Huge Nintendo promo for Ultimate Chicken Horse… in Asia

Happy New Year, Ultimate Friends!

How’s 2021 shaping up for you so far? It’s looking mighty fine for us!

Here’s the round up:

• A partnership with Nintendo for a huge Ultimate Chicken Horse promo… in Asia

• Looking back on the game projects we helped with as part of Elevate 2020

• The 8th Pixelles Game Incubator projects are available to try out

• Two new game dev funds: the Pixelles BIPOC Creator Fund and the Moonrise Fund

• Charity donation: AGDQ2021

Arutimettochikinhōsu news

(That’s the phonetic transcription for アルティメットチキンホース, which is how Ultimate Chicken Horse is written in Japanese kana script. The more you know!)

We try not to brag about it too much, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is actually kinda big in Japan. This is about to manifest itself in a super exciting (albeit region-locked) event: between January 25th and 31st, the game will be available for free for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

This is by far the biggest promotional event we’ve ever done with Nintendo, and we are simply honored to be on the short list of third party developers they have reached out to for this kind of opportunity.

And of course, we’re hoping that one day, maybe we’ll get to do the same kind of thing in the American and European regions... 

Other game happenings

Back in September, three of us signed up to be mentors for Code Coven, and we were then involved in the Elevate 2020 Accelerator, a global online incubator for indie game devs that were impacted by the event cancellations that COVID-19 caused. Now that Elevate 2020 has come to an end, we thought we’d showcase the three game projects we have helped out with.

project turing

Richard was mentoring Caldera Interactive who is working on Project Turing, a pixel-art cyberpunk empathy-adventure where players will explore a fascinating world inhabited by machines seemingly deserted by their creators. Give them a follow to keep track of this game, which is still in the early stages of development!

Eve was paired with Team Subliminal, who is making Button City, a narrative adventure game about an arcade in the sky! You can check out the game in its full low-poly glory right now by downloading the demo, and add it to your wishlist to know when the full version is out.

Grimoire groves

Kyler was paired with Team Stardust, who is working on developing Grimoire Groves: a roguelite game about cute witches restoring balance to a magical forest. The team is interestingly going to apply non-violent gameplay to the underlying structure of a roguelite to make a game that will be suitable for a wide audience.

As we mentioned before, last year we also got involved with the 8th edition of the Pixelles Game Incubator. The cohort revealed the fruit of their labor in December, and Kyler attended the showcase. He thought Julia Dion’s game Mastermine was a fun one to try for anyone who is a fan of Minesweeper. All the games made as part of the incubator in 2020 and in years prior are available to play in the Pixelles Arcade.

We also want to give a shout-out to Pixelles for their latest initiative, the BIPOC Creator Program, offering personally tailored mentorship and grants of up to $10k CAD to Black, Indigenous and Person of Colour Canadian game creators. The last day to apply is January 24th.

In a similar vein, our friends at GLITCH just launched the Moonrise Fund, an early stage equity fund focused on building a better, more inclusive creative economy. We’re thrilled to see more and more of these initiatives designed to open up opportunities for the next generation of game creators!

The charity corner

We were happy to donate $1000 to Games Done Quick during their AGDQ2021 speedrunning marathon benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Once again, GDQ and its audience absolutely knocked it out of the park, raising over $2.75 million (!) for the cause.

That’s all folks!

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team

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