Babies! Music! Game Awards!

Happy holidays boys and girls!

We’ve got some fun updates to share with our community as we move into the holiday season. 

Babies and Music

First off, there’s a new Clever Endeavour baby! Yes, another one. That’s 3/6 team members who brought new humans into this world in the last six months. Fabio and his wife Joyce are happy to introduce Daniel Lins Grisi, the newest ClevBaby. Apparently he doesn’t need the white moustache tape anymore.

Fabio also has another baby to introduce! What? This baby is a labour of love, and comes in the form of his first music album! Listen to Fabio’s album “Oh, Hi Dare!” on Spotify now! 

Game Awards

As you may have seen, last week was the 2019 Game Awards, which saw a ton of new announcements along with the awards ceremony. Here’s a detailed recap. We wanted to talk about a couple of the Montreal studios with big reveals, and mention some of our favourite moments from the show.

First, Double Stallion announced their game Convergence, which is a “League of Legends story” according to the trailer. Very curious to see what the gameplay is like, and really happy we can now talk about it. Rich had been pestering our friends from that studio for a while now but they couldn’t tell us what they were working on… now we know!

Our friends over at Tuque also announced their new Dungeons and Dragons themed game, Dark Alliance, with a lovely intense metal track from In Flames (one of Rich’s favourite bands). This reveal comes after the announcement that Wizards of the Coast acquired the game studio back in October.

Eve wanted to shout out to the madness of the Muppets segment to introduce the “games for impact” category. Not much to say about this… just watch it and you’ll understand why she suggested it:

Her favourite trailer of the event was this haunting one for Hellblade II. Rich would like to point out that this is also very metal.

UCH Updates

On the Ultimate Chicken Horse front, we’re wrapping up this new update and early next year we’ll be able to announce it. Very excited to share this with you, but first we’ve got to finish up the final touches for the content, some testing, localization (translating the new stuff in the game into 14 languages), and implementing new audio. A lot of work goes into these updates! 

Happy holidays to everyone! That’s all we’ve got for this update, but we’ll see you in the new year and hopefully you’re as excited as we are for what’s to come.

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.