Happy New Year, Ultimate Friends!

How’s 2021 shaping up for you so far? It’s looking mighty fine for us!

Here’s the round up:

A partnership with Nintendo for a huge Ultimate Chicken Horse promo… in Asia
Looking back on the game projects we helped with as part of Elevate 2020
The 8th Pixelles Game Incubator projects are available to try out
Two new game dev funds: the Pixelles BIPOC Creator Fund and the Moonrise Fund
Charity donation: AGDQ2021

Arutimettochikinhōsu news

(That’s the phonetic transcription for アルティメットチキンホース, which is how Ultimate Chicken Horse is written in Japanese kana script. The more you know!)

We try not to brag about it too much, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is actually kinda big in Japan. This is about to manifest itself in a super exciting (albeit region-locked) event: between January 25th and 31st, the game will be available for free for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

This is by far the biggest promotional event we’ve ever done with Nintendo, and we are simply honored to be on the short list of third party developers they have reached out to for this kind of opportunity.

And of course, we’re hoping that one day, maybe we’ll get to do the same kind of thing in the American and European regions...

Other game happenings

Back in September, three of us signed up to be mentors for Code Coven, and we were then involved in the Elevate 2020 Accelerator, a global online incubator for indie game devs that were impacted by the event cancellations that COVID-19 caused. Now that Elevate 2020 has come to an end, we thought we’d showcase the three game projects we have helped out with.

Richard was mentoring Caldera Interactive who is working on Project Turing, a pixel-art cyberpunk empathy-adventure where players will explore a fascinating world inhabited by machines seemingly deserted by their creators. Give them a follow to keep track of this game, which is still in the early stages of development!

Eve was paired with Team Subliminal, who is making Button City, a narrative adventure game about an arcade in the sky! You can check out the game in its full low-poly glory right now by downloading the demo, and add it to your wishlist to know when the full version is out.

Kyler was paired with Team Stardust, who is working on developing Grimoire Groves: a roguelite game about cute witches restoring balance to a magical forest. The team is interestingly going to apply non-violent gameplay to the underlying structure of a roguelite to make a game that will be suitable for a wide audience.

As we mentioned before, last year we also got involved with the 8th edition of the Pixelles Game Incubator. The cohort revealed the fruit of their labor in December, and Kyler attended the showcase. He thought Julia Dion’s game Mastermine was a fun one to try for anyone who is a fan of Minesweeper. All the games made as part of the incubator in 2020 and in years prior are available to play in the Pixelles Arcade.

We also want to give a shout-out to Pixelles for their latest initiative, the BIPOC Creator Program, offering personally tailored mentorship and grants of up to $10k CAD to Black, Indigenous and Person of Colour Canadian game creators. The last day to apply is January 24th.

In a similar vein, our friends at GLITCH just launched the Moonrise Fund, an early stage equity fund focused on building a better, more inclusive creative economy. We’re thrilled to see more and more of these initiatives designed to open up opportunities for the next generation of game creators!

The charity corner

We were happy to donate $1000 to Games Done Quick during their AGDQ2021 speedrunning marathon benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Once again, GDQ and its audience absolutely knocked it out of the park, raising over $2.75 million (!) for the cause.

That’s all folks!

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team