Holy shit, I finally released the Ungrateful Birds sequels. I started these back in November 2021, after going kind of insane working on Salt Lake Stories.
I always liked Ungrateful Birds and have long wondered if I had more I wanted to do with the basic idea.
And honestly this post stuck with me. I thought it was fun that someone had played it together, and I think it’s a fun game to watch, but I thought it might be even more fun if people could play together. The addition of a second player was the main thing that led me to start on this. I thought it was something I could dash out in about 3 months. But while there was a break in the middle of the year where I worked on an Open World Jam game that’s on hiatus (and then a second smaller Open World Jam game that is also now on hiatus) for a few months, this is the game I’ve probably polished and tested the most, and have probably put the most amount of hours into. It’s weird. Game’s kind of a joke. But I hope it’s a pretty good joke.
Game’s got a world map. Weird how triumphant I felt implementing this. Makes me feel more like I made a Video Game.
At some point, as the scope of the game grew, I decided I wanted to see if I could make a little money from it. But I’m in this as a hobby and mostly just want people to play my games, so I wanted it to be free. So I came up with this weird solution of creating a main game and then an additional game (kind of a level pack, really, but I’m treating it as a sequel or companion game) that’s offered for a small price. I don’t know how successful this will be or how good an idea it was, but I hope enough people enjoy the game that they’re interested in playing more. No Good Deed is 38 stages with 4 bonus stages and Call of the Desert is 16 stages with 1 bonus stage. No Good Deed has 10 types of birds with different behaviors, and Call of the Desert adds five (though two are really just reskins of birds form NGD). I’m really proud of how the levels turned out in CotD. I thought at first the side game was going to be made up of mostly scraps, but it ended up being, I think, a worthwhile game in its own right, even though it’s largely the same game as NGD.
Anyway, I hope some people have some fun with it. I had a lot of fun making it. And I watched a friend play through it yesterday that confirmed a lot of my choices in designing the game and the stages worked out how I wanted them to, so that’s good. And I’m really excited to focus my creative energies elsewhere.