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!

Behind the scenes of A-cobra-tic, Damage Labs, and IndieCade

Good day, friends of Clever Endeavour!

Here’s what we’d like to share with you this month:

• A new behind-the-scenes series about the A-cobra-tic update for Ultimate Chicken Horse

• Damage Labs, a Canadian studio startup program we will mentor

• IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere, an upcoming games event you can back now on Kickstarter

• This month’s selected charity: the Climate Emergency Fund

Let’s dive in!

Behind the scenes of A-cobra-tic

Earlier this week, we published the first article in a brand new behind-the-scenes series that will illuminate how we develop updates for Ultimate Chicken Horse. We tend to be extremely secretive with new content before its release, so this series will hopefully help you get a better understanding of our process, and of why we don’t like to share too much, too early.

In these articles, we will explain the many steps and iterations it took to make every major feature in the A-cobra-tic Update, which was released earlier this year. You’ll learn about the kinds of design decisions we make when we add new characters, levels, and blocks to the game, and see images we’ve never shared before of the various concepts we refined or abandoned along the way.

The first feature we have written about is the flamethrower block. Here’s a sneak peek:

Read the article to find out why we scrapped this adorable concept in favor of the one we ended up putting in the game!

This behind-the-scenes series will have 7 weekly installments including this one. The next one, which will be posted next Tuesday, will reveal the origins of the Snake character and its Cobra reskin. Keep an eye out for it on our blog or on social media!

The Damage Labs studio startup

In late August, Clever Endeavour became a mentor for the new Damage Labs studio startup program, an initiative from DMG Toronto for new and aspiring Canadian founders.

Damage Labs is “a free program for founders from historically marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds ready to start a game studio” that will guide its cohort to build game studios that are sustainable, inclusive, and ethical.

Applications are open until October 14th, and the program will run from October 26th to April 20th, demanding 15 hours per week. If you are in a new independent game studio in Canada led by a person who belongs to an underrepresented identity group, we highly recommend that you consider applying!

IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere

IndieCade has been organizing festivals and events to support, showcase and celebrate independent games internationally since 2005. They have had to make significant changes to their operations this year to bring us their yearly festival and awards ceremony online, and are now raising funds on Kickstarter to scale their digital platform to be a sustainable, year-round space for the celebration of independent games.

We were happy to back their campaign to help them create this digital space, and we invite fans of the indie landscape to join us and help IndieCade reach their funding goal!

If you’re interested in attending this year’s online festival, it will take place online on October 16-24. Fifty nominated games will be showcased and livestreamed. The streams, virtual booths, nominee gallery, and Discord community hub will be free for everybody to access. Other perks like private Zoom sessions and Discord channels, priority registration in tournaments, and industry networking opportunities will require a paid ticket.

Tickets will be on sale Monday, September 28th. You can follow IndieCade’s Twitter account for the latest festival news.

The charity corner

Finally, as part of our monthly employee-led donation program, Kyler chose to make a charitable contribution to the Climate Emergency Fund for the month of August. This donation will go towards supporting organizations and activists who bring awareness to the public about the threat of climate change, and who demand urgent action from leaders.

Thank you for reading, and keep being awesome!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team

Behind the scenes: The flamethrower

This is part 1 /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 humble flamethrower

The idea of a flamethrower block with an intermittent flame hazard has been around in the Ultimate Chicken Horse community for a long time. In fact, according to our record of Fun Reports, Discord logs, and fan art collection, it might be one of the most suggested additions ever!

For example, here’s the first instance of a flamethrower block mock-up I could find, sent by ZakolakPL on Steam way back in July of 2016:

The illustration indicates alternating on and off states

Then there’s this one sent my Fulandre, also on Steam, but in December of 2017:

we love how this fan art basically shows three animation frames for the flamethrower idea

This design is more analogous to the (mostly harmless) fire hydrant block. It is also is very reminiscent of the flamethrower block idea that Fabio pitched to the team in August of 2019, when we first met to decide what to add to the next update – though the resemblance is purely coincidental:

propane tank + nozzle = flamethrower. everyone knows it.

What was interesting to us about this block design was that, thus far, Ultimate Chicken Horse had been lacking a diagonal hazard. When developing new content for the game, we find it quite valuable to identify the so-called low-hanging fruit, because it means we can get a lot of value from an addition that is simple to make. It doesn’t cause us headaches to get working, while giving our fans something new. It’s a win-win!

Essentially, we immediately agreed to make this block, but decided that the design we wanted would be different in some ways:

• The silhouette and details would need to be simpler and fit the grid better, in keeping with the overall aesthetic of blocks in Ultimate Chicken Horse.

• Similarly, the colors would be brighter to fit the usual palette.

• Unlike the mock-up, the flame would exactly occupy two diagonal squares on the placement grid.

