The search for a new Community Manager, and industry events

Howdy, Ultimate Chicken Horse fans and other friends of Clever Endeavour!

It’s time for another monthly round-up of what we’ve been up to. Here’s the short version:

• Ultimate Chicken Horse is in a gift box of 100% Québec indies

• The final articles of the A-cobra-tic behind-the-scenes series are out

• We’re reviewing applications for a new Community Manager

• The Pixelles Creator Fund we sponsored has selected recipients

• We’re sharing a simple Unity 2D animation pipeline for beginners

• GAMERella took place this past weekend

• Our whole studio attended an anti-oppression workshop

• This month’s charity pick is Les Petits Frères

Phew! Get ready to read about all this — or scroll down to the bits you want to read. We’ll never know.

Ultimate Chicken Horse news

As we’re approaching the season of Winter Holidays, some of you might be looking for a good way to give the gift of Ultimate Chicken Horse and/or other such indie games to loved ones. If so, you might want to check out the new Prestige Giftbox, which offers a selection of games made independently in Québec, including UCH!

This past month, we published the final 2 articles in our 7-part series of behind-the-scenes exposés on the development of the A-cobra-tic Update. These last articles covered the making of The Ballroom and the beehive.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this series and give us your feedback!

Clever Endeavour news

As it turns out, the A-cobra-tic behind-the-scenes blog series may very well have been Eve’s last big project as our Community Manager. Indeed, as we mentioned way back in April, she’s going to be transitioning to a Producer and Marketing Manager role, and the time has finally come for us to onboard a new person to take on the community management duties.

We started looking for applicants in late October, and now that the submission period is over, we are in the process of reviewing the many applications we received. If you applied, rest assured that you will hear back from us in due time! Lots of you expressed interest, so it’ll just take us a bit of time to move on to the next step and arrange interviews.

Also in late October, Pixelles announced their selections for the Pixelles Creator Fund 2020. As sponsors for the fund, we are super excited to see what these game projects will become! Go check them out, and give the devs a follow!

We’ve also been involved in this year’s Pixelles Game Incubator program, with two of our team members (Kyler and Alexis) making themselves available as mentors for the 2020 cohort of first-time game-makers. To this effect, Kyler wrote up scripts and instructions for a simple 2D animation workflow in the Unity game engine, which you can find here. Check it out if you’re interested in learning how to animate 2D sprites in Unity, and let us know what you think!

While we’re still on the mentoring train, this past weekend Rich and Kyler acted as mentors for the Gamerella game jam. As we mentioned last month, this is a super fun weekend of lightning-speed game development where participants make a playable game with new friends in just two days. On the whole, it seemed that people were busy jamming away, but we both got to help in a meaningful way to guide some teams who were stuck part way through.

Finally, everyone at Clever Endeavour and our friend studio Artifact 5 got together yesterday to virtually attend an anti-oppression workshop directed by the wonderful Malek Yalaoui, an educator and advocate. It was an unconventional reunion for our studios after being out of our shared working space for 8 months (and counting), but an important one. Malek facilitated great discussions among us, and gave us lots to think about as we all continue trying to be a force for good in the games industry and in the world.

The charity corner

As part of our studio’s monthly employee-led donation initiative, for the month of October, Fabio’s chosen charitable organisation was Les Petits Frères. Their mission is to counter the isolation of seniors aged 75 and older, which is a cause we feel is especially important during the pandemic.

That’s all! Thanks for tuning in!
We’ll see you next month!

<3
The Clever Endeavour team

Behind the scenes: The beehive

This is the final article in a 7-part series written by Eve, the Clever Endeavour Community Manager, about the making of the A-cobra-tic Update for Ultimate Chicken Horse, which was released in March 2020. Each article reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Not the bees!

The beehive as a new block for the A-cobra-tic Update kind of snuck up on us.

At our first meeting about the update, we all agreed to make 3 blocks, and the favored ideas were unanimous. Though their design changed with iteration, we knew we were setting out to make a set of blocks with certain features, and those became the flamethrower, cannon, and one-way gate.

At our second meeting, we mostly discussed the design of those blocks, but Alex also pitched this new idea of a beehive and bees chasing players. As he put it, the concept was basically to introduce the Move or Die mechanic to Ultimate Chicken Horse, by adding something that would create a momentary pressure to keep moving forward no matter what, without any chance to pause and think.

this game also has a chicken in it!

