Online is out of Beta, Twitch Votes and New Content!

Hi UCHers! This week's update comes in the form of a video, which will help describe all of the new things we've tweaked and added to Ultimate Chicken Horse. To make sure you have the newest stuff, make sure you Verify your Game Cache the next time you play. Take a look at the new things:

Grab the 4-pack of UCH (on sale until September 26th!) and play online with friends or join the vibrant community; there are always several matches available online for you to join, and the new updated lobby shows you the best matches possible based on skill, connection quality, and other factors.

We've also added Twitch integration, where Twitch streamers can have their audience vote on which blocks will appear in the Party Box. Once the chosen platform is placed, the names of the people who voted will pop out of it.

Next up is a new level, the Pier!

This level features a giant wave that the players need to run away from... don't get caught underneath! The level makes for an interesting dynamic when players have to place obstacles on the path with the added pressure of constantly needing to move forward quickly.

Our newest block added to the game is a punching plant which gets angry when you come near it, then punches out in a fit of flowery rage a second later. If you get caught in its range, you may regret it.

We're pretty excited to have these updates out, and we're still working hard on the game. Next up is a big new feature, please follow us on your favourite social media site to stay informed!

What are you most excited about? What would you like to see next? Be sure to Tweet at us and let us know :) We're going to start working on Sandbox mode shortly, which we'll talk more about in future updates. Stay posted!

For the full list of changes in this newest update, you can see the patch notes here. 

Self-Skill-Balancing With our New Handicap Feature

Hello internet! This week we wanted to introduce to you our new handicap feature, which will be coming out in the next release. A handicap is a game balancing feature that some games implement to allow certain players to score more points, take more damage, or somehow align themselves when playing against players of a vastly different skill level.

In our game, we've run into some issues where players will feel mismatched, and the game doesn't do anything to help that. This is a common problem in competitive games, like Smash Bros (from where the screenshot above is taken). The answer in Smash Bros (a cartoony fighting game) is to give players a percentage which increases the damage that they take, and thus makes it harder for them to win. In our case, we've decided to do a similar thing, but where players have a score multiplier that reduces their score by a percentage:

Of course, players can't add some amount of points to their score, because that would end up with a race to increase the handicap and would lead to a stalemate. Here we count on the players themselves to realize that they're much better, and use the handicap to even things out. This will be easy to do from the Treehouse lobby, and should be simple enough to agree on when playing locally.

We're not entirely sure how the handicap will be used online, and if players will realize that they're better and / or be willing to reduce their score to make a more fun match, but we'll find out soon enough! This feature and a whole bunch of other stuff will be coming in our next major update :)

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 :)