It's official! I mean, it was official a little while ago, but now we're talking about it! Ultimate Chicken Horse will be part of this year's Indie Megabooth at PAX Prime in Seattle next week, and we're getting ready to rock.

For those of you that don't know, the Megabooth is a selection of indie games featured in a central location on the show floor at PAX, one of the biggest game expos in the world (if not the biggest). Pretty big stuff.

There are going to be a ton of good outcomes from being a part of the Megabooth and a part of PAX Prime. We're hoping to meet press, meet fans, meet YouTubers and Twitch streamers, gain interest in the project, meet developers from the West Coast, and have a ton of fun. This event should help us position ourselves the way we would like in the market, and I couldn't be more excited.

Now, I'd like to talk about some of the preparations we've been doing in the last couple of weeks, and the continued prep leading up to the event.

Game Stuff

On the game side of things, we've been working on a few things. The main one of those things is the single player section of the game, which will be available to try out at PAX. Realistically, we won't show it on the main TV because we want 4 people playing at all times, but we may have another screen off to the side showing it. This will also help to show press that it's not just a multiplayer game, and that the single player adventure mode will be equally awesome.

One of the big things we've worked on on the multiplayer end is the party box. The party box gives players random blocks to place in the level before running through, for those of you that haven't played party mode. We've run into an issue a couple of times however where you'll be in dire need of bombs or easy platforms, and the box will give you the complete opposite.

The solution involves making sure that in very specific cases when people are reaaally having trouble, we give them some blocks that could help. This won't make it such that the party box is no longer random; there will always be a chance of getting some insane and evil platform that you didn't want.

Apart from that we've done some user interface fixes and tried to make certain things more clear... these are likely things that no one will notice but really make a huge difference when it comes to intuitiveness.

PAX Logistics

For PAX we've needed to get a bunch of stuff together, the usual stuff such as plane tickets, hotel / hostel (one day it'll be a real hotel), and logistics for the show and the equipment.

We're going to have t-shirts, so we needed to figure out how to bring them over along with all of our other equipment. We're actually getting hats made as well! Look out for them, as they'll be a PAX special.

Press

We've started contacting press to try to set up meetings or to get them to come check out our booth and the game. This involves a lot of time and a lot of work going through all the sites we think might be relevant, tracking down specific journalists from those sites, and trying to get in touch. It's always important to write personalized emails (journalists are people too!) so it's fairly time consuming.

Ironically, this image to the left is a hat, not someone from the press.

What are we hoping for?

This is a good question for a team going to PAX for the first time, and participating in the Megabooth for the first time as well. What do we expect? What do we want?

Firstly, we want to show the game to potential fans and existing fans. We want to hear input, we want to feel the awesomeness that it is to see people laugh and yell when playing our creation, and we want to spread the word about our game. We also want to test our new changes and find out what other changes need to be made.

We also want to focus on press; not only on getting press coverage but on establishing a relationship with members of the press for the future, if not for now. It's important to establish a human connection to press, after all, we can help them with great content and they can help us with visibility, all the while maintaining a fun and friendly relationship. It doesn't have to be as contrived as the industry sometimes makes it seem.

Come see us at PAX if you're going to be there, or keep up with our social media to keep in touch. We're going to be active on our Instagram and our Snapchat (ClevEndeavGames) as well throughout the event. The Snapchat is actually a great place to see some of the most fun moments and sights from the event, so do keep up! Of course you can also follow along our Twitter and Facebook as well.

See you soon! :)

This week, Clever Endeavour participated in an expo called Game On, which showcases the history of video games and lets museum-goers try every console they've ever (or never) heard of. Alongside this, Clever Endeavour was able to set up for a couple of days to showcase Ultimate Chicken Horse.

Considering we were showing the game during the day (11am-4pm), the majority of the players were families and children, not what we might think of as typical "gamers". This was especially nice because there have always been fewer children than the adults playing the game at shows, and it allows us to see how intuitive the game is. That being said, a lot of the young kids picked it up quicker than the average adult... makes me feel old.

This expo also came at a nice time, as we're going to be at PAX Prime in a couple of weeks. Next week there will be a bigger article about that, but if you've been following our Twitter or Facebook you would know that we'll be there!

It was nice to test some of the stuff we've been working on before PAX. We've been balancing the party box in party mode, working on the single player part of the game, and working on some other design stuff that we won't bore you with now.

We learned that some of the stuff we had set up for the party box needed to be tweaked, and we learned about some strange bugs which we must have created over the course of the last few weeks. What some non-game-developer people don't realize about games is that as a general rule, whenever you introduce something new, you break something old. No one truly knows why.

Anyway we're working it out, and you can expect a longer article next week about our PAX prep, as we're going full steam ahead on that.

Keep following, keep tweeting, keep spreading the word folks! :)