October 20, 2020

Behind the scenes: The one-way gate

October 20, 2020/ Richard Atlas

This is part 5/7 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 reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Make way for the one-way gate

The first two blocks we designed for the A-cobra-tic Update were both intended to introduce more diagonal action to Ultimate Chicken Horse: the flamethrower and the cannon.

With the one-way gate, what we wanted to add was a block that could be used to force players to keep going down a certain path once they chose to enter it. We felt it had cool implications for puzzle-like challenge levels, which some of our fans really like to make and play.

One tactic to achieve that would have been to create a pair of items: a locked door block and a key pick-up. However, we also needed this new block to be interesting in regular Party mode, which is how most people play Ultimate Chicken Horse. We didn’t feel like a lock-and-key mechanism was the best choice for the kind of fast-paced action the game is best known for.

Instead, we figured our ideal one-way door would be like a miniature semi-solid platform. Since the release of Super Mario Maker 2 in June 2019, this had become a highly requested feature for Ultimate Chicken Horse; and we’re not above taking inspiration from the masters of platformer design at Nintendo.

When we thought about how to materialize this idea into a door-like block, the most obvious form that came to mind was a motion-activated door, which is an object most people have interacted with in real life, and is therefore easy to understand at a glance. If the block was going to be activated by motion, it came as a natural conclusion that it should also respond to moving projectiles if they entered its detection zone, and this was going to make it all the more interesting in Party mode. Just like that, we had a fairly complete mental image of what we wanted to make.

The first in-game prototype was literally just a copy of the existing door item, modified to open based on a motion detection trigger rather than being on an automatic timer.

Two main modifications were made to the one-way door’s core functionality since this first version. One is the speed at which the door closes after a trigger leaves its detection zone: it needed to be much faster to make the door work as a semisolid platform when it’s placed horizontally facing down.

only “solid” as long as it’s not activated to open again!

The second change was to make the motion detector into a proximity sensor instead. As we increased the responsiveness of the door by making it close faster once it stopped being activated, the block’s behaviour started feeling a lot less intuitive than we’d hoped. We realized that this issue could be solved by making it respond not to motion, like real life automatic doors do, but rather to the simple presence of a character or projectile in its detection zone.

While the functionality of the one-way door was a closed case after mere days, the visual design of it took us more time to pin down. Originally, we thought it should be a 1x5 block, which would be similar to the scaffold when open. We also imagined it as a door opening from the center, and took inspiration from a discarded jetpack dispenser animation Fabio made when we were developing content for the Transformidable Update.

There were some issues with this design. First, we realized that the solid piece at the bottom would prevent placing the door on the ground in a way that would allow players to just run through it without jumping. This could be fixed by removing that part of the block, and changing the animation to make the door telescope shut instead, morphing it into something like a garage door. However, this created a new problem: the block stopped looking like anything recognizable once it was in its open state.

There was one more issue with the original design: it just looked… ominous.

i made this gif to express my feelings to the team about this design

The block thus went back to the drawing board, and was redesigned to instead look like a traffic gate, with the red and green lights indicating both the area of effect of the trigger zone, and the state of the block (opening or closing).

You might think the visual design was our final concern with the one-way gate, but as it turns out, it also required a ton of mechanical tweaking, on account of the fact that it just kept being extremely lethal, against all reasonable expectations.

Don’t be fooled by the fact that all of the above footage is in exactly the same location on Rooftops — it actually represents a span of 3 months of development and multiple tweaks to the gate’s hitboxes, because its lethality kept creeping back in new scenarios.

For this reason and other such technical oddities, the unassuming one-way gate is the block that had the most bugs filed in our bug tracker for the A-cobra-tic Update!

Thank you for reading this behind-the-scenes article! If you liked it, maybe you want to check out the previous ones on the flamethrower, Snake, the cannon, and Space. Stay tuned for next week’s article, which will cover the making of The Ballroom!

