We’ve been hiding in the shadows of the Clever Endeavour bunker for months, plugging away at the console versions of the game and creating new content for users on all platforms. Now we’ve got some serious new stuff to show off, as you saw in that trailer.
--- Updated launch schedule! ---
PS4 Americas: December 12th
PS4 Japan: December 14th
Xbox One (global): December 15th
PS4 Europe (and Oceania): December 18th
Nintendo Switch: ASAP in 2018
So what have we been working on?
Challenge Mode
First things first: the brand new Challenge Mode is going to open up the world of Ultimate Chicken Horse in a huge way. We noticed that most of the players that create and share their own levels in Free Play Mode have been using it to set some pretty ridiculous challenges for each other. Unfortunately they’ve had to work around the limitations of the existing game modes. With Challenge Mode, players can now directly compete for the best time in their creations against the rest of the world! And if pure speed isn’t enough, coins act as a secondary objective; you’ll have to get each one to earn the real bragging rights. And finally, Ultimate Chicken Horse is all about playing with friends and Challenge Mode is no different. Team up and cooperate to earn the fastest group times and prove that your crew is the best around.
Levels will be displayed in a level browser which can be sorted in terms of popularity of levels, organized by difficulty, and more searching options. You can find the best, the newest, or even just random levels from other users to test your skill, or input level codes that your friends send you.
With Challenge Mode comes an expanded Free Play mode, with blocks of different sizes and colours, along with permanent blocks that can be placed in the level and never destroyed (when playing in Party Mode or Challenge Mode). This will allow you to make pixel-art style levels with customizable level bounds, backgrounds and music in a newly added blank level editor.
A New Character!
But who’s up for the challenge?? Well, the newest addition to the Ultimate Chicken Horse crew is certainly up for it. Elephantastically parading around, full of pachydermic pizzazz!
What’s more, to add to the abundance of possible level designs you can now make, we’ve also added a handful of new blocks into the mix to be used for all game modes.
New Blocks
Paper Airplane Shooter
This block produces and throws paper airplanes that the player can stand on. It's a combination of a photocopier, a Mars Rover and a robot arm (developed by the same people who created the Robot bunny).
Wrecking Ball
It wrecks stuff. Wrecks ‘em good.
Scaffolding Piece
This piece seems boring by itself, but will allow for cool contraptions to be created when you stick it to other pieces, especially moving pieces.
Long Distance Mover
Pretty much the same as the Horizontal Mover block from before, but goes a longer distance for more variety.
Diagonal Mover
Same idea as the other movers, but diagonal.
Up-Blower (or Fan Blower)
We’ve gotten many people suggesting different blocks, and one of the ones that came up often was a fan blower object, or the opposite of a black hole block. Well, here we are! It can boost your jump, throw off your flight trajectory, or restrict your movement.
Pressure Trigger Spikes
Ouch! Careful not to stay on this block for too long…
Smooth Rotating Block
While the Rotating Tire is great, it locks in four positions and doesn’t rotate slowly and smoothly. We decided that this would be an interesting block to expand the possibility space of what you can do with rotating objects.
And while these animals are content running around with new blocks, they’re even happier that we’ve given them new outfits to play around with.
New Outfits
We invite you to check out the new outfits in the game, as there are a bunch of new ones and all animals now have 3 options with colour varieties.
But that’s not all! There’s more… a couple of brand new levels with interesting and unique mechanics, to add some more variety to the world of Ultimate Chicken Horse.
New Levels
But that’s not all! There’s more… a couple of brand new levels with interesting and unique mechanics, to add some more variety to the world of Ultimate Chicken Horse.
Jungle Temple
The Jungle Temple is, well, an underground temple in a jungle. You also might have noticed a large sun coin on a pedestal in the screenshot… I’m sure nothing will happen if you pick it up...
Volcano level
Caution, hot! The new volcano level brings our animal friends about as far away from the Farm as they’d like to be. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but that doesn’t make it an easy level.
Updated Soundtrack!
We've also re-done a bunch of the Ultimate Chicken Horse music, so that sweet funky music is even more funky now. Vibe Avenue, our music wizards, have re-recorded many of the parts to include live horns, strings, guitar, and other instruments. This music will be launching in the game when the update goes live.
Cross-Play
Along with the release on console, we’re going to be including a limited form of cross-play. All of the shared levels made on any platform will be accessible by all of the other platforms, and the leaderboards will be shared across all platforms as well. We will have cross-play between PC and PS4, to join your friends you can use the lobby code created by the host when they create the lobby. We unfortunately won’t have cross-play between PC and XboxOne, and we haven’t confirmed the status of cross-play between PC and Nintendo Switch yet. These restrictions are due to security concerns and policy guidelines on the part of the platform holders, so unfortunately we can’t change their minds about this.
Another change that we wanted to talk about was the 2-player double party box. Previously, in a 2-player game, the beginning of the game would be slow due to a lack of blocks. Levels were empty, and the game moved much more slowly than the 4-player game… this was frustrating for everyone. Our new default option is to receive two party boxes on each round, if you’re playing a 2-player game. Give it a try! This option can be turned off, in case you liked it the old way, the the options page of the treehouse lobby.
All of this new stuff is coming free on all versions when the console versions launch. This update also includes a ton of little fixes and polish, and should address many of the concerns we’ve heard from the community about quality of life issues and general user experience issues. We’re excited for this next new chapter in the life of Ultimate Chicken Horse, and we hope to see tons of new creations and imaginative ideas from the community with our new Challenge Mode.
Level Migration from the Old Version
Old levels that you've made before the update will still be accessible by using the level code, but won't show up on the LevelNet lists (like trending, newest, etc.). If you want it to show up there, you can save a local copy of the level then publish it, and you'll get a new code which is on the new level server.
CHANGE LOG
Full change log to come. There are lots of fixes, improvements and performance optimizations not discussed above!