PAX East Numbers & Pictures!

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Last weekend, the whole Clever Endeavour team went down to Boston to show our game, Ultimate Chicken Horse, at PAX East. We had a great time, everyone who played seemed to love the game, and we met some great people. 

We wanted to give some quick insights on how much is costs to go to PAX, and talk about the benefits we got from being in Boston at this year's expo. Below you can see our booth setup, nothing too fancy but that's part of how we kept the costs low.

This is our third PAX now (having been to PAX Prime in 2015 and PAX South in January 2016), and it's getting much easier. The game is pretty much able to show itself, as players figure it out while watching and waiting for their turn. Once they're on, we rarely have to explain anything because one of the other players will have figured it out, and we let the players interact with each other without much intervention. 

The booth filled up pretty quick...

The show was a great way to meet fans (and future fans, we hope!) and to reinforce our presence on the global stage. Being part of the Megabooth of course was amazing, and gave us a great amount of visibility. While we didn't have any specific goals of getting press or new YouTubers, simply the fact that we were there and people saw us means that we'll continue to be talked about when multiplayer party games comes up in conversation.

Some fun numbers!

  • 240 copies of UCH sold
  • 36 people at the booth at once (max that Rich counted)
  • 5 interviews conducted
  • 25 hours of booth showing
  • 3 of us manning the booth, making it quite easy to manage
  • 18 studios from Quebec (not just about us, but still cool)

Some less fun, more useful numbers: how much does it cost to go to PAX East from Montreal?

The only uncertain number here is the cost of meals, because we haven't yet sorted through all of our bills, but this was a high estimate either way. If you're driving, the trip is cheaper of course, but if flying you could add another $200-$400 per person depending.

Let us know if you have any questions about this... but see? It can be quite cheap to go to PAX! And fun :D

Play With Random People Online ✔

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This week's update comes in few words, but much progress! You can now play online with random people across the globe in Ultimate Chicken Horse by using our server lists:

As we mentioned last week, this isn't proper matchmaking because it doesn't group you with people at your skill level necessarily, but that will come eventually. Right now, as long as a game is in the lobby (i.e. between levels) you can join the people playing. 

Beyond that, we're going to PAX East next week so that's going to be exciting stuff, and we're working on fixing other bugs including controller issues and connection issues (which are always the toughest to track down). 

Full list of known issues still in the game here.

Enjoy!

Some Bug Fixes, YouTube, and Going to PAX!

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Hello children of the internet!

We've got a few updates this week, including improvements to the online mode of Ultimate Chicken Horse, some big YouTube videos, and the announcement that we're going to PAX.

Bug Fixes

 
 

First off we wanted to talk about a few bugs that we've squashed recently in preparation for a new build which should be going up very soon. The most important, which I guess isn't a bug really, is the face that you no longer need port forwarding to play UCH! Hooray!

We've done a lot of work on the connection side of things, trying to make sure that we can reproduce bugs that people are having due to being far apart. The more we work on it though, the less issues people seem to be reporting, so that's a good sign.

 
 

Another thing we're working on are server lists. Once this is ready to roll, it means that you can search online for matches and won't need to have friends who play the game to be able to start a match. This is obviously a huge advancement as well, and should help tremendously. It's not quite "matchmaking" because the games aren't matched based on skill, but we can implement that later on. 

YouTube Videos Aplenty!

Next up we've got a bunch of YouTube videos.  The one I embedded above is one by SeaNanners, a YouTuber who has 5.5M subscribers. That's pretty crazy, and it's exciting to see that some of the biggest YouTube gamers are picking up the game.

That's not all though... if you're looking for some more UCH entertainment, there's plenty:

It's super encouraging for us to see all of this activity, and to see the comments on these videos! Everyone seems to love them and asks for more, so let's hope the bug fixes can keep up with the hype!

Also, fun fact, we've reached over 7 million views on YouTube (of people playing our game)! That's awesome.

Going to PAX!

In case you missed it, we're going to PAX East as part of the Indie MEGABOOTH this year! Apparently we didn't make it into their video, but oh well. Being part of the MEGABOOTH is a huge opportunity as it tend to attract a ton of content creators and press. 

Really excited for this, so if you're heading down to Boston on April 22nd for this awesome event be sure to check us out! More on PAX prep next week probably, we're scrambling to get everything done and prepped in time, while still trying to push out consistent bug fixes and add new stuff to the game. 

See you all soon! :)