Behind the scenes of A-cobra-tic, Damage Labs, and IndieCade

Good day, friends of Clever Endeavour!

Here’s what we’d like to share with you this month:

• A new behind-the-scenes series about the A-cobra-tic update for Ultimate Chicken Horse

• Damage Labs, a Canadian studio startup program we will mentor

• IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere, an upcoming games event you can back now on Kickstarter

• This month’s selected charity: the Climate Emergency Fund

Let’s dive in!

Behind the scenes of A-cobra-tic

Earlier this week, we published the first article in a brand new behind-the-scenes series that will illuminate how we develop updates for Ultimate Chicken Horse. We tend to be extremely secretive with new content before its release, so this series will hopefully help you get a better understanding of our process, and of why we don’t like to share too much, too early.

In these articles, we will explain the many steps and iterations it took to make every major feature in the A-cobra-tic Update, which was released earlier this year. You’ll learn about the kinds of design decisions we make when we add new characters, levels, and blocks to the game, and see images we’ve never shared before of the various concepts we refined or abandoned along the way.

The first feature we have written about is the flamethrower block. Here’s a sneak peek:

Read the article to find out why we scrapped this adorable concept in favor of the one we ended up putting in the game!

This behind-the-scenes series will have 7 weekly installments including this one. The next one, which will be posted next Tuesday, will reveal the origins of the Snake character and its Cobra reskin. Keep an eye out for it on our blog or on social media!

The Damage Labs studio startup

In late August, Clever Endeavour became a mentor for the new Damage Labs studio startup program, an initiative from DMG Toronto for new and aspiring Canadian founders.

Damage Labs is “a free program for founders from historically marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds ready to start a game studio” that will guide its cohort to build game studios that are sustainable, inclusive, and ethical.

Applications are open until October 14th, and the program will run from October 26th to April 20th, demanding 15 hours per week. If you are in a new independent game studio in Canada led by a person who belongs to an underrepresented identity group, we highly recommend that you consider applying!

IndieCade Anywhere and Everywhere

IndieCade has been organizing festivals and events to support, showcase and celebrate independent games internationally since 2005. They have had to make significant changes to their operations this year to bring us their yearly festival and awards ceremony online, and are now raising funds on Kickstarter to scale their digital platform to be a sustainable, year-round space for the celebration of independent games.

We were happy to back their campaign to help them create this digital space, and we invite fans of the indie landscape to join us and help IndieCade reach their funding goal!

If you’re interested in attending this year’s online festival, it will take place online on October 16-24. Fifty nominated games will be showcased and livestreamed. The streams, virtual booths, nominee gallery, and Discord community hub will be free for everybody to access. Other perks like private Zoom sessions and Discord channels, priority registration in tournaments, and industry networking opportunities will require a paid ticket.

Tickets will be on sale Monday, September 28th. You can follow IndieCade’s Twitter account for the latest festival news.

The charity corner

Finally, as part of our monthly employee-led donation program, Kyler chose to make a charitable contribution to the Climate Emergency Fund for the month of August. This donation will go towards supporting organizations and activists who bring awareness to the public about the threat of climate change, and who demand urgent action from leaders.

Thank you for reading, and keep being awesome!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team

Behind the scenes: The flamethrower

This is part 1 /7 of a series of articles written by Eve, the Clever Endeavour Community Manager, about the making of the A-cobra-tic Update for Ultimate Chicken Horse, which was released in March 2020. Each article will reveal some of the process of making new content for the game, and show in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

The humble flamethrower

The idea of a flamethrower block with an intermittent flame hazard has been around in the Ultimate Chicken Horse community for a long time. In fact, according to our record of Fun Reports, Discord logs, and fan art collection, it might be one of the most suggested additions ever!

For example, here’s the first instance of a flamethrower block mock-up I could find, sent by ZakolakPL on Steam way back in July of 2016:

The illustration indicates alternating on and off states

Then there’s this one sent my Fulandre, also on Steam, but in December of 2017:

we love how this fan art basically shows three animation frames for the flamethrower idea

This design is more analogous to the (mostly harmless) fire hydrant block. It is also is very reminiscent of the flamethrower block idea that Fabio pitched to the team in August of 2019, when we first met to decide what to add to the next update – though the resemblance is purely coincidental:

propane tank + nozzle = flamethrower. everyone knows it.

