What We're Working On, Humble Bundle and More!

If April showers bring May flowers? What does April snow bring? 🤔 (Yes, it snowed here in Eastern Canada this week 😥)

Here's a summary of this month's post:

• Studio update - what we're working on

• New Couch Classics Humble Bundle

• Twitch ANZ Event + Twitch Channel Update

• Charity Corner

Studio Updates

It's been a while since we've explicitly talked about what we're working on. We're still focusing primarily on our next game. We can't wait to share it with you, but there's still a ton of decisions and development to be done until we're ready to announce it.

We're also still working with our 3rd party partner to change up the server architecture for Ultimate Chicken Horse, which we mentioned back in February. Typical of game development, this has hit all sorts of bumps and snags, but it's making steady progress. As soon as we're confident about the release timing, we'll share the details on what else is coming with this update.

If only game development was as easy as hitting a "git'r'done" button!

Humble Bundle

Ultimate Chicken Horse is in the New Couch Classics Humble Bundle which is available until May 5!

If you haven't used Humble Bundle before, different games are available at different purchase points. For Ultimate Chicken Horse, if you pay above the bundle average listed on the page, you'll get Ultimate Chicken Horse, Nine Parchments, 20XX AND Door Kickers: Action Squad. At the time of writing, it costs ~$10 CDN for all of the games listed! If spend >$12.60 CDN on the bundle you'll also get Wargroove, Lethal League Blaze and biped.

After purchasing a bundle, you can keep as many games as you want for yourself and gift the remainder or you can purchase a whole bundle for a friend!

The best thing about Humble Bundle is you can choose how much of the purchase goes towards charity. While Humble Bundle has the incredible Stop AAPI Hate charity as the default option, you can swap it out for a list of other charities on the platform.

Grab the bundle here: http://bit.ly/UCHCouchClassics

Twitch ANZ Event + Twitch Channel Updates

Earlier this month Twitch ANZ hosted a streamer battle between 16 Australian and Kiwi partners.

Check out the VOD here and see how many Ultimate Chicken Horse easter eggs they placed in the host room! Thank you to Twitch ANZ for organizing the event and to all the streamers who participated.

Since we're talking about Twitch, we've gotten affiliate status on our channel! 🎉

This means you can now collect channel points by watching and redeem them for different things during livestreams. If you subscribe to our channel, you'll also get our PogChimp emote.

Any revenue from our streams will be donated to a charity of our choosing.

Charity Corner

Fabio led our employee-led charity donation in March and he chose to donate to Le PAS de la rue, an organization that helps homeless folks 55+ and older in Montreal with housing and support.

---

And that’s it for this month! Stay safe and healthy, everyone!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team

5 Years of Ultimate Chicken Horse

It’s hard to believe we’re already 3 weeks into March. Does anyone really understand the passage of time anymore?

Here’s what to expect in today’s blog:

• Celebrating Ultimate Chicken Horse’s 5th Anniversary

• Industry Events

• IGF Judging

• Our Charity Donations of the Month

5-Year Anniversary

It may be hard to believe, but March 4th marked 5 years since Ultimate Chicken Horse launched on Steam! 🎉

Since this year’s update wasn’t ready, we celebrated with a special anniversary stream where we tested our memory of various community moments and even played a bit of an early Alpha to see how far the game has progressed since then. Check out the VOD here on YouTube.

If you’re looking for some more Ultimate Chicken Horse news and updates, check out our #AskClevEndeav stream from February 26th and come join us live on Twitch for the next one on March 26th!

Industry Events

This year we’re proudly sponsoring Comics x Games, a partnership of The Hand Eye Society and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival to showcase unique gaming content from a variety of indie studios. Keep an eye on their website for more news on the games and microtalks that will be featured May 8-12, 2021!

Our friends at Pixelles recently announced the recipients of their BIPOC Creator Program which will provide grants to several Canadian game creators. Check out the games and creators here.

We were also happy to hear that the Founder Support Fund at Damage Labs was fully funded this month! This fund will provide equity-free grants to help support marginalized game developers.

