Switch Update, Game Improvements and Project Management

Hello gamers and friends and gamerfriends! We’re back with another monthly update on Ultimate Chicken Horse and the Clever Endeavour studio.

So first, more Switch updates (because what would a newsletter be without Switch updates)! Last we talked about Switch progress, we thought we were really close to sending the game to certification again. Unfortunately, we ran into a few problems. We found that there were some edge cases where the game would load too many textures (images) and the Switch would run out of memory.

To fix this we had to optimize how we organize many of our textures, which ended up requiring an automated tool to be written to make sure we didn't break anything. This tool really sped up the process, but it was still a very intensive process to figure out the best way to organize the textures in the game.

Once that problem was fixed, we ran into a new optimization issue with some levels on the Switch, where they would run extremely slowly depending on how many blocks were added to the level. The first system we optimized was the graphics renderer; we changed how our simple lighting system worked, which dramatically increased the efficiency of the rendering in many cases. Unfortunately this wasn't enough to make all user generated levels playable on the Switch.

After a discussion with Dan Menard from Double Stallion games, we realized that the slow down might actually be related to the sounds in the game. For some reason, turning the music and sound effects all the way down sped up the game... After some investigation, and many little settings tweaks, we were able to dramatically improve the efficiency of the sound engine on Switch, and large, complex levels are running much better than before.

Another wrench that got thrown into our gears was that one day the game's cross platform capability (PC + Switch!) stopped working. We hadn't made any changes, so it was a very elusive problem that ended up being fixed by forcing all of the game's code to recompile from scratch. This is one of the most "robots are taking over without telling us" bugs we have ever run into.

After all of those changes, we did a whole bunch of testing and have now sent of the game to Nintendo for another round of certification. Fingers crossed that it passes.

We’ve also been doing a lot of little things to improve the user experience, and Rich spent a while making sure all of the text in all of the languages in every part of the game were properly aligned and didn’t cut off or wrap weirdly:

We’re pretty excited to share all of the new content with you, as well as hopefully finishing up tackling this bug list that has been growing (and shrinking, on occasion) since 2016. Hopefully that announcement and release date is coming soon.

While the programmers have been busy touching up some final optimization stuff and bug fixes, a couple of us have had time to look into our project management software and see how we can improve our work flow. The way we’ve been doing things  is good but we feel that we’ve reached the limit of what it can do. Choosing a software to manage work for an entire company, even if the company is only six people, is challenging. Many programs are good with certain types of work flow (with progress boards for example), while others are good with other types of flow (bug tracking, work time estimation, etc.). We think we’ve chosen one and as we finish up Ultimate Chicken Horse work for now, we’ll try to move over to it. More to come on that front once we’ve actually made the move, don’t want to jinx anything!

This is a Pokemon named Jinx, for those that don't know

On the community side, we’ve got another new AskClevEndeav video where Alex and Ben talk about the pyramids in Egypt, cats vs dogs, and some video game stuff too:

And as usual, we’ve got some links that the team would like to share with you:

Rich would like to share the fantastic music from Donkey Kong Country on SNES:

Ben shares the transcript of a June 8th presentation by Dr. Hal Puthoff: "The DoD’s UAP Program: The Back Story, the Forward Story" (it's about UFOs!)

Gen points us to some super cool Nintendo Labo contest winners:

Kyler introduces us to a nice graph that represents the heart of the game engine that we use, Unity.

And Fabio tells us a story about his experience with River Raid:

When I was young I used to play River Raid a lot. It was one of my favourite games. I sucked playing it, but it was a great pleasure anyways. I used to dream about unreachable parts of the map and constantly imagined how it was at the end of the game. (I had different endings in my head every week). Now, years and years later someone created a bot that plays the perfect River Raid game (and even the poor bot died a few times). So now I know that the game ends with your plane exploding when you reach 999,999 points. This might be the greatest disappointment ever. Nevertheless the the end of River Raid is a reminder for all of us that our dreams and imaginations - intrinsic on our journeys in life - are usually more interesting and rewarding than the finish lines. Here is the mesmerizing, more than one hour long video with the entire River Raid game play. Enjoy!

Switch Update, New Team Member, Fan Art and more!

Hi friends!

We’re back this month for another update about what’s going on at Clever Endeavour Games. There are a few things to update about, so we’ll talk about the Switch, our new addition to the team (Geneviève!), fan art, and some links from the team.

But first, the Steam Summer Sale is officially on! Now would be a good time to grab that copy for a friend! :)

Switch Update

We’re still working on it! I know that you know that, and probably want more details. Well, we’re in the home stretch now and we’re waiting on a couple of content updates to be finalized before sending the game off to Nintendo for certification again. We think we’re close, and hopefully our next certification round will pass, but of course we never know what could go wrong or what could be dug up.

We do feel, however, that the changes we’ve made to the game regardless of the Switch port are going to be important in providing new fun to players, and expanding the possibilities of what can be done in our game on all platforms. Stay tuned, I promise that we’re working on it and getting things done as quickly as possible.

New Addition to the Team

Around a month and a half ago, our old community manager Kate Gray left to work full-time in narrative design, to pursue her dreams in the field she truly loves. Around a month ago, we hired a new employee full-time who’s going to take care of community management as well as QA, and she’s awesome.

