Indie G Zine, Hiring, New Shirts and Fun Links!

Good afternoon Clever friends! 

Indie G Zine

We’re in the Indie G Zine Volume 3! We just backed the Kickstarter to get our copy, and I suggest you do the same. 

What is the Indie G Zine? It’s “an illustration anthology dedicated to some of the best indie games released or upcoming. It's our way to celebrate both cool art and cool indie games.” We’re really proud to be included in this. Thanks to Julian for doing this!

Hiring and Prototyping

Last month we mentioned that there were some staff changes at Clever Endeavour Games. Well, this week I’m happy to announce that we’ve hired another team member, who will be starting next week. He’s a jack-of-all-trades who you might consider a technical artist, but he’s a swiss army knife of skills and we’re looking forward to introducing you properly to him next month. 

This new hire will help us with our prototyping process, which has been going strong for a few months since just before the A·cobra·tic Update launched. We’ve been playing with a different idea every 2-3 weeks, and creating a playable prototype that we test internally. We’ve got a bunch of different ideas brewing, and we’re looking for the next idea that will blow your socks off. The process is changing and evolving, and every time we work a new idea we tweak things and discuss the results as a team—we can’t talk about these projects as we’re not sure which one we’ll actually turn into a full game, but it’s been a fun process and we’re confident we’ll find the next great idea.

Swag Additions

In Ultimate Chicken Horse news, we’ve got new shirts for Snake and all of the re-skins of the animals up on our SpreadShirt store! You can also get these designs on mugs, hats, baby onesies, and more.

To celebrate that - and honestly just because she could - Gen made some “official” Ultimate Chicken Horse swag in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

You can follow this link to find the download code for each of them, as well as some fan-made original designs!

Links from the Team

We’ve also got some links to share with you from some members of the team, to lift your spirits during these somewhat crazy times. The first, keeping with the Animal Crossing thread, Fabio is sharing this ridiculously detailed re-creation of an AC village made of clay… on a toilet paper roll.

Next is an important video shared by Kyler—this CGP Grey video is about how to improve your mental health during COVID time. There are a million of these videos and articles out there, but this had a slightly different approach which I enjoyed.

Next up, we’ve got Gen sharing this lovely little puzzle game called Sizeable, which you can play on itch.io here.

The next is a Reply All podcast episode shared by me (Rich), about a pop hit that went missing. A listener calls trying to track down the name of this song, and it’s a deep story with lots of surprises.

Lastly, there’s this video from Alex. I’m not sure either.

Thanks for reading! Follow our Twitter or come hang with us on Discord to keep up to date on all the goings-on!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team

Staff Changes, Q&A Vlog, Vinyl Record and more!

Hola!

We’ve got a packed blog post for you this month! Staff changes, a Q&A vlog from the team, an Ultimate Chicken Horse patch, a vinyl soundtrack and piano score, and COVID-19 updates and donations. Let’s dive in.

The studio

First off, we’ve had some important staff changes here at the studio. Our programmer Ben announced his resignation at the end of March, deciding to move on from Clever Endeavour to explore new opportunities. His departure was smooth and there were no hard feelings, it was just time to move on and we wanted to share this news with our loving community. 

The team had decided to put out a job posting for a Unity 3D/2D artist at the start of April, which was going to take place regardless of Ben’s departure. We went ahead with this, and the applications for the job closed yesterday. We’re reviewing the applications and will be starting the interview process soon… exciting stuff!

In other staff change news, Geneviève will be slowly transitioning from Community Manager / QA into more of a production role. The timing of this transition is dependent on a few things like figuring out which project we will focus on next, and that little detail of a global pandemic stopping us from working together at the office. Once we have a clearer picture of what’s in store for us, we will look into hiring a community manager who will be trained by her. More to come on this front! 

ICYMI: Last week, the Clever Endeavour team did a live AskClevEndeav on Twitch, with the team on video conference answering questions from fans. We talked about our favourite things in Ultimate Chicken Horse and answered questions that came up in chat as we recorded. You can catch the recorded video here. (We’ve previously done a bunch of videos called AskClevEndeav which you can find on our YouTube channel.)

Ultimate Chicken Horse

After last month’s A·cobra·tic Update we needed to patch a few strange and elusive bugs. Make sure your game is updated to version 1.7.028 to get the fixes to those bugs, including a PS4 save data issue, our game making too many calls to the GameSparks servers (which we use for online play), and some performance stutters in the Treehouse and the Space level. You can see the full patch notes here.

In more Ultimate Chicken Horse news, the soundtrack is now on vinyl! Our partner Debug Records has made this two-vinyl record available on their store, so if you love Ultimate Chicken Horse and you love vinyl, you can grab it now. (For EU orders see this store).

