Our Experience at Boston FIG

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On the road again… ♫

Feels like we were just in Seattle, a couple of weeks ago. Oh right, that’s cause we were! Well this past weekend we ventured down to Boston, a little closer to our hometown Montreal, to participate in the Boston FIG (Festival of Indie Games)


The FIG is quite a bit smaller than PAX Prime was (7,000 people compared to 70,000) but was still a lot of fun, and we actually had a chance to run around and play some of the other sweet games at the festival. It was quite crowded, and our booth was busy as usual 


The booth looked the same as it has at other festivals, so far it seems to be working alright! The reason we raise the TV is so that people who are standing behind the players can watch; we don’t like to discriminate against short people.


Next step is getting two 52″ TVs… ha. One day.

Oh, and we also won an award! Actually, we won two! Super honoured and thankful to be able to accept the awards for “Best in Show” and for “Audience Choice Award”! Great thanks to the folks who set up the show, and for the wonderful audience for loving our game!


We played some great games there, a couple of the most notable in my mind were the following:

Smorball

Smorball is a typing game that uses words from old scanned images from the Smithsonian library and has you type them quickly to beat up robots.


Fat Mask

Fat mask is an awesome colour-matching multiplayer puzzle brawler speed game. Not sure how PaperCult pitches it, but it’s probably better than that. Anyway in Fat Mask, your goal is to match blocks of the same colours together. You pick them up and throw them at piles of a similar colour to create combos, then throw another block to confirm the group; this puts the number of points equal to the number of blocks into your score.



Many awesome games were played, lots of fun was had, and we really appreciate the FIG organizers for making such a sweet event every year.

Thanks, and look for more updates next week!

!!! Major Game News & Hype !!!

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We have some big news to release today! I'll give you the short version first, and if you're interested in reading the whole thing you can scroll down and do that.

Beyond the hype and press (see below), our wonderful experience at PAX taught us a lot of things... things we didn't even expect we could learn at an expo. The biggest amongst these things is simple: People. Want. Online. Multiplayer. We knew this, of course, but we didn't realize truly how much more important it was than everything else. After seeing how Rocket League and SpeedRunners have had such success with matchmaking, we realized that we need to put all of our focus on the online multiplayer and on matchmaking (eventually). This means putting the single player experience on the back-burner for now.

OnlineMulti

You wanted online multiplayer, and we're listening. Beyond that, we came to the realization that what we have is good, and people love it. We should refine what we have and make it accessible for people to play together online, and make sure that we focus 100% of our efforts on the game experience you know and love.

Because of this, we've decided to stop working on the single player mode, despite it being interesting and fun to play. We realized that the experience, while fun, isn't the truest Ultimate Chicken Horse experience and might be included in later patches but shouldn't prevent us from having the time / resources to create the perfect multiplayer experience.

Ultimate Chicken Horse hype?

From Polygon:

Ultimate Chicken Horse is Competitive Platform Design on the Fly

From Kotaku:

Three Cool Surprises from PAX Prime

From IGN:

Pretty sweet to be attracting this attention, and we're thrilled that both the media and non-media PAX goers liked the game. In the next little while I imagine the press will die down, and it'll reignite a month before launch (if our marketing plan is carried out as we're planning).

So what's the plan now?

Well, on the game side, we're doing a few things. We're focusing on online multiplayer, which means Alex is banging his head against network code for a while. It's notoriously tricky and with new updates to the game engine we're using, it means there isn't much help to be found online.

Given that we're putting the single player off for now, it gives Richard time to step away from level design and focus more on business, creating a marketing plan, deal with Kickstarter rewards, sort out fun fun taxes, and work on design.

2015-04-23 TreeHouseLobby.png

Above you can see our tree-house lobby, which has served us well so far. What we're aiming for in Ultimate Chicken Horse is a fully playable menu system so that players can choose everything on the menu:

  • Local or online
  • Choice of character
  • Choice of level
  • Choice of game mode
  • Options within a game mode
  • etc.

Apart from the lobby work, we'll need to work on the Sandbox mode and work on user interface to make everything clear and wonderful. Lots to do before launching in February! We've also been talking to the console folks and discussing our plan for launch on the different consoles... we'll keep you posted!

What about our Kickstarter rewards?

Aha! We haven't forgotten about you. The Beta keys are being sent out today or tomorrow, and the T-shirts are shipping in the next two weeks. I know we wanted to ship the shirts earlier but PAX jumped up in our faces, then Kyler hopped off on vacation and we had too much stuff to do! They're coming though, never fear.

The non-physical rewards, such as the "design-a-block" or "design-a-level" are being fulfilled slowly, but are happening. We would rather talk to one or two people at a time and get it done quickly with them rather than talk to everyone and have people wait months before getting a response. Don't worry though, we're very conscious of our Kickstarter backers and we're going to be contacting you soon, once everyone is back at the office.

How do I stay informed?

We won't likely be making any major marketing pushes in the next little while, but I write articles or development blog updates here on our site every week, so that's a good way to find out what's happening. Alternatively, you can sign up to our development newsletter, which goes out every few weeks and keeps you updates with progress. Not a fan of newsletters? Try our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or just receive an email when the game launches.

Keep in touch! We love to hear from you :)

Our PAX Prime Experience in Pictures!

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We had an absolutely amazing time in the Indie Megabooth at PAX Prime this year, and decided to show you some of the highlights of the trip. Enough text, look at pretty pictures!