thanks to @bib for helping us find and fix a bug where birds could exist in a simultaneous state of life and death, becoming functionally immortal and allowing them to lug around and eat their own corpse. if you’ve ever wondered what you’d taste like, become a beta tester today
it’s igf time of year again and we kept having problems with people accidentally skipping text. i don’t think the temporary solution we arrived at is the best but having an otherwise-not-featured mascot character explain the controls to you badly is really funny to me as a cold open for a videogame
figuring out how to write jokes without crossing some invisible “quirked up indie rpg” line is an eternal struggle. really, writing anything is hard. and there’s so much of it! whats the deal
kind of melancholy that last year we saw people talking about our igf demo on cohost and this year i have no clue where i’d run into something like that. when the game comes out we’ll get some unknowable number of dollars and some steam reviews (“were they on drugs when they made this? - 13 people marked this review Funny”) but like, it sucks that if someone ended up having a more meaningful relationship with it there arent a lot of ways id see it. unless they were like a youtube video essayist or something, or were a poster here. idk the modern internet is bad is what im saying. if i really wanted to hurt myself i guess i could log back into tigsource, that site’s still up right.
we were privately encouraged to submit to experimental games workshop so we’re gonna be throwing some kind of video together for that, hoping it works out and maybe we can make some people laugh
hoping to release “early” next year. anything could happen…
I love that an actual good bird game is finally here because every time I play a bad one I just hear Twitter user jenihead yapping ‘where’s bird game? where’s bird game???’ oh shit I gotta link this to her
as we inch ever closer to Feature Completion im gonna post random stuff that won’t make the cut
Longitudunus: holy spear that gets stronger based on your horizontal position on the game board. impossible to balance
Meta Slime: miniboss that attacks you with achievements. i don’t really know how this was going to work either. i thought it was funny at the time
i have a note from march that just says “STIMMING” in all caps. i don’t know what it’s for. maybe it’s for the videogame. you can put it on the TCRF page
made progress on the floating island of garbage. kali’s been churning out some really charming takes on the remaining enemy concepts, which i think complements the dystopian stuff in a fun way. yeah sure you’re being electrocuted by boston dynamics dogs, but,
it does feel like we’re in the home stretch of making this thing which somehow makes the stuff left to do feel more intimidating, i guess because i have to actually do all of it instead of just telling myself i will. in particular im hoping i can boost the rate i can put words down and not feel like i have to scrap them and start over
i also feel like we’re missing some kind of “intro” stuff that sets expectations better for the obtuse bullshit we want the player to figure out but i don’t know what that looks like yet. hopefully we at least finally fixed players skipping dialogue on accident. maybe if we’re lucky those incremental fixes will be enough, idk
here’s a video of a bald eagle making a honking sound
one of my favorite bits of bird trivia is that the “eagle.wav” sfx u hear in most stuff is actually a redtail hawk, because bald eagles are so actually undignified goofballs who make silly noises
last summer i got to hear that cry in real life & see some hawks circling that was pretty rad
My gold standard for this is when Dangan Ronpa interupts the game to just plainly explain how the game works. We’re sorry for this, but it is important and we want you to have a good time.
kali made new store page art for the rpg maker steam festival, kinda sick with it. terminal even. looking at it kills you. because it’s good
we’ll also have a demo for the next nextfest (nextnextfest), which is on the 24th. it’s got some stuff in it! i hope you like the stuff that’s in it. it’s like twenty minutes of stuff, and some of that stuff is new, and some of that new stuff isn’t done, but it will be done by the 24th, which is when you can play it. listen i wrote so much dialogue today i have to stop myself from adding textcodes to this post on reflex
sometimes making a videogame is about adding a 2% chance for dialogue about hot air balloons giving birth because you don’t want to write the ending
Wow. That looks like a videogame. Is it possible this was the peak of development?
Yes.
The game is bad now, and I am reverting it immediately.
Stay tuned for more dev updates!
