It’s shaping up to be a busy summer for Clare resident Chad Comeau, the game designer who for the past year-and-a-half or so has been working on a video game about Clare and who – in partnership with graphic designer Marc d’Entremont – also has come up with a new Acadian card game.
The video game, which is called Clarevoyance, was the focus of an unveiling event recently in Church Point.
Although the project isn’t finished yet, Comeau said the idea was to share some things with people, basically let them have a look at some of what’s been done and update them on the initiative.
“People know I’ve been working on the game,” he said, “but I hadn’t really shown anything about it like the logo, the name and stuff like that ... so it was an attempt to share the project with the public.”
The project is funded by Heritage Canada, the Province of Nova Scotia and the Municipality of Clare.
“It’s a collaborative community game,” Comeau said, “where all art, music and writing is created by local artists, and all characters will be performed by people from the region. We will be recording 60-100 characters at the Tide School studio (in Meteghan) in July.”
July also is the month Comeau expects the cards to arrive for his and d’Entremont’s new Acadian card game, which is called À tchi? Comeau figures to have the cards by late July or thereabouts.
The game’s title is an Acadian expression – a question actually – that people will use when they want a better idea who someone is. Who’s the person’s father, they’ll ask. People are often identified by their family tree, which is the basis of the new game.
(For example, if someone named Claude is the son of Philippe and Philippe’s father was Pierre, then you might hear an Acadian refer to the person as Claude à Philippe à Pierre, no last names required.)
To help fund the card game project, Comeau and d’Entremont did what proved to be a successful crowdfunding campaign.
Comeau said the cards will be sold in a few stores and he also will be selling them on his website.
Both projects – the video game and card game – will help promote Acadian culture, so it was perhaps fitting that the May 27 event in the Marc Lescarbot theatre at Université Sainte-Anne was held just as word was spreading that the Congrès mondial acadien (World Acadian Congress) of 2024 will take place in southwestern Nova Scotia.
The CMA is a big gathering and celebration of Acadian culture that takes place every five years. The municipalities of Clare and Argyle had jointly applied to host CMA 2024 and were successful in their bid. The event is scheduled to be held Aug. 10-18, 2024.
Comeau said it was great to hear that the congress will be coming to the Clare-Argyle region.
“Here in Clare, we’ve felt over the past few years that there’s an excitement in the air,” he said. “With the news that we were chosen to host the next World Acadian Congress, it’s nice to see that it’s not just us. Clare is indeed a hub for creativity and culture, and we’re more than excited to share it with the world.”
