Welcoming Steph, UCH Server Updates and More!

Hey there everyone!

We've got a jam-packed blog for you today, so here's the TL;DR:

• We have a new team member, Steph!

• Changes are coming to the Ultimate Chicken Horse server architecture

• We're doing Twitch streams again

• Sharing the community survey results

• New Valentine's Day feature levels are now live

• Nintendo Switch promo results in ~125k first-time players

• Code Coven’s Modern Magicks conference

• Charity donations: Ocean Conservancy and ChocoBowl

New Team Addition

Steph here, writing my first ever blog post! I joined the Clever Endeavour team back in January as the new community manager since Eve, the previous community manager, is moving on to do more production work within the studio.

I came from agency life where I worked on a whole bunch of gaming titles that ranged from indies to AAA, and I'm super excited to bring my experience to the team! While the rest of Clever Endeavour is in Montreal, I'm currently located in Toronto so it'll be a little while until I can meet them all in person and eventually move over there myself.

I'm already having a blast with the team and am working on a bunch of new community initiatives, so I look forward to communicating with you all.

Upcoming Server Update

Some time ago we vaguely alluded to having a small Ultimate Chicken Horse update in the works, and with the game’s 5th anniversary approaching fast, some of you must be wondering if those two events will line up.

Because we have gotten some questions about this already, we feel the need to disclose that the update will unfortunately not come out in March. In fact, we still don’t know when it will come out, but we can say that it’s still a few months away.

This is because, in addition to the content that we are planning to add to the game, one major change is in the works: online server migration. We’ve known for a little while now that the Unity Relay Servers that we use will be deprecated at some point in the coming years. In order to future-proof the game, we need to move away from those servers.

We’re currently working with an outsourcing company that has started work on this server migration. Changing the whole server architecture is no small task, and they have already hit roadblocks, causing delays in our initial plans. For example, they’re going to need to upgrade the version of Unity the game is built in, a process that will also force them to update external plugins we use, as well as all console-related development tools, and will almost certainly break some things in the game.

To put it succinctly: There is an Ultimate Chicken Horse content update in the works, it will come out sometime this year, but we still don’t know when.

Twitch Streams

Come join us for weekly streams over on Twitch!

Every week I (Steph) will be playing community challenge levels and answering questions in chat. I'm also planning to do a monthly #AskClevEndeav stream with our other team members so you should see the #AskClevEndeav stream a little more regularly.

We stream every week on Friday 3-4 pm EST except for tomorrow (Feb 19) as we have the day off!

Join us: twitch.tv/cleverendeavourgames

Community Survey

A few weeks ago we asked for community feedback on multiple social platforms. Here are the main findings:

• The top 3 social platforms used are: YouTube, Discord, Twitch

• Platforms participants play on (in order): PC, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

• Most loved current initiatives: Fan Art Gallery, AskClevEndeav, Discord

• Most wanted future initiatives: In-game stats, community contests, tournaments

The survey also highlighted some confusion as to how we pick art pieces for the Fan Art Gallery or levels for Feature Friday so we have clarified about art pieces here and Eve shared some insight for how we pick levels for Feature Friday.

Thank you to the 120+ people who participated in the survey, it's given us a lot to think about and consider.

Valentine's Levels

We have a whole bunch of sweet Valentine's levels now featured on the LevelNET in Ultimate Chicken Horse. Go check them out while they're available!

Nintendo Promo in Asia

As we mentioned in last month’s blog post, in late January we had a free trial of Ultimate Chicken Horse in several Asian regions, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. For one week players in these regions could play the full game for free if they had a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. For those who wanted to continue playing past the trial period, there was a sale so they could buy their own copy of the game.

This trial resulted in the busiest times we've ever seen in Ultimate Chicken Horse! We estimate that the trial brought in 125k first-time players over a week, and we saw almost 10k concurrent players on January 30th! A total of 85k people played UCH at some point on that same day, another all-time record.

Code Coven’s Modern Magicks

For those who’d like to check in on the Code Coven Elevate 2020 cohort and the teams we mentored, we thought we’d point you towards the Modern Magicks conference, which will take place on February 20th. This streamed event will highlight some of Elevate’s projects and developers, including a talk by Caldera Interactive about building an ethical game studio.

Charity Corner

Rich led this month's employee-led donation and he chose Ocean Conservancy. This organization advocates for various solutions to the multiple challenges facing our oceans and the wildlife within them. This includes protecting the Arctic, fighting climate change, creating sustainable fisheries and creating trash-free seas.

We also donated $400 to the ChocoBowl, a yearly stream where game developers play a classic RPG for charity. This year they were raising money for The Bail Project.

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That's it for now! Looking forward to seeing you next month, or in our Twitch streams before that!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team

Huge Nintendo promo for Ultimate Chicken Horse… in Asia

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.

project turing

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.

Grimoire groves

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

Ultimate Chicken Horse Winter Levels and Games to Play for the Holidays

Hello, Ultimate Animals!

