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.

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

<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.

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

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team

Huge Nintendo promo for Ultimate Chicken Horse… in Asia

Happy New Year, Ultimate Friends!

How’s 2021 shaping up for you so far? It’s looking mighty fine for us!

Here’s the round up:

• A partnership with Nintendo for a huge Ultimate Chicken Horse promo… in Asia

• Looking back on the game projects we helped with as part of Elevate 2020

• The 8th Pixelles Game Incubator projects are available to try out

• Two new game dev funds: the Pixelles BIPOC Creator Fund and the Moonrise Fund

• Charity donation: AGDQ2021

Arutimettochikinhōsu news

(That’s the phonetic transcription for アルティメットチキンホース, which is how Ultimate Chicken Horse is written in Japanese kana script. The more you know!)

We try not to brag about it too much, but Ultimate Chicken Horse is actually kinda big in Japan. This is about to manifest itself in a super exciting (albeit region-locked) event: between January 25th and 31st, the game will be available for free for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

This is by far the biggest promotional event we’ve ever done with Nintendo, and we are simply honored to be on the short list of third party developers they have reached out to for this kind of opportunity.

And of course, we’re hoping that one day, maybe we’ll get to do the same kind of thing in the American and European regions... 

Other game happenings

Back in September, three of us signed up to be mentors for Code Coven, and we were then involved in the Elevate 2020 Accelerator, a global online incubator for indie game devs that were impacted by the event cancellations that COVID-19 caused. Now that Elevate 2020 has come to an end, we thought we’d showcase the three game projects we have helped out with.

project turing

Richard was mentoring Caldera Interactive who is working on Project Turing, a pixel-art cyberpunk empathy-adventure where players will explore a fascinating world inhabited by machines seemingly deserted by their creators. Give them a follow to keep track of this game, which is still in the early stages of development!

Eve was paired with Team Subliminal, who is making Button City, a narrative adventure game about an arcade in the sky! You can check out the game in its full low-poly glory right now by downloading the demo, and add it to your wishlist to know when the full version is out.

Grimoire groves

Kyler was paired with Team Stardust, who is working on developing Grimoire Groves: a roguelite game about cute witches restoring balance to a magical forest. The team is interestingly going to apply non-violent gameplay to the underlying structure of a roguelite to make a game that will be suitable for a wide audience.

As we mentioned before, last year we also got involved with the 8th edition of the Pixelles Game Incubator. The cohort revealed the fruit of their labor in December, and Kyler attended the showcase. He thought Julia Dion’s game Mastermine was a fun one to try for anyone who is a fan of Minesweeper. All the games made as part of the incubator in 2020 and in years prior are available to play in the Pixelles Arcade.

We also want to give a shout-out to Pixelles for their latest initiative, the BIPOC Creator Program, offering personally tailored mentorship and grants of up to $10k CAD to Black, Indigenous and Person of Colour Canadian game creators. The last day to apply is January 24th.

In a similar vein, our friends at GLITCH just launched the Moonrise Fund, an early stage equity fund focused on building a better, more inclusive creative economy. We’re thrilled to see more and more of these initiatives designed to open up opportunities for the next generation of game creators!

The charity corner

We were happy to donate $1000 to Games Done Quick during their AGDQ2021 speedrunning marathon benefiting the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Once again, GDQ and its audience absolutely knocked it out of the park, raising over $2.75 million (!) for the cause.

That’s all folks!

Thanks for reading, and see you next month!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team