friends that they were easily blackmailed into showering us with the great quality artwork, trailers, music and sound that we wouldn’t have had any hope of making ourselves!

Alex: Jock and I have been in the industry for quite a while doing all sorts of things for all sorts of companies. Both of us worked on so called ‘Triple A’ titles before joining our previous employer, Outerlight, the creators of The Ship Online, where we met Duncan. We were, and possibly still are, working on something that’s potentially related to The Ship in some way but we’re wrapped up in so many NDAs that we couldn’t say for certain. Crate Expectations is our baby though, we love it dearly and it’s definitely the game I’m most proud of from my career so far.

Any important lessons you learned from making and releasing the game?

Duncan: Maybe puns aren’t as big a selling point as I’d like them to be! We fell in love with the name of the game as soon as it was suggested, never for a second considering changing it. In truth, I imagine a significant number of people probably thought “Crates? Nah” and skipped right over us. Box art and title are all people judge you on when scanning through the Xbox Indies section of the marketplace. I love both of ours very much indeed, but perhaps that love isn’t universal.

Alex: Yeah, we learnt a lot of lessons, mainly don’t let your game look like a puzzle game when it’s a strategy game. Everyone ends up sad – the puzzle game enthusiasts jump in and download the trial and have their minds blown when there’s no puzzle to solve and the strategy game lovers skip straight over it because it’s probably another crate pushing game. We had an absolutely amazing Trailer made up by a really great friend from The Creative Assembly, the guy that does all the trailers down there, but looking back on it, we should have added more text explaining what the game is actually about. I suppose if we’re truly honest we also learnt that games built for the Xbox Indies Channel need to be made as quickly as possible to maximize the chances of profiting from them. Crate Expectations took two months for four people in total so the initial outlay was high and we certainly haven’t made that back but we’ve learnt so much in the process that we think it was worth it.

Why did you decide to go with Xbox Live Indie Games as your target platform, any regrets with that decision?

Duncan: Our main reason was the ease with which we could do so. We had the equipment and software we needed to get the game built ready to hand, and the costs of releasing on Xbox Indies is trivial in comparison to many other avenues. Plus developing using XNA is a real pleasure; it makes it easy for even rubbish programmers like myself to be productive!

Alex: I suppose our only regret currently is that we didn’t make a PC version of the game too. We’re thinking very, very hard about that. There is a significant outlay of work to get the game’s online multiplayer aspect working on PC and we’re not entirely sure that it’s going to be worth it but we’ve had such good feedback from the people who’ve actually played the Indies version that we’re edging closer and closer to just doing it. The Indies Channel is a great place for people to start making games but there’s no doubt that there is a larger market for strategy games like Crate Expectations on PC.

Can you share any future plans for Crate Expectations or new projects you’re working now or would like to one day?

Duncan: We’ve actually not long released our first update to Crate Expectations, which added a bunch of new levels and numerous fixes and improvements that should hopefully make the game far more accessible and enjoyable. Whether we’ll do any more updates remains to be seen, but if there’s anybody out there that would like to see it happen then speak up – it wouldn’t take a great deal of encouragement for me to crack open the level editor again!

Alex: As I mentioned above I think if we do anything with Crate Expectations it might be to make a PC version and look at Steam as a potential way of distributing the game. As for other projects, we have the aforementioned title that is very much under wraps at the moment, we’re very, very excited about that though and then we have another Indies title that is coming along quite nicely. It’s a totally different game to Crate Expectations but so far it’s looking really promising. It’s already fun to play with and it’s very much still in the prototype stage.