A Thank You Speech... even though we didn't win

Hello friends!

Someone who I respect (but can't quite remember who) told me that even if we don't win the IGF Design Award for which we were nominated at GDC this year, we should still say thank you to the people who have helped out along the way. I think it's important because those people still deserve the thanks to help us get to where we are now, including a nomination for an award like this. So, here goes... our thank you speech that we had semi-prepared in case we won.

Thanks to all of our players. From our earliest fans at Mont Royal game society, our Kickstarter backers, to the people who are still playing today. All of your feedback and suggestions have made the game what it is. Its been a collaborative effort.

Thanks to our audio team, Vibe Avenue, for great music and sound.

Thanks to all of our families for so much support in so many ways: financial, emotional, accounting and legal help. Kyler would like to say a special thanks to thank his wife Jackie for all of her help, support and love to make this game and this company possible. 

Thank to all the people in the world who have YouTubed or streamed the game on Twitch and other streaming sites; your interest has spread the hilarious antics of this game around the world and in so many different languages, it's truly amazing.

Lastly, it's so cool to be up here (or not up there, as t'were) with such amazing developers. We'd like to thank all of the game companies we've befriended on the way, and thank our shared office called the Gameplay Space in Montreal for being such a great community.

Keep being awesome, keep making great games and thinking outside the box, and keep helping each other by sharing tips and tricks and information, and keep paying forward the lessons you learn, it helps us all to strengthen our industry.

That concludes our thanks, but we really want to emphasize the fact that we couldn't have done what we did and what we're doing without the support of these people. If nothing else, it's a good reminder to be thankful for what we've had and the people who surround us.

:)

GDC and PAX Awesomeness

Hiya! As you might know, we recently came back from both GDC and PAX. GDC (Game Developer's Conference) is a week-long event that takes place in San Francisco, and PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) is a massive consumer-facing weekend event that takes place in Boston. This year, the two were about a week apart, and we're rested up and back to our routine... if you can call it a routine. 

GDC is a great opportunity to learn, get inspired, do business, and meet other great devs. The conference involves going to lectures, meeting cool people, going to eat, meeting more cool people, going to parties, and meeting even more cool people. We were also nominated for an Indie Game Festival award for design, which was a great honour, and we got to go to the award show which was a ton of fun.

The award ceremony was hosted by the lovely Nina Freedman, and then the Game Developer Choice awards were hosted by Tim Schafer, who was funny as ever. We got to feel fancy and have little (kinda big actually) meatball hors d'oeuvres and wine and stuff. That was just one of the many, many, many parties where we met a ton of great people.

We went to some great talks as well, and we were able to share the knowledge within the team at dinner one night as well as in a meeting that took place here at our office. The most interesting thing about the talks is not only that they teach great things, but also that they inspire you to think of things beyond what was covered in the talk, and talk about those ideas at parties (which further accelerates the creativity).

The next step was PAX East, which is a game expo which sees over 150,000 people over three days (my source on this isn't reliable, but I think it's close to that). As you can imagine, the show was pretty crazy. 

It was really great to hear people come up to us and tell us how much they loved the game, as well as introduce it to new people who hadn't seen the game yet. We also had some press interviews and had some streamers pop by to play the game. 

It was a great two weeks full of team bonding, lots of beer, knowledge gathering, and gaming (though we didn't actually get to play much...) and we're looking forward to the next event.

:)

A New Artist Appears!

Today we have the proud honour of introducing the newest member of our team, Fabio Grisi! Fabio is an artist who will be helping us with all sorts of stuff: 2D assets and animation, 3D art, video work, and surely other art tasks that come up for Ultimate Chicken Horse and future projects. 

Just to give a quick show of his awesomeness, this is the video he made as an application for the job here at Clever Endeavour:

We should take a second to thank all of the other applicants, some of whom were truly amazing as well! At the end of the day, we felt that Fabio's skills would be the best fit for the team given our current situation and size. 

Fabio comes from Brazil, and moved to Canada four years ago to work in the game development world. He's a multi-talented artist who also makes music videos on his YouTube channel Mini Music... who knows, maybe there will be ukelele in our next game?

All in all, we're super happy to have him on the team and look forward to the future as a team of 5 people, up from the original three co-founders that we were when Ultimate Chicken Horse launched on Steam.

You can also check out his art on his ArtStation page: