Ultimate Chicken Horse Tournament, Disco:MTL, and Glasswork

Hello Ultimate Animals!

Here are some highlights from the last month at Clever Endeavour Games: a live tournament event for Ultimate Chicken Horse, a day-long indie summit on game discoverability, and some creative team-building fun. Let’s dive in!

Tournoi I-Sport 2019

On July 7th, Gen attended the first Tournoi I-Sport by La Zone de Jeux Indie Loto-Québec at the Montréal Casino. There, players took part in four tournaments of indie games made in the province of Québec: Ultimate Chicken Horse, King of the Hat by our office buddies at Business Corp. Incorporated, Save Your Nuts by Triple Scale Games, and Sacrifice your Friends by Astrolabe Interactive.

Photo by Matías Garabedian: twitter.com/matiasmontreal

The energy at the event was super fun. Everyone involved in organizing and animating it did a great job, and the players for each of the games put on a fantastic show. You can see the Ultimate Chicken Horse match for the first place at this link (timestamp: 5h14m27s), but we also encourage you to peruse the recording to see the other games in action! Special thanks to Toornament for their help with tournament structure.

Disco:MTL 2019

A week after that, on July 13th, Gen went to Disco:MTL, The Game Discoverability Summit held by the GamePlay Space (where our office is). It’s always fantastic when industry events happen right where we are, and this one holds a special place in Gen’s heart because discoverability is a very high-priority topic in community development and marketing for indies.

Photo by GamePlay Space: twitter.com/GamePlaySpace

The talks were about specific areas of interest – like visibility on Steam, influencer relations, Discord community-building, or game trailer campaign design – which made them extremely interesting… if you’re into that kind of stuff. Here we won’t bore you with diagrams of marketing funnels, but just know that they were there and they were good!

Team building: Glasswork!

Because we’re in a new phase at Clever Endeavour, where we’re experimenting with new ideas and just generally letting our creativity take the lead to discover what our next project will be, it’s especially important that we honor our tradition of doing team-building activities that take us all out of the ordinary day-to-day. That’s what we did last month when we went out to take part in a glasswork class!

Specifically, we learned the basics of flameworking, where the glass artist sits at a torch to melt sticks of glass onto a small metal rod, spinning it to form beads. As you can see, it looks equal parts badass and dorky.

It’s surprisingly easy to get started with this technique, so all of us were able to make our own unique beads that we took home after they spent a day in the kiln. Some of us also got creative with the format: Fabio made a couple of face-like sculptures, Rich made a snake, and Kyler made a jellyfish and… what we think might be attempts at Sheep? Gen bought a small sheep figurine from an artist of the glasswork atelier, and it makes for a pretty funny comparison.

That’s it for now!

Note that while we’re still busy with the Ultimate Chicken Horse community, professional development, and team-building (not to mention child-rearing in the case of Kyler), we’re also working every day on entirely new game projects. It’s just too early for us to make any of them public, so you’ll have to forgive us for being a little elusive!

<3

The Clever Devs