Continuing on the music train, we’ve commissioned Laurence Manning to create a piano score for the main title music for Ultimate Chicken Horse (composed by Vibe Avenue). She’s got a great YouTube channel with piano covers of game music and some original compositions as well. You can download the piano score from our website here.

COVID-19

We want to thank you all again for how well the A·cobra·tic Update was received. This happened right at the time when COVID was starting to force people to stay inside, and we wanted to help some of the people who need it most in this crazy situation. For that reason, Clever Endeavour Games donated $50,000 CAD to a number of different charities including direct relief funds, food banks, and organizations that help with mental health—especially in times of crisis. 

We wanted to share the list of charities we gave to, because we believe they’re extremely worthy causes and it’s a good list to look at if people want to help out—especially in the Montreal area.

WHO Google Matching Fund: Google will match donations to the World Health Organization (WHO)

Food Banks

Moisson Montreal: Food bank in Montreal which distributes to smaller food banks as well

MultiCaf: Food bank in Montreal 

Sun Youth Food Assistance: Food bank in Montreal centered around emergencies

Shelters

La Rue Des Femmes (women’s shelter): Relational health centre that helps homeless women rebuild their lives and reintegrate into society

Chez Doris (women’s shelter): Shelter providing meals, respite, clothing, socio-recreational activities as well as practical assistance

Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal (women’s shelter): Frontline services to First Nations, Inuit and Métis (Aboriginal) women and children

Dans la Rue (youth shelter): Care for the immediate needs of homeless youth and help acquiring skills and resources to rebuild their lives

Health

St Mary’s Hospital with matching fund by Manulife: For medical equipment such as incubators, masks, and more

Head & Hands: Holistic approach to physical and mental health of youth (and they honestly do everything)

Revivre: Mental health organization devoted to those affected by anxiety, depressive or bipolar disorders

Suicide Action Montreal: Organization to prevent suicide and help survivors cope with its serious repercussions

Canadian Mental Health Association: Wide-ranging association which supports many smaller organizations to promote mental health

Portage: Addiction and rehab center helping people relating from substance-abuse related issues

If you made it this far, congrats. That’s a lot of Clever Endeavour news! We hope everyone is staying safe and healthy and responsible with their social distancing! 

<3 
The Clever Endeavour Team

Covid, Ultimate Chicken Horse Streamer Tourney, PAX East and more!

Hello friends!

Today’s blog post comes to you from our homes, as we’re all working from home amidst the coronavirus pandemic. You’ve heard enough about it by now—on our end, we’re safe and sound and work continues remotely, albeit feeling slightly isolated from humanity. Please be safe out there! Our workspace was very empty the last day I was there…

In other news (is there any other news?), we launched the A·cobra·tic Update last week! Your enthusiasm for it has been really wonderful, and we even reached a record number of players over the weekend. In fact, there were so many of you playing that our online servers had trouble keeping up! Thankfully we were able to patch them up this week and things should be back to normal now. We also found out that there were save issues on PS4 with the Update, but that should also be fixed by the time you read this.

On the day of the Update release, we held a small friendly tournament with 8 Twitch streamers: michaelalfox, HCJustin, AlpacaPatrol, BaerTaffy, Coestar, FlackBlag, Jaaski, and unrulybabs. We had a fantastic time watching them play with the new items and levels. Congratulations to Justin for earning the title of Ultimate Champion!

This Update and the response to it was the perfect way for us to celebrate Ultimate Chicken Horse’s anniversary with our fans. The game turned 4 years old on March 4th! Thank you all for the continued support, it’s crazy to think that we’ve had such a supportive community for so many years! ♥

Continuing on the Ultimate Chicken Horse train, we’ve got the soundtrack available for purchase on Steam now even if you don’t own the game. This is a change that Steam made, and to make the deal sweeter, we’ve updated the soundtrack with high fidelity tracks which you’ll get if you already own the soundtrack or if you buy it moving forward.

I (Rich) went to PAX last month! I was there to scope out the industry, see new up-and-coming games, and keep up with developers we know.

I managed to play over 70 games over the two days I was there, and there was a lot of impressive stuff. I knew many of the games there already since there was such a strong Quebec contingent in the Indie Megabooth and PAX Indie Showcase, but apart from the ones I already knew, my favourite game was Orbital Bullet. Check out some gameplay here, or wishlist the game on their Steam page.

That’s what we’ve got for you this month! We’re working to get the last few Ultimate Chicken Horse issues sorted ASAP and get the patch through certification on all the consoles, and then back to work on new prototypes. We got a little derailed from that with the update launching, but we’ll be back on track soon! Hop in our Discord server and let us know what you think about the newest update!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team