What was interesting to us about this block design was that, thus far, Ultimate Chicken Horse had been lacking a diagonal hazard. When developing new content for the game, we find it quite valuable to identify the so-called low-hanging fruit, because it means we can get a lot of value from an addition that is simple to make. It doesn’t cause us headaches to get working, while giving our fans something new. It’s a win-win!

Essentially, we immediately agreed to make this block, but decided that the design we wanted would be different in some ways:

• The silhouette and details would need to be simpler and fit the grid better, in keeping with the overall aesthetic of blocks in Ultimate Chicken Horse.

• Similarly, the colors would be brighter to fit the usual palette.

• Unlike the mock-up, the flame would exactly occupy two diagonal squares on the placement grid.

• The block itself would fit in a single square to facilitate its placement and rotation.

Following these guidelines, here’s the concept Fabio came up with next:

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

The most astute observers will notice two things:

• This is CUTE AS HECK

• … and yet, it’s not the design we ended up using!

I honestly expect some amount of outcry about that design decision. Why oh why did we not go with this adorable little animation? I mean, look at the little thing *go*, right?!

However, the fact that it’s a perfectly lovely animation by itself does not mean that it works well in the game! We had multiple concerns about it, and I hope that I can help you agree with us with a bit of explanation.

First, the design surely is easily recognizable as a lighter, yet the proportions are clearly off, which makes it look somewhat uncanny. It manages to be both way too small (given how short it is), and way too big (compared to the game characters, or even that mouse).

Also, while we were all enamored with the animation at first, we quickly realized that looping it over and over, as we needed to do in the game, made the cute mouse look less like a lively creature, and more like some sort of mind-controlled automaton doomed to repeat the same movement at a steady interval for all of eternity. Yikes.

You can see that in the GIF below, along with an even bigger issue: When the block was rotated, the mouse’s orientation with regards to gravity defied the laws of physics in a jarring way. The ability to flip blocks is central to Ultimate Chicken Horse, so we want all blocks to make (relative) sense no matter their orientation.

well this is awkward

Finally, we also saw an issue with what the block design was communicating to the player. If the mouse could press the button to light the flame, then players might have expected to be able to do the same – like with the punching glove block, which has similar-looking buttons that players can press. The potential confusion was even more striking when we experimented with removing the mouse automaton. That was our biggest issue with this version of the block: we wanted the flamethrower to be automatic and predictable, and the visuals failed to telegraph that clearly if they suggested the block could be activated by player intervention.

With all that in mind, we returned to the basics and moved on to what became our winning flamethrower design, while keeping the same flame animation:

fwoosh!

This little device tacked onto a propane tank is not exactly cute, but it works so well! Most people would know to expect fire from it, and the dial indicates that it’s both automated and predictable. The design also makes equal sense if you rotate the block in any direction.

The final flamethrower has some additional benefits compared to the lighter, both in ways that are specific to the needs of our game, and ways that boil down to basic animation principles.

With regards to in-game functionality, the animation remains smooth and accurate if you increase or decrease the Game Speed by using Modifiers, whereas the mouse’s organic movement stopped making sense if you modified the speed in either direction.

When it comes to the readability of the animation, the flamethrower holds a couple advantages. First, the position of the nozzle more clearly indicates that the flame will come out at an angle, unlike the lighter, which one could have expected to have a normal, vertical flame. Second, the silhouette is much more distinct.

It’s a well-known animation fact that a character or object’s silhouette benefits from being as clear and expressive as possible, in order to help the viewer make sense of what they’re seeing. In the context of Ultimate Chicken Horse, this is an interesting consideration, because it has to be balanced against another constraint, which is that we want our blocks to fit and fill squares on the grid as closely as possible, both visually and physically, to make placement and platforming on all blocks seamless. Arguably, the lighter design occupies one square of the grid with more fidelity than the flamethrower. However, the flamethrower is definitely not far from a snug fit, while also having more distinct features.