This is the very last Clever Endeavour monthly round-up of 2020! It hasn’t been easy, but we made it through the year.

Here’s what’s in store:

• We’re looking for YOUR Winter-themed levels to feature in Ultimate Chicken Horse

• Damage Labs has announced its first cohort of game studios

• The Queerness and Games Conference 2020 talks are available online

• You can pre-order the Slice of Life: Songs from Wholesome Games vinyl to benefit the Galaxy Fund for game prototypes

• We made you a list of our favorite online multiplayer games and video chat platforms for the Holidays

• Our latest charity picks are Chez Doris and The Gazette Christmas Fund

Let’s go!

Ultimate Chicken Horse call for levels

Everyone at Clever Endeavour will be on vacation for the next two weeks, so the regular Feature Friday event – where we add 4 new user-made levels to the featured tab in Ultimate Chicken Horse at the end of every week – will be on a short hiatus.

To make up for it though, we’re going to feature 15 wintery and festive levels this Friday, December 18th for you to enjoy over the Holidays! Read the details in the Steam event, and make sure to send us your Winter-themed levels today or tomorrow for a chance to be selected.

Our other clever endeavours

As usual, the studio has been involved in a few initiatives in the games industry that we’d like to share with you this month.

First off, Damage Labs, a studio startup program we sponsor, has announced its first cohort of selected founders and studios. We’re super excited to learn more about these teams and their projects in the coming weeks! If you’d also like to help 10 innovative game studios by giving them the opportunity to thrive, you can still donate to the Damage Labs Founder Support Fund, which has raised 75% of its goal so far.

Next, the 2020 online edition of the Queerness and Games Conference, which took part gradually over the months of October to December, has now come to an end. We sponsored QGCon early in the year, when it was slated to happen at Concordia University in Montréal in the month of May, but life clearly had other plans for all of us. Nevertheless, the organizers managed to move the whole event to YouTube, where you can now find all recordings. (Note that some mature subject matters are discussed!)

Last but not least, you might recall that we sponsored the Galaxy Fund back in July. There’s a new cool way to contribute to this game prototype fund: by pre-ordering Slice of Life: Songs From Wholesome Games, a vinyl compilation of soundtracks from 21 different indie games! You get great music and a gorgeous album, and a diverse group of studio founders get the proceeds. Win-win!

Things to do over the Holidays

This Holiday season, most people will rely on the power of the Internet to celebrate with loved ones. Because of that, we thought we might as well share some of our favorite games and tools that make online get-togethers more fun! Of course you can always play Ultimate Chicken Horse, but you know that already, so we’ll focus on other things this time. ;)

Here’s a short list of games that we have been playing as a team all year for our Friday game time:

• Geoguessr

An oldie but a goodie! It’s very simple: you get plopped down somewhere on Earth via Google Street View, and have a limited amount of time to deduce your location on the world map. You’ll only need one paid account to generate and share Challenges with an unlimited number of players.

• Skribbl.io

Skribbl is a free multiplayer drawing and guessing game, like Pictionary, where scoring is based on how quickly you can guess the word (or others guess your word). You can join random lobbies or create private rooms for up to 12 players.

• Drawful 2

In the same vein, we’ve been playing a lot of Drawful 2 by Jackbox Games. In this one, the drawing prompts are a little bit wackier, and once everyone has written their guess, you have to try and find out which one was correct. You get points for fooling people into thinking your caption was the initial prompt!

• Golf With Your Friends

There’s nothing quite like mini-putt, and this is a very fun and well made online version of that. The levels start off simple enough, but progressively become more and more ridiculous, and incorporate things you’d never get to see in a real-life course, like cannons and jetpacks.

If you’re just looking to hang out with people virtually, you might find that Zoom isn’t the best for large group gatherings – or maybe you’re just tired of it, on account of having spent so many (school)work hours on there this year. For something more dynamic for your Holiday parties, where you can quickly create separate sub-rooms for people to break off into, we suggest that you check out these two alternatives:

• Gather

Walk around a virtual pixel art space, and automatically get into voice / video chats with the people who are nearest to you. Tables and rooms act as semi-private chat bubbles.

• Wonder

With a simple interface, turn a larger conference call into a collection of dynamic groups and circles of conversation.

The charity corner

In November, as part of the Clever Endeavour employee-led donation initiative, Alexis chose to make a charitable contribution to Chez Doris, a Montréal-based shelter for homeless women whose mission is to give women in need a safe and nonjudgmental environment where confidentiality is assured.

For December, the whole team decided to give our monthly donation budget to the Gazette Christmas Fund, which gets distributed to some of the neediest families in the Montréal community.

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That’s all for this last update of 2020!

Take care of yourself and others over this challenging Holiday season. We’re wishing you all the best, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all again in January!

Happy Holidays, and happy New Year!
<3

The Clever Endeavour team