4-Pack for Ultimate Chicken Horse NOW AVAILABLE!

It's finally here! Go go go! 4 copies of Ultimate Chicken Horse for the price of 3!

Unfortunately, Steam no longer lets people do 4-packs of games. "But what about that other cool game that just came out and has a 4-pack?? Lies!" you cry out in anger. Well, apparently, the games that were in early access or already had Steam pages before a certain time (before ours) were able to keep their bundle packs. 

But that's alright! We have the solution, and it comes in the form of the Humble Bundle store. While it's not bundled like a monthly deal, they also have a storefront where we can put our product, and they've worked with us to make a custom deal which allows us to sell 4 for the price of 3. 

So, all that to say thanks to the Humble folks and their awesome team, and now you can enjoy UCH with friends and not worry about paying full price for 4 copies!

That's all for this week, we're continuing hard work to get the Beta out of Beta and into awesome. Expect updates soon!

May Game Development Update

We’re back! Well, we never left. But we have another update.

It’s been a year (and three days, fine…) since our Kickstarter for Ultimate Chicken Horse was funded! First of all, a huge thanks again all of our backers for their support. And thanks to you non-backers who have stayed interested regardless of Kickstarter. Without these backers and this community support, this game wouldn’t be what it is today and wouldn’t have a community of wonderful creative people making crazy stuff like this:

So what’s new in the last month, in terms of game development?

• Wider search regions (so that more games will show up)
• Bigger buffer in disconnect time so that it’s less likely you’ll get booted if someone’s internet slows down
• Public games in progress will show up in the lobby list, so that you can see if there’s a game that will soon be joinable
• Networked sudden death: in case of a tie, the game no longer freaks out
• Networked outfits: still a bit buggy but you should be able to see your friends’ outfits in online play
• Controller bug fixes
• Emotes and chat! Info in our blog post here. 

…and much more. For the list of changes, see the Steam forum Update Log here.

As you can see, almost all of the changes are bug fixes and improvements to the online mode. We’re working now toward bringing the online Beta out of beta and making sure that the game is as bug free as possible before adding more content (which we’re super excited for) and starting on console ports.

We were also at PAX East since the last update, which was another great show. It’s awesome to meet fans (or future fans) and to meet content creators and press, and see how much fun everyone has with the game. See more about PAX on our blog. 

Lastly, but not leastly, we came out on NVIDIA SHIELD! Their marketing folks were super helpful and now, if you have a SHIELD, you can play in your living room with their Android.TV box. Very cool stuff!

Alright actually lastly, we have an update about the YouTube hype we’ve been getting. We just got a video from Pewdiepie! If you don’t know who he is, you should. He basically owns YouTube.

We’re now up to over 23 MILLION VIEWS on YouTube of people watching other people play the game. That’s freaking awesome.

Till next time!

New Emote and Chat System

Exciting news! 

This week's update will have our new emote and chat system so that when you play online with friends, you'll be able to communicate! This was something that we had been thinking about but didn't prioritize until the community got back to us and asked for it. Once we played around online with strangers (fans, I hope?), we saw clearly that it was necessary to feel that couch co-op feeling while playing online. 

We knew we wanted to have something that was quick to access, had short messages, and wouldn't get too confusing or bothersome. We took some inspiration from Rocket League and their system where pressing a direction on the D-pad would open a list of 4 categories, and then pressing one of those would open 4 emotes to choose from. The yellow box on the left of the screenshot shows the emotes.

"But I want to control my character with the D-pad!" This is something we had to consider as well, and we decided that holding the left trigger (not currently being used) will open the emote system and allow you to choose a category. We didn't want the player to lose control of the character, so when the emote system is up, players can use the right joystick to get their message across.

This system gives us 16 options, in 4 different categories. We decided to start with the four following categories:

• Information
• Reactions
• Compliments
• Apologies

These categories might still change, but I think we'll see how people react to the emotes that we have and we can change them accordingly. We think they're fairly intuitive though and cover a wide range of emotions. 

Another big difference in how we made our system was that the words originate from the character themselves. This means that the player doesn't have to look away from themselves to communicate, and it's clear which player is saying what. Those emotes will show up on the corner of the screen so that other players can see it.

We're keen to see how the community is going to use this and what people react well (and badly) to, so please give us any feedback you have!

We've also fixed a bunch of other stuff in the newer update, which you can see in the update log.