Ever wondered what a community manager does? Our own community manager, Steph, wrote a personal blog that breaks down the various roles and responsibilities that this very fluid role tends to have as well as the various different external factors that have huge impacts on how community managers work.

IGF Judging

Every year, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) celebrates the incredible variety of indie games created by our global community of talented creators. (As some of you might recall, Ultimate Chicken Horse was an IGF nominee in 2017 for the Excellence in Design award!)

For the 2021 edition, a grand total of 504 games have been submitted and collectively judged for nomination in 6 categories. For a second year, Eve and Rich heeded the call to be part of the small army of IGF judges, and they’d like to shine the spotlight on a few of the entries they were assigned.

The IGF category winners will be announced at the IGF Awards Ceremony on July 21st.

Eve

I love the IGF Judging season, because it gets me to play games I might not have picked up otherwise - or even heard of! It’s always a pleasure to witness the sheer creativity of indie developers and to stumble upon the gems that are worthy of nomination. This year, two games particularly caught my attention.

The first is Ikenfell, an old-school turn-based tactical RPG in a fresh modern packaging. It’s about a group of magic students uncovering dark secrets, fighting for the greater good, and forging friendships along the way.

I had heard a lot of good things about Ikenfell, and after playing it for a few hours, I can see why. The pixel art aesthetic is quite lovely, the writing is super wholesome, and the music is absolutely banging. The turn-based combat works very well, and it has a timing mechanic that spices it up. None of these individual characteristics would normally sell me on a game, but Ikenfell ends up being greater than the sum of its parts, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into the genre.

The second entry I want to mention has a completely different vibe. Booth: A Dystopian Adventure is a retro-futuristic game by a solo developer, Guanpeng Chen. In this game, you are a food inspector in a world where environmental collapse has given rise to famine and food-centric authoritarian governments.

The gameplay is very reminiscent of Papers, Please, where tedium and micro-decisions under strict authority are tools for world-building and storytelling. Booth is a little long, and more than a little bleak, but it kept me coming back to learn more about this dystopian world and the conflicting interests at play. If you’re into that kind of experience, it’s worth checking out.

Rich

I always love judging for the Indie Games Festival because it lets me have a look at a very wide variety of games ranging from single-person hobby projects to 12-person games with AAA-level polish. I want to point to two games that I played this year that really stood out to me.

The first is The Signifier, which you can find on Steam here. It’s a trippy detective game where you delve into a murder victim's subconscious and see the world through different perspectives—what their memory reports to have seen in the physical world and what their emotions report seeing. The visuals are stunning, the story is intriguing, and the audio ties it all together to really give a feel of creepiness and mystery without being scary.

The second is a student game called Vessels, which you can find here. I can't tell you too much about the game without ruining the story, but you're some sort of astronaut who is in the airlock of your ship, and your crew asks you questions to try to make sure you're safe to come back on board. I really liked how the narrative is done, and I really felt myself fighting back against what other characters said and did—but *as* the character in the game, not as myself. This was a cool feeling and really got me immersed. Would recommend!

Charity Corner

As a continuation of our employee-led charity initiative, Gen got to pick the charity for February and chose the Canadian Civil Liberties Association which fights against rights violations, inequality, discrimination and abuse of police powers in Canada.

Since March is Women’s History Month, check out this list of charities and organizations that help amplify and empower women inside and outside of the games industry.

---

As the days become longer and the weather warmer, we hope that you all stay safe and healthy!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team

Welcoming Steph, UCH Server Updates and More!

Hey there everyone!

We've got a jam-packed blog for you today, so here's the TL;DR:

• We have a new team member, Steph!

• Changes are coming to the Ultimate Chicken Horse server architecture

• We're doing Twitch streams again

• Sharing the community survey results

• New Valentine's Day feature levels are now live

• Nintendo Switch promo results in ~125k first-time players

• Code Coven’s Modern Magicks conference

• Charity donations: Ocean Conservancy and ChocoBowl

New Team Addition

Steph here, writing my first ever blog post! I joined the Clever Endeavour team back in January as the new community manager since Eve, the previous community manager, is moving on to do more production work within the studio.

