Introducing... the Black Hole of Doom

Or, just the black hole. But what an awesome inter-universal transport device it is. In our game, unfortunately, you never find out what’s in the universe through the black hole. Instead, you respawn and try to run through the level again.

Today we introduce the newest block on the… block? Uhh, the newest addition to our library of platforms for you to use to mess with your friends.

The black hole also gives you a warning as to how close you are to being sucked in, a nice visual effect that actually gives more feedback than you may think:

Clearly, our Raccoon is unphased by the near-death experience it’s currently experiencing. Then again if you’ve ever seen the game, most experiences are near-death experiences so…

Another interesting thing about the black hole is that it can actually help you as well! It can boost your jump and allow you to reach places you couldn’t have reached otherwise.

That jump wouldn’t have been possible without the black hole there! Amazing!

If you backed the Kickstarter at the tier where you get the Beta, you can play around with it now! If not, you can simply get excited about the fact that the amount of fun you’ll have with this game just keeps increasing :)

Thanks for tuning in!

Character Customization and Some Code Reworking

Hello hello, back again for another update on our work on Ultimate Chicken Horse! Things are still moving along nicely, though we're aware that there's still a ton to do to get the game where we want it to be.

The first new thing we've got this week is some implemented character customization outfits! What that means is a horse in a bow-tie and a top hat:

Rich has been stepping out of his business duties and venturing into the art world to work on the character outfits, and has been coming up with some potential designs to make our characters even more awesome.

Above are just a couple of outfit ideas for our characters, we've got a ton more! The issue with the character outfits though is that our characters are hand animated frame by frame, which means that the outfit needs to be redrawn on each frame. As Rich found out when doing the bow-tie, that means over 90 frames of redrawing for each outfit piece, followed by testing and fixing.

Next up, and probably even more importantly, we're doing some refactoring in our code to make life muuuch simpler for development for online play. What we're doing is changing our current code to an event-based system.

No, we don't actually have babies coding for us. Just Alex. And he's not a baby. We think.

What this means is that the code is based around events, and different objects listen in to certain events. For example, the scorecard will be "listening" to hear when the event "round ends" happens. Once the event happens, the scorecard will be notified and will pop up.

This refactoring (restructuring) of code will help us to be better organized when implementing network code and will allow us to troubleshoot more easily because we will be better able to pinpoint the source of the problem.

That's about all the news we have for today, check in again next week and keep following on social media! :)