Working on a new Lobby System

Hi everyone! 

This week we wanted to share with you some of the early progress on our new lobby system that should help make matches more fair, more reliable, and more enjoyable. As it stands, the lobby system allows a player to create a lobby, and that lobby shows up on a list for other players to see and join. Once in the lobby, the host has control of the rules and then the game starts with those rules when enough players have joined. 

This is all well and fine, but we felt like for the long-term success of this game we needed to implement a more robust system that allows players to see more information about the game they're about to enter.

With the new lobby system, players will be able to see the region, the type of game mode, round limit or length limit, and the "health" of the lobby. This health is related to the connection strength and region, but also to player skill.

This does not mean we'll have skill-based matchmaking (like in a game like Rocket League), but it should help to make games slightly more fair by estimating the skill of the players behind the scenes and baking that into an overall "health" score.

We're going to have to test it quite a bit before we roll it out, and might make it public along with some other changes, so there's no guarantee of how quick you'll see it in-game. Regardless, we wanted to share our progress with you and let you know what you have to look forward to for the future of Ultimate Chicken Horse.

New Employee, Bug Fixing, New Block Sneak Peek!

Hello friends!

Every month, on the third Thursday of the month, we do a big update to our newsletter subscribers, Kickstarter backers, etc. We’ll loop our blog readers in with the same info to update you as well about the company and about the game, Ultimate Chicken Horse.

As you may have read last week, we’ve expanded! We’re excited to introduce you to Ben, our newest programmer addition.

Also, in case you weren’t aware, we recently had our game discounted as part of the Steam Summer Sale at the end of June, and it did really well! The discount helped us make a ton more sales than usual, and our community is growing and becoming stronger. We’ve got about 250 active users at all times which is pretty impressive for our scale of game and the number of sales we’ve made, and we expect that to continue increasing as we continue to add content and fixes to the game.

Speaking of which, what’s going on in the game?

The first (not very obvious) thing is that we’re constantly making updates which make the online play more stable and make the connections more reliable. We’re getting toward the end of the bugs with the online play, and will start to add more content once those bugs are all squashed. Part of the complication arises from the fact that the problems are sometimes server-based, sometimes based on a player with a poor connection, and sometimes due to mistakes that we’ve made, but it’s hard to know the cause of some of the issues we’ve been seeing.

Next thing we’ve been working on is some Twitch integration with the game, which will allow Twitch streamers to better interact with their audience, and vice versa. The Twitch integration is part of the bigger Sandbox Mode plan but it’s been Ben’s first task and looks like it’s going to be really fun to play around with.

Despite focusing most of our energy on streamlining the online experience, we have started a bit of new content, and here’s a super super early teaser for one of the next block / platform concepts. It’s actually getting close to finished, but this was an early sketch and we won’t reveal too much until our next big content push (cause mystery is appealing ya know?).

We’re hoping we can blow through the rest of the bugs pretty quickly, and we’re excited to get into more production and work on the Sandbox Mode. Then will come console ports, and we should start working on our next game at the same time.

Next week might be an article, might be a quick update, we’ll see where we’re at!

A Wild Programmer Has Appeared!

Alright well he's not so wild, but he is awesome. His name is Ben, and he's the newest member of the Clever Endeavour Games team! 

Ben has come on board to help us finish off the last of the bugs in UCH, and to help implement new features such as the Sandbox mode and other secret things we can't tell you about yet. He'll be with us full-time, so he'll help with console ports and with future projects as well.

We're really excited to add him to the mix, and we're sure that we'll be able to get more done once he's all settled in and familiar with the game code. At the time of writing, he's only been here for two days and it's already happening... so :)

As you may or may not know, he's our first full-time employee, apart from the three co-founders of the company (Rich, Kyler and Alex). It's an exciting time for us as we begin our expansion. We plan to stay small and not scale faster than we can handle... scaling improperly can kill startups and we're making sure to be careful of that. 

Our goal is to stay as flat as possible and empower our employee(s) to contribute as much as the co-founders do, encouraged by the fact that they'll be treated as equals and not as minions. Eventually, there will be a point where the flatness will be questioned and we'll need to evolve in terms of our roles and responsibilities, but we're not there yet.

For now, we're still working on this game and getting it to be as good as possible, and like we've said before, it's approaching what we had in mind when we started designing the game :)