CHKN News

Hey, CHKNeers! This week’s update makes fighting creatures in the arena more fun, with camera and AI/combat improvements as well as new pre-built creatures to test out. We want your feedback on creature battling in the Arena! Tell us what you think of the update and share your creature combatants with us on the Discord.

This update also includes:

• New homestead art
  
• Better creature riding
  
• Fixes to loading and performance

Creature AI improvements for better combat, plus cameras have been updated so you can see the action (and faces!) more clearly.

This Snicken is quite shocked at how much health it doesn’t have. Better luck next time, Snicken.

• Cameras:
  
  • Knockdown camera greatly improved (better transitions, closer focus on face to show creature’s reaction)
    
  • Camera bugs in Team Elimination mode have been fixed
    
  • Fixed awkward camera transitions in Exhibition mode.
• Combat AI improvements: Creatures no longer end up in staring contests; they’re much more aggressive in combat
  
• New Arena creatures: Added new prebuilt creatures to try out in battle
  
• Fixed Arena attack attempt & hits tracking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24euCrR0TVE
Check out some of our favorite community creature creations in this collection and try them out in the Arena. Then share your best Arena creature creations on the Discord. We’ll be adding them to our next Arena collection!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1626493299

Improvements to loading, creatures, homesteads, and environments, plus some bug fixes.

• Optimization & Loading:
  
  • Reduced initial load time and optimized initial load memory usage. Loading should take significantly less time on lower end machines.
    
  • Improved auto-quality detection to choose performance settings more appropriate for your hardware
    
  • Added shadow distance setting to Options
    
  • The memory footprint of the game has been majorly decreased
    
  • World hitches (periodic framerate drops) that were caused by the game reading from the hard drive are now gone
• Creature movement: Speeds re-tuned so creatures are much more agile across the board (makes for better combat and riding)
  
• Riding: Added an easy-to-craft riding item for early game to make riding more accessible, and improved targeting when riding a creature

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YysvifakI44

• Environment:
  
  • Melon & Squash art are higher fidelity and Raspberry & Blueberry items increased in poly count. Basically, these all now look more delicious
    
  • Bush textures got a visual tweak to bring them in line with other environment art
• Homesteads: All new art for wood and stone structure items!

Cozy.

• Creatures & Life Blocks:
  
  • A new set of creatures now have a chance of spawning in the world
    
  • Unicorn and Dinosaur Spike Life Blocks got a spiffy revamp
    
  • Added new Antler Life Block

• FX: Impact effects are larger in scale so they’re easier to see
  
• Item destruction: Disabled destruction of ability scrolls and item recipe tomes, and Electric Shock ability no longer destroys nearby items
  
• Multiplayer Bug Fixes:
  
  • Fixed an issue where creatures were missing for clients
    
  • Fixed creature riding for clients
    
  • Fixed a bug where party members in a multiplayer game would take damage from friends
    
  • Fixed a bug where bush impact sounds were not playing for clients in multiplayer games
• General Bug Fixes
  
  • Fixed a race condition with creature spawning that was causing multiple issues (abilities not appearing, duplicate creature records, and missing creature party avatars in the HUD)
    
  • Fixed a bug where players would teleport underground and bonded creatures would be lost forever if the player died while riding a creature
    
  • Fixed a bug where creature stamina while riding a creature would not deplete during sprinting
    
  • Fixed Creature AI triggering scared or angry routines at the wrong times
    
  • Fixed a bug where resolution settings were randomly changed/reset

Make sure to join the CHKN Discord to give us your feedback! It’s also a good place to find multiplayer friends, share your creations, vote in our polls, and just hang out.

- Team CHKN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/420930/CHKN/

Thanks to the awesome CHKNeers on Discord and the forums testing and reporting issues to us, we’ve been able to swat some bugs and continue to improve performance on lower end machines. Here are some notes from the latest set of hotfixes:

• Loading: Initial loading sequence speed improved (specifically AI portion of loading speed 5x as fast)
  
• Spawning:
  
  • Creatures: Fixed a bug where creature respawning at very high rates (negatively affecting both gameplay/world population and performance)
    
  • Poachers: Fix for poachers spawning excessively and causing frame rate drops (and just being generally annoying when trying to progress)
    
• Multiplayer:
  
  • Structures now show up
    
  • Player Stamina fixed
    
  • Farming hoe and ground tilling fixed
    
  • Lifeshaper upgrades now work for all players
    
  • Fixed a bug where poachers were invisible
• Grass: Fixed disappearing grass, quality settings, optimizations, but there’s an edge case we are still tracking down.
  
• Game Exit: Fixed bug causing issues for players who exit the game while the creature builder orb is open
  
• Screen Resolution: Fixed bug causing screen resolution to randomly reset
  
• Party Slots: Fixed bug causing occasional creature party slots to disappear

Please check out this build and let us know how things are working for you. We’re still optimizing and fixing bugs and your reports really do help us get these updates out more quickly. Keep ‘em coming!



We’re always on Discord so that’s the best place to find us quickly and let us know of any issues or feedback. You can also post on our forums and we’ll have a look.

Thanks, everyone.

- Team CHKN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/420930/CHKN/

2018 is coming to an end and we just want to say a big Thank You to all of you. Your support and feedback has been amazing this year and we couldn’t make CHKN without you. We look forward to a great 2019!





Don’t forget you have until Jan 3rd to hunt down your free holiday hats in Adventure mode! Find a wild creature roaming the island, observe it’s magnificent festive hat, then take that hat for yourself! That’s the holiday spirit.