I came from agency life where I worked on a whole bunch of gaming titles that ranged from indies to AAA, and I'm super excited to bring my experience to the team! While the rest of Clever Endeavour is in Montreal, I'm currently located in Toronto so it'll be a little while until I can meet them all in person and eventually move over there myself.

I'm already having a blast with the team and am working on a bunch of new community initiatives, so I look forward to communicating with you all.

Upcoming Server Update

Some time ago we vaguely alluded to having a small Ultimate Chicken Horse update in the works, and with the game’s 5th anniversary approaching fast, some of you must be wondering if those two events will line up.

Because we have gotten some questions about this already, we feel the need to disclose that the update will unfortunately not come out in March. In fact, we still don’t know when it will come out, but we can say that it’s still a few months away.

This is because, in addition to the content that we are planning to add to the game, one major change is in the works: online server migration. We’ve known for a little while now that the Unity Relay Servers that we use will be deprecated at some point in the coming years. In order to future-proof the game, we need to move away from those servers.

We’re currently working with an outsourcing company that has started work on this server migration. Changing the whole server architecture is no small task, and they have already hit roadblocks, causing delays in our initial plans. For example, they’re going to need to upgrade the version of Unity the game is built in, a process that will also force them to update external plugins we use, as well as all console-related development tools, and will almost certainly break some things in the game.

To put it succinctly: There is an Ultimate Chicken Horse content update in the works, it will come out sometime this year, but we still don’t know when.

Twitch Streams

Come join us for weekly streams over on Twitch!

Every week I (Steph) will be playing community challenge levels and answering questions in chat. I'm also planning to do a monthly #AskClevEndeav stream with our other team members so you should see the #AskClevEndeav stream a little more regularly.

We stream every week on Friday 3-4 pm EST except for tomorrow (Feb 19) as we have the day off!

Join us: twitch.tv/cleverendeavourgames

Community Survey

A few weeks ago we asked for community feedback on multiple social platforms. Here are the main findings:

• The top 3 social platforms used are: YouTube, Discord, Twitch

• Platforms participants play on (in order): PC, Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

• Most loved current initiatives: Fan Art Gallery, AskClevEndeav, Discord

• Most wanted future initiatives: In-game stats, community contests, tournaments

The survey also highlighted some confusion as to how we pick art pieces for the Fan Art Gallery or levels for Feature Friday so we have clarified about art pieces here and Eve shared some insight for how we pick levels for Feature Friday.

Thank you to the 120+ people who participated in the survey, it's given us a lot to think about and consider.

Valentine's Levels

We have a whole bunch of sweet Valentine's levels now featured on the LevelNET in Ultimate Chicken Horse. Go check them out while they're available!

Nintendo Promo in Asia

As we mentioned in last month’s blog post, in late January we had a free trial of Ultimate Chicken Horse in several Asian regions, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. For one week players in these regions could play the full game for free if they had a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. For those who wanted to continue playing past the trial period, there was a sale so they could buy their own copy of the game.

This trial resulted in the busiest times we've ever seen in Ultimate Chicken Horse! We estimate that the trial brought in 125k first-time players over a week, and we saw almost 10k concurrent players on January 30th! A total of 85k people played UCH at some point on that same day, another all-time record.

Code Coven’s Modern Magicks

For those who’d like to check in on the Code Coven Elevate 2020 cohort and the teams we mentored, we thought we’d point you towards the Modern Magicks conference, which will take place on February 20th. This streamed event will highlight some of Elevate’s projects and developers, including a talk by Caldera Interactive about building an ethical game studio.

Charity Corner

Rich led this month's employee-led donation and he chose Ocean Conservancy. This organization advocates for various solutions to the multiple challenges facing our oceans and the wildlife within them. This includes protecting the Arctic, fighting climate change, creating sustainable fisheries and creating trash-free seas.

We also donated $400 to the ChocoBowl, a yearly stream where game developers play a classic RPG for charity. This year they were raising money for The Bail Project.

---

That's it for now! Looking forward to seeing you next month, or in our Twitch streams before that!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team