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.

—

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

The search for a new Community Manager, and industry events

Howdy, Ultimate Chicken Horse fans and other friends of Clever Endeavour!

It’s time for another monthly round-up of what we’ve been up to. Here’s the short version:

• Ultimate Chicken Horse is in a gift box of 100% Québec indies

• The final articles of the A-cobra-tic behind-the-scenes series are out

• We’re reviewing applications for a new Community Manager

• The Pixelles Creator Fund we sponsored has selected recipients

• We’re sharing a simple Unity 2D animation pipeline for beginners

• GAMERella took place this past weekend

• Our whole studio attended an anti-oppression workshop

• This month’s charity pick is Les Petits Frères

Phew! Get ready to read about all this — or scroll down to the bits you want to read. We’ll never know.

Ultimate Chicken Horse news

As we’re approaching the season of Winter Holidays, some of you might be looking for a good way to give the gift of Ultimate Chicken Horse and/or other such indie games to loved ones. If so, you might want to check out the new Prestige Giftbox, which offers a selection of games made independently in Québec, including UCH!

This past month, we published the final 2 articles in our 7-part series of behind-the-scenes exposés on the development of the A-cobra-tic Update. These last articles covered the making of The Ballroom and the beehive.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this series and give us your feedback!

Clever Endeavour news

As it turns out, the A-cobra-tic behind-the-scenes blog series may very well have been Eve’s last big project as our Community Manager. Indeed, as we mentioned way back in April, she’s going to be transitioning to a Producer and Marketing Manager role, and the time has finally come for us to onboard a new person to take on the community management duties.

We started looking for applicants in late October, and now that the submission period is over, we are in the process of reviewing the many applications we received. If you applied, rest assured that you will hear back from us in due time! Lots of you expressed interest, so it’ll just take us a bit of time to move on to the next step and arrange interviews.

Also in late October, Pixelles announced their selections for the Pixelles Creator Fund 2020. As sponsors for the fund, we are super excited to see what these game projects will become! Go check them out, and give the devs a follow!

We’ve also been involved in this year’s Pixelles Game Incubator program, with two of our team members (Kyler and Alexis) making themselves available as mentors for the 2020 cohort of first-time game-makers. To this effect, Kyler wrote up scripts and instructions for a simple 2D animation workflow in the Unity game engine, which you can find here. Check it out if you’re interested in learning how to animate 2D sprites in Unity, and let us know what you think!

While we’re still on the mentoring train, this past weekend Rich and Kyler acted as mentors for the Gamerella game jam. As we mentioned last month, this is a super fun weekend of lightning-speed game development where participants make a playable game with new friends in just two days. On the whole, it seemed that people were busy jamming away, but we both got to help in a meaningful way to guide some teams who were stuck part way through.

Finally, everyone at Clever Endeavour and our friend studio Artifact 5 got together yesterday to virtually attend an anti-oppression workshop directed by the wonderful Malek Yalaoui, an educator and advocate. It was an unconventional reunion for our studios after being out of our shared working space for 8 months (and counting), but an important one. Malek facilitated great discussions among us, and gave us lots to think about as we all continue trying to be a force for good in the games industry and in the world.

The charity corner

As part of our studio’s monthly employee-led donation initiative, for the month of October, Fabio’s chosen charitable organisation was Les Petits Frères. Their mission is to counter the isolation of seniors aged 75 and older, which is a cause we feel is especially important during the pandemic.

That’s all! Thanks for tuning in!
We’ll see you next month!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team

Behind the scenes: The beehive

This is the final article in a 7-part series 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 reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Not the bees!

The beehive as a new block for the A-cobra-tic Update kind of snuck up on us.

At our first meeting about the update, we all agreed to make 3 blocks, and the favored ideas were unanimous. Though their design changed with iteration, we knew we were setting out to make a set of blocks with certain features, and those became the flamethrower, cannon, and one-way gate.

At our second meeting, we mostly discussed the design of those blocks, but Alex also pitched this new idea of a beehive and bees chasing players. As he put it, the concept was basically to introduce the Move or Die mechanic to Ultimate Chicken Horse, by adding something that would create a momentary pressure to keep moving forward no matter what, without any chance to pause and think.

this game also has a chicken in it!

