First Aid, Events, and More Events!

Hello again friends!

This month’s update is full of events and initiatives in the Montreal game development scene.

First off, what about Ultimate Chicken Horse? What about our next game ideas? Well, we’re still hammering away at an update for UCH that will be ready sometime after the holidays. In terms of new game prototypes, we’re working on them but we’re not ready to talk about anything! 

As we started writing this, we realized with deep regret that we didn’t have pictures of it, but Rich and Eve took a first aid course so they could save everybody’s lives forever! Well, they could have a better chance of saving everybody’s lives at least. The course involved general first aid, using a defibrillator, covering wounds, helping people who are choking, and CPR.

Would have been great to see pictures of us banging away doing CPR on dummies... oh well, we’ll know for next time. For the time being, here’s a picture of the superhero (and supercute) dog that helped locate people after an earthquake hit Mexico in 2017.

Last month, the first roundtable from the Game Dev Climate Network took place. This was a big group discussion held at our workspace, GamePlay Space, and studios from all over Montreal took part. The discussion came just before the massive climate march that took place in downtown Montreal, and was centered around ideas of what we can do to help as game developers. If you’re interested, the report from this first roundtable can be found here.

This month, Clever Endeavour also helped support Gamerella, a game jam and workshop series aimed at encouraging women and marginalized groups to make games. You can read about them on their website.

More recently, last weekend was the combined MEGA-MIGS conference and expo. For those that are curious, this is the Montreal Expo Gaming Arcade and the Montreal International Game Summit. This year the two were combined and the expo, which was open to the public, happened on the weekend. The conference part, which was for developers and people in the industry, happened Monday and Tuesday. The expo was great and we got to play a whole bunch of games, from medieval simulation games to kung fu sports games. After the combined expo-conference was done, there was a big party held at GamePlay Space, where we could catch up with developers we haven’t seen in a while and meet new friends that we will keep in touch with in the future.

That’s all we’ve got for you today friends! The Clev babies are still growing and thriving and planning global domination, and the Clev adults are still working on new projects and the new update. See you next month!

Another baby, Gameloop, and Halloween

Greetings earthlings!

Clever Endeavour has some exciting life and community news this month!

Most importantly, the second ClevEndeav baby (or ClevBaby, depending who you ask) has arrived! Ben and his wife Abi welcomed little Clara-Louise to this world a little over a month ago, and we're super happy for them. We wanted to share this joyous life-news with the community, and now we’ve got two babies in the mix! Well, I guess we don’t have them, but I still like to think they’ve joined the Clever Endeavour family.

We’ve also got a new AskClevEndeav video from Alex and Gen! They discuss a goose, the mystery behind Attar Metals, soundtracks, and more:

The next bit of news we wanted to discuss is an event called GameLoop, which we sponsored again this year and three of us attended. GameLoop, as we mentioned in our blog last month, is an un-conference about game development. It's an event where attendees suggest sessions, those suggestions are voted on, and a schedule is made right then and there before people split up into rooms for talks. These tend to be round-table discussions (which I find are often most informative!) and vary greatly in subject matter. This year, as you can see from the picture of the schedule below, the talks ranged from indie marketing to mental health to comedy in games. Fascinating stuff! (Fruits are room names, by the way).

Personally (Rich speaking here), I found that I learned a lot in sessions that I knew very little about. I also found that I learned a lot of things that weren’t necessarily related to the title of the session; for example, in the discussion about “Problems with Empathy Games”, I learned a lot about minority representation in games, writing for characters with whom you don’t share life experience, and more. 

Last but not least, we’ve got a Halloween event happening and we want your best spooky levels so that we can feature them in Ultimate Chicken Horse! These featured levels are on the main page when people open the underground computer in the game, so please send us your best stuff! Details can be found on the event page here.

Festivals, Conferences and Kiwis!

Hello friends!

This month in Clever Endeavour news, we talk about the Boston Festival of Indie Games, the upcoming GameLoop event, a visit from some Kiwis, and new Ultimate Chicken Horse content. Well, we don’t actually talk about the content, we just tease you and tell you that we’re working on more content.

Boston Festival of Indie Games (BFIG)

Rich went down to Boston FIG with Phil from It’s Anecdotal and Mo from Artifact 5, who were showing their new games. Rich was just along for the ride (provided the car for the ride, actually), and had a place to stay with a friend in Boston so it made the trip a no-brainer. Check out the video below for a recap of the fun that was had!

For the record, it kinda bugs him that they call it FIG Fest because that would mean Festival of Indie Games Festival and that’s mildly unnerving.

GameLoop

For the 5th year, GameLoop is back in Montreal! GameLoop is an “unconference” where the conference attendees make the conference by pitching sessions on the spot, and splitting into rooms to discuss them right then and there. The process is very cool—people pitch sessions and volunteers write them down on cue cards, then the cue cards are placed on a board where people vote for them by putting little stickers on the ones they like best. After this short decision process, the top picks are chosen and a schedule is made on the spot, with 3-4 rooms for several sessions to happen at once.

Tickets are up now so act fast if you want to grab one! They usually sell out very very quickly. Clever Endeavour is proud to be sponsoring the event again this year!

Friends from Dinosaur Polo Club!

This week we were lucky enough to be visited by two lovely friends from Dinosaur Polo Club, who are developers from New Zealand. They make the game Mini Metro (and Mini Motorways coming soon!), and they were in Montreal meeting developers to gather information about, well, lots of things. Prototyping, company culture, company structure, the creative process, management, everything. The great thing is that we—and I’m sure all of the other devs they met—shared with us as much as we shared with them, so it was a great exchange. 

Plus, they’re just cool people and good friends so it was fun. Rich and Gen, along with Phil (mentioned in the BFIG section), went for dinner with the Dino Polo gals. Here’s a somewhat embarrassing photo that the people at the ramen place made us take, and it’s the only photo we have with both Chantelle and Niamh in it. 

Ultimate Chicken Horse Work

We haven’t forgotten about you, dear UCH players! We’re working on new content for an update that will come out at some point, but we’ve been slowed down by some paternity leave and vacations, so we can’t show you anything just yet. We promise it’s awesome though… we think so at least.