Self-Skill-Balancing With our New Handicap Feature

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Hello internet! This week we wanted to introduce to you our new handicap feature, which will be coming out in the next release. A handicap is a game balancing feature that some games implement to allow certain players to score more points, take more damage, or somehow align themselves when playing against players of a vastly different skill level.

In our game, we've run into some issues where players will feel mismatched, and the game doesn't do anything to help that. This is a common problem in competitive games, like Smash Bros (from where the screenshot above is taken). The answer in Smash Bros (a cartoony fighting game) is to give players a percentage which increases the damage that they take, and thus makes it harder for them to win. In our case, we've decided to do a similar thing, but where players have a score multiplier that reduces their score by a percentage:

Of course, players can't add some amount of points to their score, because that would end up with a race to increase the handicap and would lead to a stalemate. Here we count on the players themselves to realize that they're much better, and use the handicap to even things out. This will be easy to do from the Treehouse lobby, and should be simple enough to agree on when playing locally.

We're not entirely sure how the handicap will be used online, and if players will realize that they're better and / or be willing to reduce their score to make a more fun match, but we'll find out soon enough! This feature and a whole bunch of other stuff will be coming in our next major update :)

Yes Mom, People WATCH People Play Video Games

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Written by Richard Atlas - Game Designer, Marketing / PR / Business dude at Clever Endeavour

Okay so first off I'd like to say that my mom actually knows that people watch people play games, because her son is in game development. But replace "mom" with dad, older sibling, cousin, grandma, grandpa, dentist, doctor, car mechanic... anyone really. It seems that people are astonished when I tell them how important YouTube and Twitch are to the success of games nowadays... after I explain to them what Twitch is and how it has more viewership than Hulu or Amazon.

This article is my explanation about why people watch video games, written as the conversations that I've had many times. Feel free to use it to explain the phenomenon to people who aren't in the industry:

Random civilian: I just don't understand why people don't have anything better to do than to WATCH people play video games, as if just playing them wasn't lazy enough.

Me: Why do people watch basketball on TV?

Random civilian: Well, I dunno, it's entertaining!

Me: I'd say they watch it because of one of three things.
1) They play basketball as well, and want to get better at it.
2) They want to see the best people in the world perform at their peak and compete.
3) They play, or used to play basketball and they understand and appreciate the intricacies of the sport.

Random civilian: Yes, I agree. 

Me: I would argue that watching someone play video games is quite similar. Watching competitive e-sports is like watching physical sports in all of the same ways. 

Random civilian (who knows a bit more than the usual): But what about people watching someone who is average at games over-reacting to things and putting on a show?

Me: Have you ever seen "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"?

Random civilian: Yes of course.

Me: Isn't that literally taking the most simple trivia game, and putting on a show? Imagine that show, with Jimmy Fallon as the host. People like entertainment, and funny people combined with solid (games) content makes for great entertainment. 

Random civilian: And you're saying that your game, Ultimate Chicken Horse, relies heavily on these people to show the world how entertaining your game is by experiencing it live?

Me: Yes. In fact I'll be writing an article sometime soon with details, but the YouTube views and big videos are directly proportional to our sales.

Random civilian: Wow! It all makes sense now! Thanks magical explanation-man!

And that, my friends, is how you should explain to people that yes, people watch people play video games. A lot. Like a ton. When you explain what the heck Twitch.TV is to people, be sure to throw in that they were bought by Amazon for $970 million. Also mention that the top gaming YouTuber, PewDiePie, has more subscribers than anyone else on YouTube, and more than Justin Bieber and One Direction's subscribers (numbers 5 and 7) combined. The top 6 gaming YouTubers combine for over 105M subscribers. Might also want to mention that the League of Legends finals sold out the Staples center in an hour... yes... to watch people play video games.

And that's that! Here's hoping it works in our favour as well :)

Twitch Integration is Coming to UCH!

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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 :)