Studio work

After more than two months of hard work behind the scenes, we’re proud to finally share Clever Endeavour’s public statement of our commitment to fight for marginalized devs in the games industry. We’ve always been enthusiastic about supporting local initiatives like the Pixelles, but the time felt right to inscribe that kind of drive into our company’s plans and policies, and to take it much further than before.

We aim to be a studio that holds itself accountable for the kind of impact that we have on the lives of the people we work with, our peers in the industry, and all members of the gaming community at large. We hope that this commitment can serve as our foundation moving forward.

In related news, this month Clever Endeavour became a sponsor for the Pixelles Creator Fund, which offers small grants to Canadian game creators of marginalized genders, no strings attached. The program is open to solo devs or small diverse teams of 3 or fewer people, and applications are due by August 31st at 11:59pm. We’re excited to see what the selected devs will create!

In unrelated news, we’ve been hard at work prototyping new ideas. Because we have such an active Ultimate Chicken Horse community, we can take the time to build out our ideas while learning new processes and methods that will help us in development of the next project. Every time we make a prototype, we ensure that the parts of the prototype we make could be used for other projects—we’re using a game architecture which may take more time up front but allows for much more flexibility and allows our non-programmers to do game design work more easily. With every new prototype we make, we get closer to finding the idea that will be our next game, and we’re learning a lot and growing as a team in the process. Onward!

Studio fun!

Last week, we did another socially distanced outing in the park to partake in team brainstorming activities, which is a great excuse to hang out when you’re in a prototyping phase. We armed ourselves with pens, paper, and our imaginations, and we essentially played party games meant to stimulate our creativity.

We warmed up with a textual exquisite corpse exercise, which yielded some… interesting results.

A tiny popsicle melts the stars in the sky with enthusiasm
They spelunked aggressively as they screamed:
“Wassup?!”
“Well, nothing actually”
and died.

Okay, so this might not be our next game pitch… but we still think it was totally worth it.

—

Back at the (home) office, Fabio delighted us with something else that’s not actually going into a game, but we think everyone will love nonetheless: 3D models of three characters from Ultimate Chicken Horse, made in the VR tool Quill.

The charity corner

As part of our company’s commitments, we will be donating $5,000 every month to a charity or organization of our employees’ choosing. For the month of July, Gen chose to donate to Femmes autochtones du Québec to support their mission of helping Native women of Quebec increase their quality of life through the promotion of nonviolence, justice, equal rights, and health.

In addition to this, in response to the crisis in Lebanon in relation to the Beirut blast, Clever Endeavour also contributed to the United Nations World Food Programme in early August.

That’s all for this month!
Take care, and be excellent to each other!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team