The team was immediately enthusiastic about the idea of murderous bees. Who wouldn’t be? Therefore, we left the meeting knowing that we would prototype four blocks for the update, rather than three, as we initially intended. (This is what is known as scope creep, by the way.)

Art-wise, there were few iterations from the original placeholder image to the final design of the beehive:

placeholder

first concept art

final art

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Small tangent to avoid the ire of bee enthusiasts and to educate those who aren’t apiculturally inclined: this kind of artistic representation, which everyone thinks of as a beehive, is in fact more akin to a bee skep. Natural beehives only look like semi-amorphous blobs of honeycombs, usually covered in buzzing bees. Bee skeps are bell-shaped straw baskets that people used for beekeeping before square apiary boxes became the norm, and though they are rarely used nowadays, their appearance has shaped people’s collective imaginary for beehives in a pretty permanent manner.

a beehive, without the usual swarm of bees

ye olde bee skep

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Moving on to the bees themselves, the first “programmer art” version of them was simply a cloud of flies, taken from the Zombie Modifier animation, duplicated and rotated to look like a swarm. While we usually hand animate pretty much everything in Ultimate Chicken Horse, this placeholder helped us see that a different solution involving procedurally animated bee particles would be preferable, so that’s what Kyler set out to do. It’s hard to illustrate the details of that process, but it involved coming up with semi-random movement algorithms to create a visual effect that’s reminiscent of the organized chaos of bug swarms.

At the same time as artists were refining the bees’ look throughout development, programmers ran into a number of bugs (hehehe) to iron out with things like pathing, as shown below.

typical #gamedev stuff

On top of artistic considerations and programming issues, we also kept facing new design questions to answer about the desired bee-haviour (sorry). For example: Should Ghosts be able to activate them? (We decided that they should, on account of the fact that it would be hilariously chaotic to allow players to torture each other from beyond the grave that way.)

One design question we pondered for a long time was whether bees should return to their hive after a kill, making the beehive possible to activate once more by a new victim. We experimented a bit with this, and saw two problems. First, we felt it was difficult to visually communicate the difference between hazardous bees targeting a player, and inoffensive bees making their way back home. When bees dispersed back to their origin, they definitely looked like they were a danger, yet we didn’t want them to be. Second, it wasn’t fully evident when was the exact moment that all bees had returned to their hive, and the beehive could be activated again.

bees returning to their hive after a kill

Aside from those concerns, we also realized that it could actually be more interesting for beehives to be activated only once. If a beehive is placed where all players have to pass to reach the goal, they make it riskier to try and get First points. Similarly, bees can guard a coin, and selectively force players who get greedy to be on their toes. These kinds of things can help even out the playing field, by making that one platformer deity in your friend group face greater challenge in their quest to score a victory. For all these reasons, we ultimately decided to make bees fade away after successfully killing their target.

RIP

Like always, the final piece of the puzzle for this block was to have Vibe Avenue make the sound effects to go with it. There is nothing like the noisy buzzing of a swarm of bees chasing you to instill a real sense of urgency!

In addition to the sounds you hear during gameplay, every single block in Ultimate Chicken Horse also needs a number of audio effects in the user interface: for example, when you hover over it before selecting it in the Party Box or Inventory. These often aren’t noticed so much, but they can go a long way to make the game feel more responsive and alive. The beehive placement sound effect has become my favorite example of that. The fact that you hear a tiny “bzzbzz!” every time you place down a beehive simply makes me want to use that block more!

Of all the blocks in the A-cobra-tic Update, the beehive came with the biggest design challenges and demanded the most work. In the end though, we regret nothing about somewhat spontaneously deciding to add it to Ultimate Chicken Horse. We think it’s one of the most interesting blocks in the game yet, and our players’ positive reaction to it easily justifies our perseverance.

Thank you for reading this behind-the-scenes series! If you missed any of them, please also check out the articles on the flamethrower, Snake, the cannon, Space, the one-way gate, and The Ballroom.

Behind the scenes: The Ballroom

This is part 6/7 of a series of articles written by Eve, the Clever Endeavour Community Manager, about the making of the A-cobra-tic Update for Ultimate Chicken Horse, which was released in March 2020. Each article reveals some of the process of making new content for the game, and shows in-progress images of each of the A-cobra-tic features that have never been shown to the public before.

