The Clever Girls DEMO will be playable on Steam, on August 7th! We’re theming this demo as a “Dress Rehearsal”. It won’t have every mechanic the full game will, but it should be enough to find out if you’re interested! Here’s the demo Steam page:
View game pageCheck below for more details! Wishlist the game, and you’ll get an email when the demo comes out!
What took you so long!?
We previously announced the demo would be released in Fall 2024, and boy were we wrong! Why were we so far off?
Clever Girls is an entirely self-funded project made by a tiny team of part-time devs. Making games (even just a demo) is really hard! Even if it took a lot longer than expected, we’re still all happy with how the demo development went, and can’t wait to see what people think.
We’re confident we’ve got something people will really like. This demo has been in the works since our Steam page announcement all the way back in February 2024. Since then we’ve come a long way in refining the game’s controls, systems and art & animation (animation especially!)
We’re going to keep working on the demo before and after the launch, but we’re finally at a place where we think it shows off what’s unique about Clever Girls with a decent amount of polish.
There are some key differences between in what the DEMO has, versus what the full game will have:
What the Clever Girls Demo HAS:
Talking dinosaurs!
A linear, self-contained, possibly canon VN-style storyline. This is the style of storytelling we’ll primarily be using in Clever Girls. The demo is roughly the size of a single planned “chapter” of the full game.
A 3D, third-person “Explore mode” with a unique environment and many interactions to look at. Explore as all four playable characters, and dig through a bunch of interesting garbage!
Three battles of increasing complexity, with more of the cast and abilities unlocking as you progress.
What the Clever Girls Demo DOES NOT HAVE, but we plan to put in the full game:
An introduction to the full game, with compatible saves and progression. When the full game is close to release, we will probably update the demo to include this. But it’s not there now!
The RPG progression system. In the full game, your characters will gain experience in a traditional RPG fashion. Also planned are systems we’re calling “Memories” and “Mementos”. These will function similar to equipment in a traditional RPG. And of course, relationship-based unlocks will add to character progression as the cast’s interpersonal interactions develop. The demo doesn’t have any of that, though!
The Relationship Graph system, allowing the inter-party relationships to progress and affect gameplay and story. For now, there’s some teases of how the relationship system will integrate into battles– but the demo doesn’t have relationships that progress. That’s not to say there aren’t some fun character interactions, though! Maybe even a couple of small choices…
A bunch more stuff! Abilities, enemy types, NPCs, items, areas, etc.
I like this game! How can I help?
Share the demo with your friends! We think Clever Girls will develop the best with a publisher’s support, in order to make the project as awesome as we can. In a risky market, what publishers want to see most is engagement and popularity. Send the demo to anyone you think might like it, and hit the wishlist button on Steam! Also, leave a review for the demo to let us know what you think!
Provide testing and feedback! The demo is as much a gameplay preview as it is a technical test of the complex story and gameplay systems. Report bugs and give opinions using the feedback links on the game’s pause menu. If you experience a crash, make sure to press the “send” button on the crash reporter so we can get a hold of the valuable crash report data.
Can I stream the demo? Can I make video content showing the demo? Make fanart?
Yes! Please stream it, make videos, and/or make fan-art! Go ahead! We think we’ve got something cool, and we’re so excited to find out what other people think of it too. If you’re making content, we want to see it!
If you want to be extra nice, consider linking the Steam page (for the demo, or the full game) when you post things! Every mention helps.
Anything else we should know about the demo?
Depending on reading and gameplay speed, we’ve seen the demo completed in as short as 40 minutes, or as long as 2.5 hours. Don’t worry, you can save and load, though some small sections might need to be repeated after loading.
We’re still working on improvements! While we’ve tested it pretty thoroughly, we’re a small team and can’t possibly catch every issue, especially the more subtle or inconsistent hardware-related ones. If there’s performance issues, crashes, or anything else, it will take time for us to fix them. Though our resources are limited, we’ll do our best to make sure as many people can enjoy the demo as possible.
Currently, the demo keeps all your autosaves. This is just out of an abundance of caution, to safeguard against the possibility of softlocks or save corruption (though we’ve eliminated as much of those as we could!). If you encounter a savegame that doesn’t seem to work right, or is stuck, try reloading an earlier autosave. The autosaves are very small, so you shouldn’t have to worry about them taking too much disk space– but you can delete them using the save menu if you want. (Or find them in your local appdata directory, under the folder named “CG_UE/Saved/Savegames” and delete them manually. Maybe make a backup first!)
Where’s your Discord? I want to join a Discord!
We’re still working on an official public Discord! As a small team, running a community space like that is likely to take a significant amount of time and effort that we’d ideally put towards development. A poorly moderated Discord community can be worse than none, so we’re working on a plan to have a place where fans can hang out and share enthusiasm, but that won’t impact our development. We want to make sure we know what we’re getting into!
What’s next for Clever Girls?
It depends on how the demo is received! We’ll work on feedback and improve the demo, and also turn our attention to the full game. Funding is definitely something we’re still sorting out (publishers, email us at [email protected]), but we have all kinds of options ahead of us to consider. If we need to, we’ll keep self-funding like we always have. We’ll make our little dino game real, one way or another!
Development information will be much more forthcoming! We’ve recently added a team member to focus on sharing things about the project. After the release of the demo, we want to rev up our social media presence and show more people the game. Let us know what kinds of content you want to see! Story teasers? Gameplay and mechanic deep-dives? Romantic dinosaur high-school AUs? (We’re not doing that one.) Tell us what interests you!
As always, thanks so much for the time and attention. We’re making this project so that people can enjoy it, so hearing feedback and responses from others is what helps keep us going.
To close us out, have some fun development art of Sawyer and Prati goofing around:
As always, thanks for following! Seeya later!