Behind the scenes: Snake

This is part 2/7 of a series of articles written by Eve, the Clever Endeavour Community Manager, about the making of the A-cobra-tic Update for Ultimate Chicken Horse, which was released in March 2020. Each article will reveal some of the process of making new content for the game, and show in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

The star of A-cobra-tic

As we’ve shown in the previous behind-the-scenes article about the flamethrower, we receive a ton of fan suggestions and concepts for things to add to Ultimate Chicken Horse. As much as possible, we keep notes on all of these ideas in a big master list, and through time similar ones tend to fuse together into concepts that are bigger than the sum of their parts. Then we look back at that list when we’re looking for inspiration for new features, and each item serves as a potential springboard for our imagination.

Most of the time when fans ask us if we took their suggestion for new content, the answer is both yes and no: their idea might have fed into this process, but no single person convinced us to make any particular feature.

The star of the A-cobra-tic Update, the new Snake character, is a major exception to that rule.

snake? snaaaaaaake!

At the start of the first meeting we had about the update, in August 2019, we knew we wanted to add a new character, but we weren’t sure what. We pitched a few options to consider, and one that came to mind for me was this specific concept fan art we received from The Grand Tickler on Steam in October of 2018:

look familiar?

Fabio, who was going to take the lead on character art for this update, was instantly enamored with this design. As soon as the meeting ended, he hopped into his VR headset to paint the first bit of real concept art for the update in Quill.

and the masses said: “UCH in 3d when?”

He backed this concept with multiple reasons why a snake on a skateboard was a good design for a new Ultimate Chicken Horse character:

• It is very distinct from previous characters

• It is dynamic and cool, but also cute

• It would be easy to animate - and fun to make!

From a technical perspective, this totally checked out, but I think that it was Fabio’s enthusiasm for Snake, and his excitement for animating it, that was the biggest factor in getting the whole team on board with it. As a bonus, we set a record time to finding the obligatory punny name for the update!

On the same afternoon, we already had concepts for the outfits and reskin.

this game of “spot the differences” is kind of easy

The hoverboard would be a nod to Back to the Future, and it made sense to give an alternative look to Snake’s defining characteristic: the skateboard. The scarf would be a great item to bring some more dynamism to Snake’s movements, and the baseball hat… well, how else are you going to dress up an animal that has no limbs?

You’ll notice that there’s one thing from that proposal that ended up changing dramatically, and it’s the Worm reskin. Fabio actually got pretty far into repainting the Snake as Worm, so we have many “final” assets to show for it:

Yes, this worm has a tongue. please don’t revoke my biology major.

We liked the looks of it on the high-resolution sprites, but once we put the art in the game to test it, we came to the realization that the scale and resolution made this reskin look like nothing more than a beige Snake.

*squint*

This brings us on a small detour to another behind-the-scenes anecdote, this time from the development of the Transformidable Update. We had started working on it in late 2018, right after publishing Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch along with the Chimply Amazing Update. It all began with Ben prototyping a whole collection of Modifiers. When that was well underway, we discussed what other fun and transformative content we could add to the update, and that’s how we came to decide to make reskins for all the characters already in the game, inspired by Horse’s Zebra costume. One of the first Transformidable reskins we developed was the Black Sheep. However, as development progressed and reskins for the other characters were drawn, we felt it just wasn’t distinct enough, and we pivoted to giving Sheep a Ram reskin instead.

it’s kinda cute…

… but this is more interesting

To get back to our Snake, when we saw the relative blandness of the Worm reskin in the game, we were reminded of our commitment to make every animal’s reskin as unique-looking a character as is possible. Because of that, we got together to discuss what else could be a good secondary look for Snake.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to think about it for too long. Since we started working on this update and Fabio made the A-cobra-tic concept art, there was a recurring conversation in the team about whether the titular pun was justified enough if the lead character was not, in fact, a cobra. Most of us didn’t think it was a big deal, considering that we’d done that before with Monkey in Chimply Amazing. (Believe it or not though, we were actually called out for that by some fans on social media!) Fabio himself was very squarely in the camp to think that it made no difference what species of snake the character was. As it turns out, there’s a very simple reason why our Brazilian team member would think that…

ah-ah! moment

Nevertheless, now that we were in need of a new design for the reskin, it felt quite natural for everyone to embrace the pun fully and agree to make a bona fide Cobra costume. The big difference between a snake and a cobra being the distinctive hood, this was a perfect way to give the reskin a unique silhouette.

fully kitted cobra

This completes the story of how we took a fan’s concept for a character and made it the star of the A-cobra-tic Update for Ultimate Chicken Horse… sort of.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that, on top of all the work that goes into nailing the art for a new character, there is another crucial component: the audio design. Snake just wouldn’t be the same without its voice, or without the extremely satisfying skateboard / hoverboard sound effects when you land and slide on things.

I can’t go into nearly as much detail for that though, because the folks at Vibe Avenue are entirely responsible for everything audio in the game. We show them the designs, and with a little bit of feedback from us, they produce all these truly fantastic sound effects. Their work is essential in making Ultimate Chicken Horse as enjoyable as it is, and we could never give them enough praise for it!

We hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes article! In case you missed it, you can also read the previous one about the flamethrower block. Next week’s article will be about another block, the cannon. See you then!