Team Members:
Spottedphyre(Spotty): Hi! My name is Spotty and i'm a freelance artist. I've fiddled with creating in Gamemaker before and have a very, very basic understanding of coding. My strengths are more on the artistic/story side. I'm also the one who will be updating the Dev Log as we go along - nice to meet you!
Grinjr(Grin): Hi, people call me Grin! I've always loved things more on the development side of things - even though I am still considered a junior at it! - But I am not so artistic so that will be Spotty's job! I've never actually finished a game to completion but have made a couple prototypes, and have made multiple things just testing out certain feature ideas. Most of which have been made in Unity, but I have also fiddled with GameMaker Studio, and Unreal Engine. I'm not really all that great with words, so that's partly why Spotty will be updating the Dev Log! Plus, I really love all her doodles that she shows!
Engine: Unity
Concept:
You are a hungry fledgling Pied Babbler bird. You're always hungry but your parents simply don't understand your needs. They just don't get you - they say what they feed you now is enough. It's time to make them realize what really matters - by screaming in the open in front of hungry predators.
Inspired from the documentary "Natural Born Hustlers: Sex, Lies and Dirty Tricks" and this article: https://www.themarysue.com/birds-who-blackmail-their-parents/
Gameplay:
You are a tiny bird that walks left and right. You occasionally get fed by your flock and grow bigger as a bird until you reach adulthood. Getting further from the safety of your home and causing noise concerns your flock that you will attract predators, and to shut you up they frantically try to feed you more. The further you go, the more noise you make, the more food you get and the faster you grow. Going out too far has it's own risks as predators often walk through the area and find noisy little birds tasty.
Process:
We honestly had little idea of what we were going to do when the Jam began. We tossed around a few ideas, like a 2D isometric RPG that has the camera go 3D when you fight enemies (think "Wild Arms") and a cooking game where you shuffle left and right to access all your cooking utensils. We decided to watch some documentaries and see if any ideas came to us, when at the very end of the third episode of "Natural Born Hustlers" was the segment on the parent-blackmailing Pied Babbler chicks. Here is my actual reaction from the whole thing.
We did end up trying to brainstorm a few ideas before we ended up settling on the Babbler chicks. Next, we did some thinking for the gameplay.
Some things we talked about:
- How the predator would react to the chick when in proximity
- The possibility the chick would have to escape when being chased by a predator
- How zoomed in the camera was to the chick
- Going up the tree for safety vs Going in a spiky bush for saftey
- Having the multiplier/danger risk being visible or hidden
- Possible UI elements
- In-Game ways to explain the premise/gameplay
We would like the player to be able to choose how safely they would like to complete the game. The entire game can be completed simply by sitting safely at home, but would take much, much longer than taking a risk out in the field. Going out should be a fun adrenaline filled gamble, so we'll have to find a balance between narrow escapes and actually being caught.
Assets:
We haven't dug too much into what the assets of the game will look like, but for now we're doing simple pixel art. For the world, we'll have around 4 layers - The Foreground, The Animals (predator and prey), The Ground, and the The Background as illustrated below (all subject to change).
And that's it for the first day! Coming up we're deciding the priorities for each task and hopefully get some code going!
