WingBeat (GreenLight Tachycineta Prototype)

Concepts scaled back: Limiting to 1 level gameplay

Current Status: 

Player does not yet interact with insect swarms but this will be primary health and performance increase mechanism. Collecting nest material increases score. Addition of procedural volume generator insect, and tree spawner (nest material generators) next steps.

Flight mechanics complete. Takeoff and landing transition into hop mode need reliable and performant triggers. At present hop mode working but disabled. 

Old Crow Mesh used to prototype with, will be replaced with final tree swallow and finished smoother animations once gameplay is complete.

Basic Concept (Working in Unreal Engine & Blender):

A flight based game where you play as a bird that lives on the wing. Either a swift (cooler name and association for folks that don’t know birds, also they nearly never land) or a swallow (cooler to look at, developer has an extensive personal history with these birds, and they have a sleeker looking flight). 

Gameplay should feel similar to 90s console flight games ala Firefox and Pilotwings, and (not 90s) Lost Ember. Slow camera trail (springarm?) your performance is based on flying through/between/into objectives as in those games.

Flying low over water should play a key role in making the game feel fast as should use of fog volumes and clouds (primarily fog due to habitat see below)

Important Features:

Game needs to be based on the actual life of these birds. 

They eat insects in flight (Niagara Particle Systems). Doing this on the wing (typically over water, between trees, or over disturbed grass) trying to flee should provide interesting gameplay goals. You fly through the swarm, catch bugs, adds to stamina/health/points etc

Flight itself for small birds is incredibly taxing, but early spring being still for too long can kill a bird due to body temp drops this means morning and evening are balancing acts. (Need some form of environmentally depleting stamina/health system)

These species play “the feather game” where a bird will take a feather up high and drop it, swivel round in flight and try and catch it again before any other birds can see it and fly up and take it then do the same. The feather game favours offence so if a defender is successful they must be really good. 

Young birds play the feather game to learn while being fed by parents and older birds play the feather game to get mates (both introduce potential story elements, tutorial & level progression)

Nest material gathering provides difficult flight goals as they could spawn in level in dangerous places to get ie close to ground, pickup could damage flight ability Potential for ground based and flight based predators. Cats/kestrels/etc

Caring for young birds makes life much harder as a parent. The bird must provide enough food to sustain young, plus all of what was required in solo life. (Potential three level game, lvl 1 Fledging - Tutorial aspects provided by parent birds training wheels on, lvl 2 Solo Life - Tutorial aspects removed survive and collect nest elements, win feather game with rivals to get mate, lvl 3 - Provide enough food to raise young and not die 

In a previous jam I did flight mechanics of a crow. It was wrong in the way bird flight is often done wrong. “Flying” mode on wasd controls that are press and hold. At best bird flight as some variant of aircraft flight. In reality these are nothing alike. Flight needs to be an on pressed flap action. It doesn’t feel like you are doing anything, and it isn’t fun. Forward backward left and right flaps need different animations with different effects. I played around with dropping “built in flying mode” retaining the wasd controls but using “add impulse” on pressed similar to a jump mechanic. This is a better approach for player involvement and control and the direction I will go, perhaps adjusting the effect direction by manipulation of tail feathers and alula as in real birds, (socket animations?) to change the direction of impulse. The press of the flap buttons needs to have a stamina drain for the bird but a rush of speed in the desired direction so that the player is given a more exciting and realistic flight experience. 

Modification of the previous crow asset I made to fit a different bird and adding better head, changing wing shape, and a larger number of smoother improved flight animations. Animations need to be based on actual placement, arm angles, and drag effects of primaries and secondaries in real birds to look right since they will be vastly slower flaps than in real birds of this size due to limitations of player control (humans do not have bird reaction times).