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 :)

The Stand-Up Revisited

Hello friends!

A while ago, I (Richard, business dude and one of the designers at Clever Endeavour Games) wrote an article about the daily stand-up meeting in Agile Management and some tips on doing it right vs. doing it wrong. The conclusion was, as usual, that there's no solved formula for how to do it and it depends on team size, the dynamic of the employees, the goals of the stand-ups, etc.

Today I wanted to present the "stand-up" that we do at Clever Endeavour Games. We practice a relatively agile (like a young gazelle) management style of production. Our morning stand-ups take place in the form of "Inbox meetings" which happen at 11am, one hour after we get to work. The Inbox is a place in our project management software where we put any idea, thought, discussion, issue, etc. that we want to deal with but needs the input of the whole team. We put them there during the day, and discuss them in the next Inbox meeting; if they're urgent then we'll interrupt work to discuss them.

So every morning, we look at the Inbox and we discuss what needs to be discussed. If it takes more than a few minutes to deal with, we make it a task and put it into our sprint or discuss it in a separate meeting. The meeting usually takes about 20 minutes or less, and gets us up to speed on all the new things that have come up, avoiding a longer meeting on Mondays.

We also discuss what we're up to during the day if it's unclear, but seeing as our team is only 4 people it's not as necessary to discuss it each day because we usually have a good idea already of what others are working on. 

I found that the traditional "stand-up" didn't do much for us, and there was a need for this sort of review of new issues that have come up. The issue with the traditional stand-up was that the team didn't find the discussion of what happened yesterday to be relevant or useful, and we still do the "what's happening today" portion of it. 

Personally, I think there is some use in having the discussion of what was accomplished yesterday because it helps people feel proud of their work, and makes them accountable if they didn't get anything done. Then again, it puts a lot of pressure to be done tasks by the end of the day, and that may or may not be positive. To be determined!

Anyway just wanted to share my thoughts on this and see if the community had different experiences or what they thought of the stand-up.

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.