If you’ve been hanging around in our Discord or following us on Twitter, you’ve surely interacted with her. She’s also been helping with making community videos, like this #AskClevEndeav video:

Along with the community management, we mentioned that she was responsible for QA. It’s the first time we’ve ever had someone in-house, and the amount of bugs found and feedback gathered is pretty monumental. Not only do we know most of the things that we have to fix, but we’re getting a better understanding of what the community actually thinks are the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the game.

Fan Art

We’ve received some lovely new fan art that we wanted to feature here. It’s always amazing for us to see people dedicated enough to our game to take the time to create wonderful art, so check it out. This time we have a comic strip made by a dedicated Kickstarter backer and his son:

If you want to submit your own fan art, send it to community@clevendeav.com and we’ll feature it on our website here. You can also share it on our Discord or Tweet at us and let us know if you want it featured!

Links from the Team

As we’ve done the last couple of months, we’ve got some fun links that have been shared by the team:

Kyler would like to share an amazing quadruped animation system:

While Alex has a slightly different animal video...

Fabio shares with us a showcase on how the internet is an ever-growing monster.

Genevieve reports on the fascinating interplay of art style, game audiences, genre literacy, and gameplay accessibility. "How could Gowland ensure the game was fun for the hardcore players that enjoy the genre, while still satisfying the sort of people that might be caught by the art style as they browse a digital store?"

From Ben: Linda Moulton Howe may be the world's foremost expert on animal mutilations attributed to the UFO phenomenon. Here's a good introductory talk on her life's work:

Lastly, Rich suggests that you watch a video that you haven't seen in a while. If you haven't seen it ever, your life has been lacking meaning and needs improving. Also, consider Narwhals and Kenya.

Switch Update, New Hire and Office Stuff

Hello friends!

Back this month with another update, and there’s a good bunch of stuff to talk about! We’ve been busy, and would like to share the things we’ve been working on. Before we dive in though, I’d like to invite people to join our Discord to communicate with us, find players, and generally be part of the community.

Switch Progress

Surely you all want to hear about the Nintendo Switch progress... trust us, we feel as strongly as you do about wanting to get the game out on the platform! We’ve sent the game for certification a second time, and got back the report with some more bugs. Some of them are trivial, while some others are quite a bit harder to track down. Specifically, there are a couple that only show up in full release builds of the game and don’t show up in the debug version. What that means is that when a build is played as if it were a full retail release, we see a bug, but we don’t get any information about how or why it happened. In a debug build, we can see the behind-the-scenes about what the game is doing and where the issue might have come up, making tracking down the issue much easier. We’ll track them down though, squash em, and get back into cert as soon as we can.

As we’ve said many times, we’re not announcing a launch date before we’ve passed certification and are 100% sure we can hit the launch date. That means not only passing Switch certification, but also submitting to certification for PS4 and XboxOne as well to make sure the new content passes and is ready to launch across all platforms. Once we know we’ve got that down, we can announce a launch date and start bugging press and YouTubers about the update.

We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding.

Kate Leaving and Genevieve Joining

If you saw the update video we posted yesterday you’ll know about this already, but if not, here it is!

Kate announced she would be leaving Clever Endeavour to pursue a job more focused in creative writing and less in community management. She loved community management and (seemed to?) enjoy her job here, but she was also working part-time in narrative design and has now been offered a full-time position at the company where she was working. We’re super happy for her, and as much as it sucks to have a great employee leave, we’re happy that she will be pursuing the career of her dreams.

We started looking for a QA tester (quality assurance) just before we found out that news, and we ended up actually looking for someone who can do both. It’s a rare breed that has the skills to do both jobs, but I think we found the candidate we wanted. Genevieve has great community management background and a wide variety of skills and interests that I think will make her a valuable member of the team.

You’ll see more of her buzzing around in the community, and we can do a proper intro a little bit later.

Stuff Around the Office

We bought plants! We also made a silly video introducing those plants in a 90s sitcom style:

We also built a computer! Well, ish. We started building a computer for our new employee and right at the end, discovered that the power supply didn’t fit properly in the case. It has a tiny little “eco” button which is positioned just awkwardly enough to ruin everything.

We ordered a new case, and will be either returning the other one or donating it as a ferret play-pen. That may or may not be entirely made up.

Links and Things!

Last month we started including links from the team of cool things that they like around the internet. Usually these things have little or nothing to do with games, but we feel it’s a good way to share cool things with our community and hopefully learn something!

Kate (we’ll put her first, in honour of her great service here at Clever Endeavour):

The Met Gala is a celebration of the kind of fashion that only suuuuuper, super rich people can afford. It's a costume ball for people with too much money, and the outfits are incredible works of art. Also, Rihanna might be the next pope.

An oldie but a goodie; Rich shares this 2009 TED talk by Simon Sinek about approaching problems from the "why" perspective as opposed to the "how" perspective. Super insightful!

Fabio shares the most ridiculous link of the bunch… at least in Rich’s opinion. I have to share this because we don’t discriminate against links. Apparently “Gil is a surrealist genious; IMDABES is his most famous song so far”, you can hear it here.

Ben, sharing the second most ridiculous link: In December, we learned the Pentagon had a secret UFO program, but what's the context of this groundbreaking revelation? Steve Bassett, UFO lobbyist and conspiracy theorist, sheds light on it all in this short 2 hour lecture.

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Thanks everyone for the continued support :)