Bringing Ultimate Chicken Horse to SHIELD

Ultimate Chicken Horse is a party platformer where you build the level as you play, taking turns placing traps and hazards and trying to screw your friends out of a win.

Each turn, place more items in the level before running through, and try to create a level that's just barely too hard for your friends, but easy enough for you. If everyone reaches the end of the level, no one gets any points, so be dangerous!

What Went Right?

The game seemed to run quite smoothly on the SHIELD and the performance felt good. The controllers feel good in your hands and are really the best type of input we could hope for. The SHIELD version was also helpful for events like PAX because the machine is small, quiet and reliable so we had no problems with thousands of people coming to the booth and playing each day.

We had a great time dealing with the NVIDIA team and found them super helpful along every step of the way. They really care about the developers they work with and you feel that in all of their communication.

Challenges

Had to reduced the size of our sound banks and correctly setup the separate sound bank vs game files so that we could fit within the size restrictions of the store.

What Went Wrong

Androids controller implementation of the "Back" button is very weird and doesn't translate well to multiplayer games designed for PC controllers. Android recognizes the "back" button as always as being "ESC" being pressed on the keyboard, and does not transmit which specific controller sent the message. This required us to work around that button in a fairly imperfect way, where any person can pause the game, but they will no longer have any way to control the pause menu.