It might seem needlessly pedantic to want to make the art of our silly game adhere to idealistic animation principles. While I could actually make a convincing argument about how it’s generally a good idea to aim for high standards of readability in fast-paced video games, there’s also one other reason why this is of particular importance in Ultimate Chicken Horse. And that reason… is Dance Party.

you love to see it

You see, this level everybody loves dearly (*ahem*) turns everything into literal silhouette animation of black shapes on a lighter background. In this context, having clear and easily distinguishable block silhouettes is crucial to avoid creating (more) frustration.

lighter silhouette

flamethrower silhouette

The image on the left shows the old lighter on Dance Party, right next to a 1x1 block. The two are not very different. What’s more, it’s pretty hard to tell what the lighter even is!

In contrast, the flamethrower in the right image could not be mistaken for a simple 1x1 platform. You might not be able to tell exactly what it is if you didn’t already know, but the nozzle sticking out nevertheless indicates that this must be the business end, and something will happen there.

Now, to be clear, I would be lying if I said that we held all of these considerations in mind from the very beginning. We stumbled upon them as we prototyped the block and iterated on its design.

That being said, this whole process is a very good illustration of how much thought goes into creating any bit of content to add to Ultimate Chicken Horse – even if it’s something mechanically simple like the humble flamethrower. As it turns out, this block required us to pay attention to a lot of visual details in order to get to a design that really works for the game.

We hope you enjoyed this first behind-the-scenes article! The next one will be about the star of A-cobra-tic: the Snake character, and will be posted in a week. See you then!

Studio Work and Studio Fun!

Hello everyone!

Welcome to this month’s Clever Endeavour News!

Studio work

After more than two months of hard work behind the scenes, we’re proud to finally share Clever Endeavour’s public statement of our commitment to fight for marginalized devs in the games industry. We’ve always been enthusiastic about supporting local initiatives like the Pixelles, but the time felt right to inscribe that kind of drive into our company’s plans and policies, and to take it much further than before.

We aim to be a studio that holds itself accountable for the kind of impact that we have on the lives of the people we work with, our peers in the industry, and all members of the gaming community at large. We hope that this commitment can serve as our foundation moving forward.

In related news, this month Clever Endeavour became a sponsor for the Pixelles Creator Fund, which offers small grants to Canadian game creators of marginalized genders, no strings attached. The program is open to solo devs or small diverse teams of 3 or fewer people, and applications are due by August 31st at 11:59pm. We’re excited to see what the selected devs will create!

In unrelated news, we’ve been hard at work prototyping new ideas. Because we have such an active Ultimate Chicken Horse community, we can take the time to build out our ideas while learning new processes and methods that will help us in development of the next project. Every time we make a prototype, we ensure that the parts of the prototype we make could be used for other projects—we’re using a game architecture which may take more time up front but allows for much more flexibility and allows our non-programmers to do game design work more easily. With every new prototype we make, we get closer to finding the idea that will be our next game, and we’re learning a lot and growing as a team in the process. Onward!

Studio fun!

Last week, we did another socially distanced outing in the park to partake in team brainstorming activities, which is a great excuse to hang out when you’re in a prototyping phase. We armed ourselves with pens, paper, and our imaginations, and we essentially played party games meant to stimulate our creativity.

We warmed up with a textual exquisite corpse exercise, which yielded some… interesting results.

A tiny popsicle melts the stars in the sky with enthusiasm
They spelunked aggressively as they screamed:
“Wassup?!”
“Well, nothing actually”
and died.

Okay, so this might not be our next game pitch… but we still think it was totally worth it.

—

Back at the (home) office, Fabio delighted us with something else that’s not actually going into a game, but we think everyone will love nonetheless: 3D models of three characters from Ultimate Chicken Horse, made in the VR tool Quill.

The charity corner

As part of our company’s commitments, we will be donating $5,000 every month to a charity or organization of our employees’ choosing. For the month of July, Gen chose to donate to Femmes autochtones du Québec to support their mission of helping Native women of Quebec increase their quality of life through the promotion of nonviolence, justice, equal rights, and health.

In addition to this, in response to the crisis in Lebanon in relation to the Beirut blast, Clever Endeavour also contributed to the United Nations World Food Programme in early August.

That’s all for this month!
Take care, and be excellent to each other!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team