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.

Short Development Update

Hey friends!

Short update this week, just wanted to let you know what we're up to in our work on Ultimate Chicken Horse. First and foremost, we want to make sure that we're squashing all of the bugs in the online multiplayer. We're working toward bringing the online beta out of beta, so the first step is to address the obvious problems. Then we'll do some serious testing, and launch it officially. 

Right now we're working on a few things. The sudden death mode (when two players tie at the end of the game) hasn't been networked until now (until soon, we should say). We also fixed the character outfits that weren't appearing in-game; when someone else wore an outfit it appear in the lobby but would disappear once you started your match. Another thing we're working on, more hastily than otherwise due to popular demand, is a chat system and emotes. We'll talk more about those next week, and our next update should have a bunch of fixes as well as the emotes.

Beyond that we've worked a bit on the stability of the online play, and random disconnects should be happening less often. Let us know if you're still experiencing these!

Updates coming soon! :)