Twitch Integration is Coming to UCH!

Updates! All the updates!

Today we're going to introduce a feature that we've talked about a bit but have never discussed in detail: Twitch integration. For those of you that don't know, Twitch is a streaming platform where people play games and often interact with their communities. Many game developers (like us!) work to add things into our games that can help that interaction.

What we've added to Ultimate Chicken Horse is the ability to have fans / viewers choose platforms that will show up in the Party Box. The Party Box is what pops up to give players the platforms they can use to build the level, but now we can add blocks chosen by you, the fans! 

The way it works is that throughout the game, viewers can type in block names: (blackhole, spinningsaw, glue, etc.) into the Twitch chat and those will be added to the vote count at the side of the screen. The blocks that were most highly voted for will show up in the Party Box with the Twitch symbol next to it, and the streamer can use that. When the block is placed, it shows all of the people who chose that block, and the round begins.

Twitch is an extremely important part of video content creation for video games, and we're hoping that once we roll out the feature and do some outreach to streamers who have already shown interest in the game, we'll start to see a lot of Twitch streamers playing the game and interacting with their communities. If you're a streamer and are reading this, please get in touch and we might be giving early access to the feature to some people for testing :)

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!