We’re also sharing our festive-hat-wearing creature screenshots over on Discord during the hunt. We’d love to see yours!


Speaking of Discord, we’ve got a few polls up over there right now. We want to know what content you’d like to see next, your favorite CHKN mode, and which creature should be next up for a revamp. Join up to vote, then stick around for events, shenanigans, exclusive roles for CHKNeers, and more polls in the future.



Have an awesome weekend and we’ll see you in 2019!

- Team CHKN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/420930/CHKN/

Happy holidays, everyone! To celebrate and say thanks, we’ve got a special treasure hunt going on through the end of the year. Plus we’ve released optimization fixes to improve performance. Those notes are below.

Reindeer, Santa, and Elf hats await.

What could be more festive than a Santa-hat-wearing chicatdog? Nothing, of course! So, this holiday we invite you to hunt down or tame some wild creatures that have randomly spawned wearing one of 3 special hats on their beautiful heads. (Or you could cheat and switch to Creative mode but where’s the fun in that?)

The hats are only available for a limited time—until Jan 3rd—so get hunting soon.

And be sure to share screenshots with us on Discord! We’d want to see your lovely (and not so lovely) creatures in their festive new gear.

Good luck!



If you haven’t tried it out yet, make sure you’re on the latest update and give the brand new CHKN a go. Build creatures with the new blocks, survive the new wilderness, send your creatures into battle in Arena mode… there's lots to explore. (See the full recap in this 0.7 update post.) Let us know what you think!

We’ve also got a poll going over on our Discord to see what everyone’s favourite mode is. Are you an Adventurer, an Arena battler, or a Creative builder? Head over there and vote!


We’ve just pushed an update with many fixes and tech improvements to optimize performance. With these, you’ll notice:

1. Stuttering/hitching as you move through the world has been dramatically reduced.
   
2. Improved loading

There’s still a point during the initial loading, before the loading bar shows 0%, where the game is temporarily unresponsive. It seems like the game may have crashed but it hasn’t! Summon the patience of a saint and it will load after some waiting (how long depends on your computer specs). We’re working on this!

And for those of you that want more technical details, here's the full list of improvements:

• New rendering technique to render many instances of an object quickly for modern video cards. Increases render range while improving FPS.
  
• Implemented compute shaders to cull based off of camera frustum and occlusion. (Requires a modern card.)
  
• Added fallbacks for the above for low-end devices to maintain current FPS.
  
• World streaming system overhauled to no longer be gameObject based. Frees up resources for other systems, greatly reduces stutters, and improves LOD responsiveness. (Collisions always register quickly; no delay when traveling through world for things to load in.)
  
• Foliage system optimized to remove frame stuttering when traveling through the world.
  
• Improved quality settings. Render distance will now tune all systems to greatly improve FPS on low end devices. High end devices can now render up to 2x as much as previous build.
  
• Plus various bug fixes (FX no longer always attached to hands, throw animation is fixed, failed to load fixed)

Our 5th creature-based armor is now in the game! If you want to keep warm on cold CHKN nights, hunt down some dog creatures and get to crafting.

“Come, Chicky! It’s time to get our revenge on those Lightcats.“

• Join our CHKN discord! Hang out, chat about your game ideas, report bugs, or get help.
  
• Follow us on Twitter and subscribe to us on YouTube
• Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to know about CHKN News

Thank you for all your support this year. We love all your feedback and crazy creature creations. Happy holidays!

- Team CHKN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/420930/CHKN

Earn a special Discord role by joining our first ever multiplayer event! We’ll be there, too. (It’s lonely in our developer basements. But fair warning, watch out for Greg’s creatures. They’re terrifying.) Let's join up and play the new CHKN!

📅 Saturday, Dec 15th
⏰ 8-9 PM EST (Time zone converter)

It’s really easy to join:

1. Launch CHKN!
   
2. Host your own game for others to join or just find an existing game and hop right in. (If you need help, check out these instructions.)
   
3. (Optional) Join our Discord & head over to the Multiplayer channel to find friends and group up (and get your special role!)

See you there!

Player Armor
5 new armors are available for you to craft on your adventures: chicken, cat, cow, and crab are live now, with dog coming next week. Craft them at the Outfit station. Collect them all!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La3Oq4pdUOY
Arena Mode
Check out the new Arena to pit your creatures against each other. You can go head to head in 1v1 fights or see how teams of creatures fare against each other. Who will win?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT_JgHn1ooE

We’ve updated the live build to hot fix a few issues players were reporting. If you were having any of these issues, please update to the most recent version and try again.

Multiplayer: Fixed Issues with players getting stuck or unable to join multiplayer games
NEW: You no longer need to start a new Adventure mode game before joining a multiplayer session

Loading: Fixed issues getting stuck on the initial game loading screen for eternity. NOTE: It may still take a while to load (we’re working on it!) but it should progress.

Lost item drops: Fixed issues with items dropping through temple floors and boulders.

HUGE thanks to everyone who’s been sending us information on these issues! It really helps us get fixes out to everyone quickly.


We’re currently investigating reports of performance slowly dropping when playing for extended periods of time. If you’re experiencing this issue, please send us your log! This info really helps us out. Here’s how:

1. Exit CHKN and go to this directory on your computer. (Replace YOURUSERNAME with your computer username.)
   
2. C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Katapult\CHKN\
   
3. Find output_log.txt
   
4. Send us the log on Discord or to [email protected]

We hope you’ll join us for the multiplayer event! CHKN is really fun with friends.

- Team CHKN

https://store.steampowered.com/app/420930/CHKN/