The team was immediately enthusiastic about the idea of murderous bees. Who wouldn’t be? Therefore, we left the meeting knowing that we would prototype four blocks for the update, rather than three, as we initially intended. (This is what is known as scope creep, by the way.)

Art-wise, there were few iterations from the original placeholder image to the final design of the beehive:

placeholder

first concept art

final art

---

Small tangent to avoid the ire of bee enthusiasts and to educate those who aren’t apiculturally inclined: this kind of artistic representation, which everyone thinks of as a beehive, is in fact more akin to a bee skep. Natural beehives only look like semi-amorphous blobs of honeycombs, usually covered in buzzing bees. Bee skeps are bell-shaped straw baskets that people used for beekeeping before square apiary boxes became the norm, and though they are rarely used nowadays, their appearance has shaped people’s collective imaginary for beehives in a pretty permanent manner.

a beehive, without the usual swarm of bees

ye olde bee skep

---

Moving on to the bees themselves, the first “programmer art” version of them was simply a cloud of flies, taken from the Zombie Modifier animation, duplicated and rotated to look like a swarm. While we usually hand animate pretty much everything in Ultimate Chicken Horse, this placeholder helped us see that a different solution involving procedurally animated bee particles would be preferable, so that’s what Kyler set out to do. It’s hard to illustrate the details of that process, but it involved coming up with semi-random movement algorithms to create a visual effect that’s reminiscent of the organized chaos of bug swarms.

At the same time as artists were refining the bees’ look throughout development, programmers ran into a number of bugs (hehehe) to iron out with things like pathing, as shown below.

typical #gamedev stuff

On top of artistic considerations and programming issues, we also kept facing new design questions to answer about the desired bee-haviour (sorry). For example: Should Ghosts be able to activate them? (We decided that they should, on account of the fact that it would be hilariously chaotic to allow players to torture each other from beyond the grave that way.)

One design question we pondered for a long time was whether bees should return to their hive after a kill, making the beehive possible to activate once more by a new victim. We experimented a bit with this, and saw two problems. First, we felt it was difficult to visually communicate the difference between hazardous bees targeting a player, and inoffensive bees making their way back home. When bees dispersed back to their origin, they definitely looked like they were a danger, yet we didn’t want them to be. Second, it wasn’t fully evident when was the exact moment that all bees had returned to their hive, and the beehive could be activated again.

bees returning to their hive after a kill

Aside from those concerns, we also realized that it could actually be more interesting for beehives to be activated only once. If a beehive is placed where all players have to pass to reach the goal, they make it riskier to try and get First points. Similarly, bees can guard a coin, and selectively force players who get greedy to be on their toes. These kinds of things can help even out the playing field, by making that one platformer deity in your friend group face greater challenge in their quest to score a victory. For all these reasons, we ultimately decided to make bees fade away after successfully killing their target.

RIP

Like always, the final piece of the puzzle for this block was to have Vibe Avenue make the sound effects to go with it. There is nothing like the noisy buzzing of a swarm of bees chasing you to instill a real sense of urgency!

In addition to the sounds you hear during gameplay, every single block in Ultimate Chicken Horse also needs a number of audio effects in the user interface: for example, when you hover over it before selecting it in the Party Box or Inventory. These often aren’t noticed so much, but they can go a long way to make the game feel more responsive and alive. The beehive placement sound effect has become my favorite example of that. The fact that you hear a tiny “bzzbzz!” every time you place down a beehive simply makes me want to use that block more!

Of all the blocks in the A-cobra-tic Update, the beehive came with the biggest design challenges and demanded the most work. In the end though, we regret nothing about somewhat spontaneously deciding to add it to Ultimate Chicken Horse. We think it’s one of the most interesting blocks in the game yet, and our players’ positive reaction to it easily justifies our perseverance.

Thank you for reading this behind-the-scenes series! If you missed any of them, please also check out the articles on the flamethrower, Snake, the cannon, Space, the one-way gate, and The Ballroom.