October 13, 2020

Behind the scenes: Space

October 13, 2020/ Richard Atlas

This is part 4/7 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 reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Making a very spacious level

As you can probably tell from the previous articles on the flamethrower, Snake, and the cannon, we often get inspired by community suggestions and fan art when we set out to make new content for Ultimate Chicken Horse.

One of the things we wanted to do with the A-cobra-tic Update was to take inspiration from some of the most popular user-made Party levels in the game, and turn one of those proven concepts or layouts into an official and upgraded version in the Treehouse. It seemed like a good way to pay tribute to our amazingly creative community of level editors, while also finding level ideas that did not depend on a gimmick that would require lots of iterations and testing.

The theme we saw most often was outer space. This has been requested frequently since at least November 2016, as shown in this concept art posted by SlapTheSam on Steam:

The requests for a space-themed level became even more frequent when we introduced the Low Gravity Modifier with the Transformidable Update, and many players made their own versions in the in-game level editor.

One that was especially beloved by the player community was Brontalo’s ‘Asteroid Belt’ (4M65-T4KU), which combines low gravity and jetpacks for extra floatiness.

We thought it would be interesting to make a vertical space level like this, with obstacles between the start and the flag. However, there were a few things we wanted to do differently.

First of all, we absolutely did not want to have a dark background like the one from the in-game level editor, because it makes for abysmal readability of some of the hazards – mostly the black hole and hockey puck. We know some players love to make custom levels that use this as a gimmick, but we knew better than to create another Dance Party situation. (I might also have a personal grudge with the Free Play starry background after playing so many levels for featuring, and may never forgive Kyler for making it a thing in the first place. But that’s a different story.)

Second, we agreed not to force the Low Gravity (or Jetpack) Modifier, because it would have negated or complicated player choice when setting custom Modifiers in this level. That meant that we had to find other ways of making the vertical climb feel natural and not too cumbersome in our space level.

We solved the latter concern with something Ben had wanted to introduce to Ultimate Chicken Horse for a long time: a UFO. Its tractor beam, which is in fact a giant black hole (the circle in the image below) with a cone-like area of effect, pulls players upwards with increasing force – and conveniently kills them if they get abducted before touching the flag.

thE green lines are called wireframes. they reveal colliders and the likes

The tractor beam definitely made Space a “gimmicky” level, which we originally wanted to avoid for fear of introducing countless technical considerations and edge cases. However, because we were reusing code from the black hole, which has been in the game for a long time, there was very little risk of encountering major bugs that we hadn’t already fixed in the past. Indeed, we didn’t have too much trouble making the level work mechanically, and spent more time on other aspects of it.

As for the background, we took inspiration from colorized pictures of nebulae, with their pretty pink and teal hues, to create a form of “atmospheric gradient” from the bottom to the top that would look spacey without being too dark. To make the gradient as smooth as possible, we applied it via a couple of layers in Unity, rather than painting it straight onto the background itself.

The last stylistic touch was to make the asteroid belt into flaming tennis balls, because Fabio had this idea of a space tennis court from which the Doomsday Meteors originate.

we’re pretty committed to the bit at this point

One final change we made to the original level concept by Brontalo was to make ours quite a bit shorter. After testing a taller version among ourselves, we found that it was too difficult and tiresome to climb to the UFO when it was placed significantly higher, and the extra distance didn’t really add anything to the gameplay. Reducing how much it stretched vertically also helped avoid situations where the camera zoomed out too much, making the borders of the level extremely apparent and complicating visibility for players.

We started our work on Space simply wanting to recreate and iterate on a fan favorite among existing user-made levels. In the end, we actually went pretty hard on level-defining mechanical gimmick to make the vertical climb work by adding the UFO and its tractor beam, in addition to changing the proportions of the playing field.

By taking inspiration from the community yet not hesitating to use all our arsenal to upscale the idea, we feel like we made Space into one of our most unique levels to date. We certainly hope that Brontalo and everyone who suggested that we make a space-themed level also feel like we did justice to the concept!

If you liked this behind-the-scenes article, we suggest that you check out the previous ones on the flamethrower, Snake, and cannon. Stay tuned for next week’s installment: we will reveal the making of the one-way gate!

