March 01, 2018

The Clever Endeavour Story Started at MRGS

March 01, 2018/ Richard Atlas

Written by Richard, co-founder / designer / business guy at Clever Endeavour

As you may have seen, the Mount-Royal Game Society (MRGS) will be closing its doors for good in the following months. They talked about it on a post on their website, which I've linked here. While the news is sad, we understand why they're closing and we hugely appreciate the work they've done over the last 7-8 years. They're having a going away party (can you call it that?), if you're interested as well!

Clever Endeavour, like many other studios I'm sure, has a special relationship with MRGS as it's the place we got started.

First of all, their monthly meetups are the first meetups I went to in the games industry, and the first step of my adventure into this wacky world. I showed up confused, lost, and feeling out of place, and finally mustered up the confidence (desperation?) to talk to people. Luckily enough, I met Osama Dorias, who is an amazing person (as well as an amazing game developer) and he introduced me to some others at the event.

Second, I met Kyler (one of the other co-founders of the company) at an MRGS meetup right when I began looking into starting a game development studio. We met at my second or third event, and it was love at first sight. Well, not really. Actually, I pitched him a game, and he kinda liked what he was doing in his freelance work, and didn't want to jump into a company with someone he didn't know. After speaking with him the next months at the same meetups, I think he was slowly convinced to give it a shot and try to work with Alex (the other co-founder) and I.

Next, we decided to do a game jam with the three of us and another friend named Hamish, who didn't end up staying on the team, and that game jam was using the themes provided by the DATGAM Game Jam which was organized by the MRGS. While we didn't "compete", we showed our prototype off at the next MRGS meetup and Ultimate Chicken Horse was born, under the temporary name "Horseblock".

The organization has been an important part of the indie developer ecosystem in Montreal, and was extremely important in the creation and development of our team and our game, which eventually led to a larger company with employees, etc. We wanted to write this post to thank the organizers for the work they've put in, and thank the organization for creating a friendly, warm environment in which anyone can share their games and thoughts without judgment. Thanks again, and best of luck to the organizers in all of their future endeavours.

February 22, 2018

Switch Update & We're Going To GDC!

February 22, 2018/ Kate Gray

Hello, friends!

So, we’ve had quite a few requests for the Ultimate Chicken Horse Switch release date. Trust us, we haven’t forgotten! We’d love to have a release date, but we’re not able to give you that yet for several reasons - reasons we’re going to tell you today, so that hopefully you can understand the delay.

*An artist's rendering of the game on Switch*

We’ve been working every single day on the Switch release, which means squashing bugs, making the game work on a different platform, and being (maybe?) the first to attempt online multiplayer using the Unity engine on Switch. This means that whenever we come up against a problem, it takes a lot longer to fix, because no one has done it before us!

In particular, we had one bug (affectionately named UCH-610, because it was the 610th bug that we tracked) that we couldn’t get past for a while, and that meant we couldn’t send it on to certification, which is the last hurdle in the timeline of releasing on Switch.

BUT GUESS WHAT? We fixed that bug. We squashed that bug. That bug is dead, toast, RIP bug.

There are more bugs, of course (there are always more bugs), but that was the one that was halting progress - so we’re now on a course to certification, and once that’s done and we’ve passed (which we’re hoping won’t take long, but sometimes they ask us to fix more things) we can announce the release date.

In other news, we’re going to the Game Developers Conference, which is in San Francisco at the end of March. If you’re there, say hi! Our whole team is going, and we’re not showing off the game on the showfloor but we will be roaming around looking to make new friends, meet other developers, catch up with old friends and people we’ve worked with at Sony, Microsoft, Unity, Intel, Valve and Nintendo.

*San Francisco meets Ultimate Chicken Horse*

But we’ll also be exploring NEW GAME IDEAS. Now that UCH is out on consoles, we’d like to start working on something new! We won’t be abandoning the Ultimate Chicken Horse family, but instead, think of it as a new little sibling that you’ll love just as much.

In fact, we’re working on new content for Ultimate Chicken Horse RIGHT NOW! We won’t tell you what it is yet, but we hope you’ll be happy with it. Expect to hear more once we have a release date for Switch!

Lots of love,
Clever Endeavour xoxo

January 18, 2018

PS4 and XboxOne are out, what now?

January 18, 2018/ Richard Atlas

Hello friends!

We're back for another monthly update.

First of all, before everyone asks, we don't have a release date for the Switch yet. We're still working on testing, fixing things based on that testing, and certification with Nintendo. This process can be short or long, and we really have no way of knowing which one it'll be.

We launched the game on XboxOne and PS4 globally last month, and the reaction has been great. People are enjoying the game, and we've seen more players in the game than ever before (including new Steam players). There was, however, a save data issue that you may have encountered if you played on these systems. Because of that, we had to work hard to patch the game in the first two weeks of January. This slowed down some other work, but allowed us to fix the critical issues which were somehow missed in testing before console launch. These issues were patched for PS4 and XboxOne last week and this week, respectively.

One of the things I'd like to note is that there are still a ton of improvements we'd like to make to the game. Some of these are things that you won't notice immediately, like improved performance in the TreeHouse lobby, increased fidelity for connections, etc. These are things that will help with the Switch but will also apply to all versions of the game. There are plenty of content ideas as well, and we'll see what we can do and when.