Looking for Our Next Team Member, Industry Event Sponsorships and More!

While we don’t have any exciting updates on the Ultimate Chicken Horse update or for our new working title, here are some things that we want to highlight for the month:

• We’re hiring!

• Industry Activities (Game Devs of Color, GameLoop)

• Donation Corner

Looking for the next ClevEnDev!

We’re looking for someone to join our small team!

This person will help us out around the studio with various tasks which will range from business administration to testing out our games.

The role is perfect for people who are looking to break into the gaming industry but maybe don’t have the education or experience to know what they want to specialize in.

If you’re interested, or know someone who would be, check out all the details and apply here:

https://www.workwithindies.com/careers/clever-endeavour-games-studio-assistant-qa

Industry Events and Sponsorships

 Game Devs of Color

Amplifying diverse voices is so incredibly important, so we’re so happy to be sponsors of this year’s Game Devs of Color Expo!

This fantastic event is open to everyone, so whether you’re a game developer or interested in game development, you can grab a ticket here and attend virtually September 23-27!

GameLoop

Speaking of event sponsorships, we’re also sponsoring GameLoop 2021!

We’ve participated in and sponsored GameLoop before, and it’s one of our favourite game developer events every year. While it looks a little different this year since it’s virtual, we’re excited to see what GameLoop Boston and Montreal have in store.

Grab a ticket here and attend the fun on July 17th. 

Donation Corner

Back in April we donated $30,000 to various charities for the critical COVID-19 situation in India. We wrote a bit about it here, and encourage you to donate too if you can as they continue to battle record high casualties.

On behalf of Asian Heritage Month and the rising number of hate crimes against Asians (you can read more about this here and here for Canada), we are donating $5,000 each to the Asian Canadian Benevolent Association, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and Elimin8Hate.

As for our monthly employee-led charity of the month, in April Steph chose for us to donate to Food Banks Canada, which helps provide food to those in need and has been facing more demand than ever due to various COVID-19 factors.

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

5 Years of Ultimate Chicken Horse

It’s hard to believe we’re already 3 weeks into March. Does anyone really understand the passage of time anymore?

Here’s what to expect in today’s blog:

• Celebrating Ultimate Chicken Horse’s 5th Anniversary

• Industry Events

• IGF Judging

• Our Charity Donations of the Month

5-Year Anniversary

It may be hard to believe, but March 4th marked 5 years since Ultimate Chicken Horse launched on Steam! 🎉

Since this year’s update wasn’t ready, we celebrated with a special anniversary stream where we tested our memory of various community moments and even played a bit of an early Alpha to see how far the game has progressed since then. Check out the VOD here on YouTube.

If you’re looking for some more Ultimate Chicken Horse news and updates, check out our #AskClevEndeav stream from February 26th and come join us live on Twitch for the next one on March 26th!

Industry Events

This year we’re proudly sponsoring Comics x Games, a partnership of The Hand Eye Society and the Toronto Comics Arts Festival to showcase unique gaming content from a variety of indie studios. Keep an eye on their website for more news on the games and microtalks that will be featured May 8-12, 2021!

Our friends at Pixelles recently announced the recipients of their BIPOC Creator Program which will provide grants to several Canadian game creators. Check out the games and creators here.

We were also happy to hear that the Founder Support Fund at Damage Labs was fully funded this month! This fund will provide equity-free grants to help support marginalized game developers.

Ever wondered what a community manager does? Our own community manager, Steph, wrote a personal blog that breaks down the various roles and responsibilities that this very fluid role tends to have as well as the various different external factors that have huge impacts on how community managers work.

IGF Judging

Every year, the Independent Games Festival (IGF) celebrates the incredible variety of indie games created by our global community of talented creators. (As some of you might recall, Ultimate Chicken Horse was an IGF nominee in 2017 for the Excellence in Design award!)

For the 2021 edition, a grand total of 504 games have been submitted and collectively judged for nomination in 6 categories. For a second year, Eve and Rich heeded the call to be part of the small army of IGF judges, and they’d like to shine the spotlight on a few of the entries they were assigned.

The IGF category winners will be announced at the IGF Awards Ceremony on July 21st.

Eve

I love the IGF Judging season, because it gets me to play games I might not have picked up otherwise - or even heard of! It’s always a pleasure to witness the sheer creativity of indie developers and to stumble upon the gems that are worthy of nomination. This year, two games particularly caught my attention.

The first is Ikenfell, an old-school turn-based tactical RPG in a fresh modern packaging. It’s about a group of magic students uncovering dark secrets, fighting for the greater good, and forging friendships along the way.

I had heard a lot of good things about Ikenfell, and after playing it for a few hours, I can see why. The pixel art aesthetic is quite lovely, the writing is super wholesome, and the music is absolutely banging. The turn-based combat works very well, and it has a timing mechanic that spices it up. None of these individual characteristics would normally sell me on a game, but Ikenfell ends up being greater than the sum of its parts, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s into the genre.

The second entry I want to mention has a completely different vibe. Booth: A Dystopian Adventure is a retro-futuristic game by a solo developer, Guanpeng Chen. In this game, you are a food inspector in a world where environmental collapse has given rise to famine and food-centric authoritarian governments.

The gameplay is very reminiscent of Papers, Please, where tedium and micro-decisions under strict authority are tools for world-building and storytelling. Booth is a little long, and more than a little bleak, but it kept me coming back to learn more about this dystopian world and the conflicting interests at play. If you’re into that kind of experience, it’s worth checking out.

Rich

I always love judging for the Indie Games Festival because it lets me have a look at a very wide variety of games ranging from single-person hobby projects to 12-person games with AAA-level polish. I want to point to two games that I played this year that really stood out to me.

The first is The Signifier, which you can find on Steam here. It’s a trippy detective game where you delve into a murder victim's subconscious and see the world through different perspectives—what their memory reports to have seen in the physical world and what their emotions report seeing. The visuals are stunning, the story is intriguing, and the audio ties it all together to really give a feel of creepiness and mystery without being scary.

The second is a student game called Vessels, which you can find here. I can't tell you too much about the game without ruining the story, but you're some sort of astronaut who is in the airlock of your ship, and your crew asks you questions to try to make sure you're safe to come back on board. I really liked how the narrative is done, and I really felt myself fighting back against what other characters said and did—but *as* the character in the game, not as myself. This was a cool feeling and really got me immersed. Would recommend!

Charity Corner

As a continuation of our employee-led charity initiative, Gen got to pick the charity for February and chose the Canadian Civil Liberties Association which fights against rights violations, inequality, discrimination and abuse of police powers in Canada.

Since March is Women’s History Month, check out this list of charities and organizations that help amplify and empower women inside and outside of the games industry.

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As the days become longer and the weather warmer, we hope that you all stay safe and healthy!

<3
The Clever Endeavour Team