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 :)

New Placement Timer, Bug Tracking, and Summer Sale Results!

Hi everyone!

Quick development update about Ultimate Chicken Horse! The online mode is still technically in "Beta", but it's really really getting there. We have certain issues that we're not sure pertain to our own code or to server issues from Unity's servers, but we're trying to track everything down and we're getting close. 

The newest gameplay addition to UCH is the new placement timer. This is a timer that runs out during the placement phase, and if the time is up and you haven't placed, you lose your chance! The reason for this is to avoid the Mexican stand-off thing where a player with a bomb will wait for a player with an item and no one will place until the other one does. In online games, of course, the troll-factor can be high and this ends up being really annoying. This solution should fix it! Of course this is optional, but most games will have it.

This next point isn't super useful for most people, but is actually pretty significant for our development and will help us down the road. We now have a bug-tracking system more formally set up with a new software, and we should have a better handle on bugs that come up in the future and a better workflow in terms of fixing the already known existing ones.

In case you were wondering about the business side of things, the Steam summer sale went really really well! The community continues to grow and although we're in a constant race of how quickly we can fix things vs how quickly the community is growing, we think it's going splendidly. We know the game has the potential to keep growing and become a true household name in the world of party games, so we're still hard at it making sure that it'll get there.

See you next week!