Another baby, Gameloop, and Halloween

Greetings earthlings!

Clever Endeavour has some exciting life and community news this month!

Most importantly, the second ClevEndeav baby (or ClevBaby, depending who you ask) has arrived! Ben and his wife Abi welcomed little Clara-Louise to this world a little over a month ago, and we're super happy for them. We wanted to share this joyous life-news with the community, and now we’ve got two babies in the mix! Well, I guess we don’t have them, but I still like to think they’ve joined the Clever Endeavour family.

We’ve also got a new AskClevEndeav video from Alex and Gen! They discuss a goose, the mystery behind Attar Metals, soundtracks, and more:

The next bit of news we wanted to discuss is an event called GameLoop, which we sponsored again this year and three of us attended. GameLoop, as we mentioned in our blog last month, is an un-conference about game development. It's an event where attendees suggest sessions, those suggestions are voted on, and a schedule is made right then and there before people split up into rooms for talks. These tend to be round-table discussions (which I find are often most informative!) and vary greatly in subject matter. This year, as you can see from the picture of the schedule below, the talks ranged from indie marketing to mental health to comedy in games. Fascinating stuff! (Fruits are room names, by the way).

Personally (Rich speaking here), I found that I learned a lot in sessions that I knew very little about. I also found that I learned a lot of things that weren’t necessarily related to the title of the session; for example, in the discussion about “Problems with Empathy Games”, I learned a lot about minority representation in games, writing for characters with whom you don’t share life experience, and more. 

Last but not least, we’ve got a Halloween event happening and we want your best spooky levels so that we can feature them in Ultimate Chicken Horse! These featured levels are on the main page when people open the underground computer in the game, so please send us your best stuff! Details can be found on the event page here.

Festivals, Conferences and Kiwis!

Hello friends!

This month in Clever Endeavour news, we talk about the Boston Festival of Indie Games, the upcoming GameLoop event, a visit from some Kiwis, and new Ultimate Chicken Horse content. Well, we don’t actually talk about the content, we just tease you and tell you that we’re working on more content.

Boston Festival of Indie Games (BFIG)

Rich went down to Boston FIG with Phil from It’s Anecdotal and Mo from Artifact 5, who were showing their new games. Rich was just along for the ride (provided the car for the ride, actually), and had a place to stay with a friend in Boston so it made the trip a no-brainer. Check out the video below for a recap of the fun that was had!

For the record, it kinda bugs him that they call it FIG Fest because that would mean Festival of Indie Games Festival and that’s mildly unnerving.

GameLoop

For the 5th year, GameLoop is back in Montreal! GameLoop is an “unconference” where the conference attendees make the conference by pitching sessions on the spot, and splitting into rooms to discuss them right then and there. The process is very cool—people pitch sessions and volunteers write them down on cue cards, then the cue cards are placed on a board where people vote for them by putting little stickers on the ones they like best. After this short decision process, the top picks are chosen and a schedule is made on the spot, with 3-4 rooms for several sessions to happen at once.

Tickets are up now so act fast if you want to grab one! They usually sell out very very quickly. Clever Endeavour is proud to be sponsoring the event again this year!

Friends from Dinosaur Polo Club!

This week we were lucky enough to be visited by two lovely friends from Dinosaur Polo Club, who are developers from New Zealand. They make the game Mini Metro (and Mini Motorways coming soon!), and they were in Montreal meeting developers to gather information about, well, lots of things. Prototyping, company culture, company structure, the creative process, management, everything. The great thing is that we—and I’m sure all of the other devs they met—shared with us as much as we shared with them, so it was a great exchange. 

Plus, they’re just cool people and good friends so it was fun. Rich and Gen, along with Phil (mentioned in the BFIG section), went for dinner with the Dino Polo gals. Here’s a somewhat embarrassing photo that the people at the ramen place made us take, and it’s the only photo we have with both Chantelle and Niamh in it. 

Ultimate Chicken Horse Work

We haven’t forgotten about you, dear UCH players! We’re working on new content for an update that will come out at some point, but we’ve been slowed down by some paternity leave and vacations, so we can’t show you anything just yet. We promise it’s awesome though… we think so at least.

Ultimate Mario Maker Chicken Horse

Hello Ultimate Animals!

Want to know what we’ve been up to at Clever Endeavour Games in the past month? Well here it is!

Making the Marios

A few weeks ago, RDS Jeux Vidéo, the video games coverage team at a large media network for covering sports around here, reached out to us about a contest they were running. A handful of local indie devs would make a Super Mario Maker 2 level for their audience to play and then vote on their favorite, for a chance to win some prizes. We figured we had to take part in that!

While Ultimate Chicken Horse has been described more times than we can count as "4-person versus Mario Maker", none of us had ever actually played that game! When finally given the chance, Kyler wanted to try to recreate some of Ultimate Chicken Horse inside of Super Mario Maker 2 to understand how it is similar or different. The level he made (742-F3Y-RFF) is a simulation of playing many rounds on Rooftops, where after each round, new elements are added to the level that make it more and more difficult.

Check it out for yourself and let us know what you think! Did he nail it?

Indie Picnic

In late July, our besties at Kitfox Games invited us to an indie game dev picnic on a beautiful Friday afternoon. We were happy to join a lovely group of some of the best people in the industry to make the most out of Montréal's all-too-short Summer. Even Kyler joined in the midst of his paternity leave, and we all got to hang out with the very first ClevEndeav beb! Pizza was eaten, lemonade was drunk, group photos were taken, and dabs were... dabbed. 10/10 would picnic again.

(photos by Kitfox Games)

Work, Work, Work!

So then, what have we been up to at work?
You guessed it: more new game prototyping that we can't talk about yet. THAT'S IT BYE!!

...

Actually, we're happy to say that we have started working on some new things for Ultimate Chicken Horse, too! So, if you were ever thinking that we had abandoned the game: heck naw we haven't. We're not capable of doing that. We keep wanting to add stuff to it.

And to avoid having to repeat that we can't actually show you anything yet, we'll leave you on this little gem: What a typical prototype environment looks like in Ultimate Chicken Horse.

Ooh, baby.

Yep. There it is.
Feel excited yet?

<3
The Clever Devs