Play With Random People Online ✔

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This week's update comes in few words, but much progress! You can now play online with random people across the globe in Ultimate Chicken Horse by using our server lists:

As we mentioned last week, this isn't proper matchmaking because it doesn't group you with people at your skill level necessarily, but that will come eventually. Right now, as long as a game is in the lobby (i.e. between levels) you can join the people playing. 

Beyond that, we're going to PAX East next week so that's going to be exciting stuff, and we're working on fixing other bugs including controller issues and connection issues (which are always the toughest to track down). 

Full list of known issues still in the game here.

Enjoy!

Some Bug Fixes, YouTube, and Going to PAX!

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Hello children of the internet!

We've got a few updates this week, including improvements to the online mode of Ultimate Chicken Horse, some big YouTube videos, and the announcement that we're going to PAX.

Bug Fixes

 
 

First off we wanted to talk about a few bugs that we've squashed recently in preparation for a new build which should be going up very soon. The most important, which I guess isn't a bug really, is the face that you no longer need port forwarding to play UCH! Hooray!

We've done a lot of work on the connection side of things, trying to make sure that we can reproduce bugs that people are having due to being far apart. The more we work on it though, the less issues people seem to be reporting, so that's a good sign.

 
 

Another thing we're working on are server lists. Once this is ready to roll, it means that you can search online for matches and won't need to have friends who play the game to be able to start a match. This is obviously a huge advancement as well, and should help tremendously. It's not quite "matchmaking" because the games aren't matched based on skill, but we can implement that later on. 

YouTube Videos Aplenty!

Next up we've got a bunch of YouTube videos.  The one I embedded above is one by SeaNanners, a YouTuber who has 5.5M subscribers. That's pretty crazy, and it's exciting to see that some of the biggest YouTube gamers are picking up the game.

That's not all though... if you're looking for some more UCH entertainment, there's plenty:

It's super encouraging for us to see all of this activity, and to see the comments on these videos! Everyone seems to love them and asks for more, so let's hope the bug fixes can keep up with the hype!

Also, fun fact, we've reached over 7 million views on YouTube (of people playing our game)! That's awesome.

Going to PAX!

In case you missed it, we're going to PAX East as part of the Indie MEGABOOTH this year! Apparently we didn't make it into their video, but oh well. Being part of the MEGABOOTH is a huge opportunity as it tend to attract a ton of content creators and press. 

Really excited for this, so if you're heading down to Boston on April 22nd for this awesome event be sure to check us out! More on PAX prep next week probably, we're scrambling to get everything done and prepped in time, while still trying to push out consistent bug fixes and add new stuff to the game. 

See you all soon! :)

New Workflow Management

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This might be more interesting for the game developers reading this, and maybe not as interesting for those non-game devs. In that case, here's a picture of a cute puppy to make sure you want to keep reading:

 
 

So. Today I'm going to talk about project management, how we've completely changed the way we're doing it here at Clever Endeavour, and what we've learned in the process. We haven't been using the new system for a long time now (see: a week), but the lessons learned in exploring different softwares and different techniques remain valid.

There is a ton of great software out there for project management: Jira, Trello, Asana, Axosoft, Jixee.. just to name a few. This stuff tends to have details, options, compatibility with other software, movable and draggable and saveable and starable stuff. This is cool and all, but what do we really NEED?

At Clever Endeavour, here's what we need:

  • See a big backlog of all the stuff we need to do
  • Know what we need to discuss next
  • Know what we need to be working on next
  • Know what we should work on in this sprint (using Agile)
  • Archive what was done and track how long we estimated for tasks vs how long they actually took
  • Have a place for resources and things we might have to look at once in a while

Pretty basic stuff, right? We decided to go the simple route, and use a software called WorkFlowy. It's basically a text editor, with nested items. That's pretty much it. You can add hashtags and search by hashtag, and you can add people (@rich, @kyler, @alex) and then see what lines were associated with those people. This is what it looks like:

Each of those dots with the light grey circle around it means there are sub-tasks or lines nested under it. This way we have everything in one place, and it's simple and clear. No bells and whistles, but no functionality missing either. 

Most importantly, we've changed our morning stand-ups to "morning reviews" where we look at the Inbox (used to put things that we need to discuss or anything that takes more than 2 minutes to do and doesn't have a place in our WorkFlowy) and we look at our tasks from the previous day, then write down how long it took to do those tasks. 

What did we learn?

In shifting from our old system to our new system, we learned a few things. We learned that simplicity is key, and that the simpler something is, the easier it is to access information. This is important for keeping everyone up to speed. We also learned that we had been doing the daily stand-up the wrong way. We followed the instructions that you hear about from the usual Agile articles and books, but it wasn't getting the job done. We were talking but it wasn't helping us actually get on the same page and it wasn't helping us track and estimate the amount of time taken to do our tasks.

So far it's working really well, we'll see what the future brings!

TL;DR

  • Simplicity is key
  • Everyone needs to be on the same page and buy in to the system
  • Big fancy software is useless if you're not already well organized
  • Use software according to your needs, not to what's popular

Also, in case you're looking for online updates to Ultimate Chicken Horse, you can use our Steam forums to check out the newest fixes from the last update, and see the list of known bugs here. We're also planning another update soon, check our Twitter to stay in the loop!