October 06, 2020

Behind the scenes: The cannon

October 06, 2020/ Richard Atlas

This is part 3/7 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 reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Jump in to learn about the cannon

Similarly to the flamethrower’s diagonal hazard, the A-cobra-tic cannon’s design was motivated by our desire to add a diagonal “mover” type of block to Ultimate Chicken Horse, as a counterpart to the fan, which pushes you in a cardinal direction.

The thought of a barrel cannon à la Donkey Kong Country was what we all initially had in mind, because it’s a game mechanic that has been proven to be objectively cool. Nevertheless, we had an early period of doubt about the feasibility of it.

When we imagined a DK-like cannon, we pictured it holding characters and moving along a track or swinging back and forth in an arc, until the player pressed the jump button to shoot out of it. However, we soon agreed that we didn’t want to introduce an item that required that kind of input, since it’s unlike any other mechanic in Ultimate Chicken Horse, and could easily lead to confusion.

We also feared that we would need to spend too much time making the physics and animations work for multiple players using a cannon in short succession, and had major concerns about networking everything properly for online games. Because we wanted this update to be completed relatively quickly, those factors almost scared us away from making a cannon altogether.

Instead, the team agreed to prototype an item that was more like a boost pad. We wanted something that you didn’t need to enter and then voluntarily exit. Instead, you’d simply be pushed in one direction when traversing the block’s area, as if you had moved into a fan’s wind, except the effect was diagonal and there was no solid object preventing you from passing in any direction.

in diddy kong racing, those are known as “zipperS”, while mario kart calls them “dash panels”. The more you know!

Conceptually, this brought us closer to another type of block people had previously requested: mirrors or trampolines that deflect projectiles into a new, straight direction. See for example this submission from Rammerz on Steam, sent in June 2016:

the blueprint background is such a nice touch!

Contrary to a fan’s wind, which changes the path of projectiles and players in an additive manner, we wanted to make a block that would force a clean new diagonal trajectory after going through it from any direction. Below is Ben’s early boost pad prototype, showing two types of projectiles entering from different angles and exiting in the same line:

This worked well, with one big caveat. As the programmer art shows, we had absolutely no idea what this boost pad should look like, or what actual contraption could have this effect. This posed a problem, because we feel it’s important that all blocks remain fairly self-explanatory in a quick-paced game like Ultimate Chicken Horse, where players want to react to things almost instinctively as they come.

Meanwhile, Kyler had gone rogue and decided to prototype an automatic animal cannon, despite our initial concerns about that design. He insisted that it would be easy enough to implement, and we had to give it to him: it looked pretty sweet already.

So we abandoned the boost pad design, and Ben and Kyler combined their forces to perfect the automatic cannon and make it work with players and projectiles alike.

Admittedly, we went on to tweak just about every bit of the mechanics of it over the next few months, from the exact physics of the exit trajectory to the colliders on players as they emerge, and everything in between. Some of our fears were founded: making the cannon work perfectly was no easy task, and it demanded serious efforts in internal quality assurance as well as the help of our trusted beta testers to iron out all the details of cannon mechanics and networking.

It also took us a few iterations to get the art and the animations just right, though we had a much clearer idea of what we wanted from the start than with other blocks.

While the cannon did end up requiring extra precautions and plenty of testing to make sure that it worked correctly with multiple players and projectiles, locally and online, we definitely don’t regret committing to that design after all. There’s a reason it’s a recurrent item in 2D platformers: it simply is fun! Once we tried it out, we knew it was worth putting in the work to do it right.

We were rewarded with a warm reception for this extravagant new block, which garnered tons of enthusiasm from Ultimate Chicken Horse fans. When A-cobra-tic came out, we saw many of you make entire levels based on this block alone, which is a true testament that it was worth all the trouble. This is the kind of thing that keeps us going, so we thank you for this show of appreciation!

Thank you for reading this behind-the-scenes article! If you liked it, you can check out the previous ones on the flamethrower block and Snake character; and you can look forward to next week’s exposé on the Space level.