• The block itself would fit in a single square to facilitate its placement and rotation.

Following these guidelines, here’s the concept Fabio came up with next:

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

The most astute observers will notice two things:

• This is CUTE AS HECK

• … and yet, it’s not the design we ended up using!

I honestly expect some amount of outcry about that design decision. Why oh why did we not go with this adorable little animation? I mean, look at the little thing *go*, right?!

However, the fact that it’s a perfectly lovely animation by itself does not mean that it works well in the game! We had multiple concerns about it, and I hope that I can help you agree with us with a bit of explanation.

First, the design surely is easily recognizable as a lighter, yet the proportions are clearly off, which makes it look somewhat uncanny. It manages to be both way too small (given how short it is), and way too big (compared to the game characters, or even that mouse).

Also, while we were all enamored with the animation at first, we quickly realized that looping it over and over, as we needed to do in the game, made the cute mouse look less like a lively creature, and more like some sort of mind-controlled automaton doomed to repeat the same movement at a steady interval for all of eternity. Yikes.

You can see that in the GIF below, along with an even bigger issue: When the block was rotated, the mouse’s orientation with regards to gravity defied the laws of physics in a jarring way. The ability to flip blocks is central to Ultimate Chicken Horse, so we want all blocks to make (relative) sense no matter their orientation.

well this is awkward

Finally, we also saw an issue with what the block design was communicating to the player. If the mouse could press the button to light the flame, then players might have expected to be able to do the same – like with the punching glove block, which has similar-looking buttons that players can press. The potential confusion was even more striking when we experimented with removing the mouse automaton. That was our biggest issue with this version of the block: we wanted the flamethrower to be automatic and predictable, and the visuals failed to telegraph that clearly if they suggested the block could be activated by player intervention.

With all that in mind, we returned to the basics and moved on to what became our winning flamethrower design, while keeping the same flame animation:

fwoosh!

This little device tacked onto a propane tank is not exactly cute, but it works so well! Most people would know to expect fire from it, and the dial indicates that it’s both automated and predictable. The design also makes equal sense if you rotate the block in any direction.

The final flamethrower has some additional benefits compared to the lighter, both in ways that are specific to the needs of our game, and ways that boil down to basic animation principles.

With regards to in-game functionality, the animation remains smooth and accurate if you increase or decrease the Game Speed by using Modifiers, whereas the mouse’s organic movement stopped making sense if you modified the speed in either direction.

When it comes to the readability of the animation, the flamethrower holds a couple advantages. First, the position of the nozzle more clearly indicates that the flame will come out at an angle, unlike the lighter, which one could have expected to have a normal, vertical flame. Second, the silhouette is much more distinct.

It’s a well-known animation fact that a character or object’s silhouette benefits from being as clear and expressive as possible, in order to help the viewer make sense of what they’re seeing. In the context of Ultimate Chicken Horse, this is an interesting consideration, because it has to be balanced against another constraint, which is that we want our blocks to fit and fill squares on the grid as closely as possible, both visually and physically, to make placement and platforming on all blocks seamless. Arguably, the lighter design occupies one square of the grid with more fidelity than the flamethrower. However, the flamethrower is definitely not far from a snug fit, while also having more distinct features.

It might seem needlessly pedantic to want to make the art of our silly game adhere to idealistic animation principles. While I could actually make a convincing argument about how it’s generally a good idea to aim for high standards of readability in fast-paced video games, there’s also one other reason why this is of particular importance in Ultimate Chicken Horse. And that reason… is Dance Party.

you love to see it

You see, this level everybody loves dearly (*ahem*) turns everything into literal silhouette animation of black shapes on a lighter background. In this context, having clear and easily distinguishable block silhouettes is crucial to avoid creating (more) frustration.

lighter silhouette

flamethrower silhouette

The image on the left shows the old lighter on Dance Party, right next to a 1x1 block. The two are not very different. What’s more, it’s pretty hard to tell what the lighter even is!

In contrast, the flamethrower in the right image could not be mistaken for a simple 1x1 platform. You might not be able to tell exactly what it is if you didn’t already know, but the nozzle sticking out nevertheless indicates that this must be the business end, and something will happen there.

Now, to be clear, I would be lying if I said that we held all of these considerations in mind from the very beginning. We stumbled upon them as we prototyped the block and iterated on its design.

That being said, this whole process is a very good illustration of how much thought goes into creating any bit of content to add to Ultimate Chicken Horse – even if it’s something mechanically simple like the humble flamethrower. As it turns out, this block required us to pay attention to a lot of visual details in order to get to a design that really works for the game.

We hope you enjoyed this first behind-the-scenes article! The next one will be about the star of A-cobra-tic: the Snake character, and will be posted in a week. See you then!