Constructing The Ballroom

While some levels in Ultimate Chicken Horse can be adaptations of concepts or layouts that the player community can generate, like Space was, there’s a lot of value in introducing ideas and mechanics that are completely new to the game. However, there’s a delicate balance between novelty and things that will cause us major headaches to implement.

It’s already possible for players to make levels with multiple goals in the Free Play level editor, and we regularly see examples of that from the community. On the other hand, level makers are limited to one start zone per level. The idea of a level with multiple starts has interested us for some time, because without the constraints of the in-game editor, it was fairly easy for us to make, while potentially creating a new play experience unlike any of our previous levels.

‘Cosmic Rift a and B sides’ is an example of a custom level with two different goals (5FHR-7H34)

With that in mind, we had no issue agreeing to prototype a level with alternating start zones. The challenge we immediately faced, though, was determining what would be an interesting layout and theme for such a level.

I pitched the first idea with a very crude drawing. I imagined a series of start zones in a semicircle, and a suspended goal at the top and center of the playing field. You can’t really tell with my lacking art skills, but the proposed theme was a circus tent, with spinning plates as starting platforms.

what matters is that it gets the point across, okay?

While there was nothing especially wrong with this layout design, our desire to make the Space level a vertical one with a flag at the top meant that this would have been too redundant.

Not fully knowing what direction we wanted to take for this second level, we decided to experiment a bit with different layouts to see what interesting play patterns could emerge by placing the start zones in various ways around the level. We built three different prototypes and playtested each of them.

prototype 1

In Prototype 1, we placed the platforms around a large object that segmented the playing field.

This would have been most interesting if going between starts 2 and 3 (faded arrows) was ever a viable strategy, but we found that this didn’t happen naturally. The result was that playing this level mostly felt like playing two separate courses (solid arrows), and they were each sparsely populated with blocks.

Prototype 2

Prototype 2 took a completely different approach, with the three start zones in succession, meaning that players would pass through the same path every time, but start at various distances from the goal. 

We found that this created little incentive to place traps in the first two thirds of the level, and that meant each run through it felt like it wasn’t made so different by alternating the starting point.

prototype 3

Prototype 3 was the general layout we went with: the three start zones at the top, and the goal at the bottom center, with symmetrical platforms at mid-height to avoid creating very long blind falls.

This had the advantage of creating two main paths (red/pink and purple/green), which gradually converge as you get nearer to the goal. It balances the objective of creating a different experience depending on where you start, while avoiding to create fully independent and sparse roads that feel like they have no relation to each other. It’s also possible – and sometimes desirable – to build into the big open zones on either side of the level to form longer, alternate paths (blue arrows).

This design was originally inspired by the Plinko board, where you choose to drop a puck from any number of locations at the top, let it bounce down on pegs that determine its path, and hope it will land into a desirable bin at the bottom. We also looked at pachinko machines, which function in roughly the same way, but are visually much more interesting. However, we decided that it was better for us to move away from that aesthetic altogether, because it emphasizes aspects of lack of control and random chance. That is the antithesis of Ultimate Chicken Horse, which is at least in part intended as a show of skill and intentionally calculated risk.

Plinko from the price is right

a japanese pachinko machine

We also toyed with the idea of not having all the players start in the same location every round and randomly spreading them out, but that would have gone against another core value of the game: fairness. The whole point is to make sure that when you make the level harder, it’s not only your opponents who suffer the consequences, but you too.

Moving away from Plinko and pachinko, we eventually settled on a classier theme for our alternating start platforms: we made them into crystal chandeliers suspended from the ceiling of a ballroom.

the ballroom as you know it

We also flipped the goal upside down so that players couldn’t just fall straight into it from the start zones. This made sure that playing this level felt like platforming your way to victory, and not just hitting bumps on a ballistic path downwards. It also incentivizes players to build around the common objective in the very first rounds before moving outward to fill the funneling paths with traps, which tends to make for the most interesting gameplay.

When you look at the final product, The Ballroom seems like a completely straightforward level. It might be surprising that it required so much thought and experimentation to get it right!

P.S. I’m glad that we ended up with the theme of The Ballroom, because it gave our musical friends at Vibe Avenue an opportunity to concoct yet another totally banging track, which turned out to be one of my favorites in the game so far!

If you liked this behind-the-scenes article, make sure to check out the previous ones about the flamethrower, Snake, the cannon, Space, and the one-way gate. You can also look forward to the last part of this series, which will be published next week and will cover the making of the beehive!