Pigeon updates, city props, trees, UI, and some fun concept sketches

Pigeon v4.0

This month we continued to improve our fine feathered friend with a whole bunch of updates!

Skill Updates

We’ve begun integrating our “DNA System” with the pigeon to allow it to upgrade, swap, and even mix various skills in all kinds of crazy ways! Shotgun spread pattern pigeon poop that explodes on impact and can turn people into goats? You got it!

We hope to start building out these actual abilities next month using this new system.

Inverse Kinematics

Creating a bird character that can look and aim in any direction is actually pretty complex. To handle this, we extended the rigging, added more animations, and began building a really cool Inverse Kinematics (IK) system to modify everything on the fly.

Now pigeons can look you in the eye while they poop on your car!

Perching

After getting frustrated enough times trying to land on small geometry, we decided to add a dynamic perching system. Now you can land on lampposts, statues, and small dogs much more easily.

Pickup/Drop Improvements

Since perching and pickup uses the same button (for simplicity), we needed a way to handle complex interactions… like the pigeon landing amongst a pile of clutter and wanting to pick something up, or perch on the largest item. For the most part, we’re able to parse this out for the player so they don’t really have to think much about it…

…however, if you level up your bird a lot and get super strong, you might just pickup a car or park bench instead of landing on it, but that sounds like fun to us!

Shader Improvements

We’ve also begun looking into a brand new shader system that looks very promising. It makes things appear more vivid, gives us tons of cool artistic options, and looks like it should run even faster than our current setup.

Before… After… ooh, talk about a glo-up!

City Props

Our artists have been working hard to build up a set of unique props for Pigeon Simulator. Now we can finally start placing them into the procedural city generator. Our programmers have built awesome tools that allow us to define specific rules for their placement, like only appearing in alley ways or on the side of a road.

Everything from office cubicles to signage has a unique look, and is built to be very performance friendly way. Each prop is interactive. It can be damaged, perched on, picked up, etc… adding even more madness to manage in this big physics sandbox world! Luckily our team works super hard to optimize everything they can at each stage to ensure things run well.

Soon the city will be full of stuff to poop on and destroy. Bwahahahahaaaa!

Trees!

While pigeons often feel at home amongst the urban environment that somewhat resembles the rocky cliff-faces they use in their natural habitats, some still prefer a nice tree to settle down in. Plus, we just needed some greenery to start livening up the place!

We’ve started building out some nice new nature props to replace the temporary ones we had in the prototype/look-target scene. Building small props is relatively easy, but building larger trees is more difficult because the player will likely want to land on larger branches, expect collisions for certain things, etc.

Plus… we’re crazy people and want to allow you to rip these suckers out of the ground and huck them across the map if you level up your pigeon enough! Whaaaaaa—?!?

So, we’ve mapped out a way to [hopefully] allow all this to work out well and started building some nice, pretty trees for the city, park, and surrounding area.

Speaking of which… we’ve also starting building out some terrain tiles so we can procedurally generate the land too!

Moarrrr Art Plz

In between all the requests for pigeon updates and props, the art team has also managed to do some other cool updates, like start creating clothing variations for the human NPCs…

…make hunky slabs of meat…

…and optimize the heck out of some models.

We may have gone too far on optimizing this guy — We may have gone *too* far on optimizing this guy

HUD

We finally added a proper HUD to the game. You know, to show important stuff like health, points, and what kind of garbage you just ate… normal stuff. It’s starting to make everything feel more real and polished now—which is a really great feeling!

We also mocked up some other UI elements, which we hope to build next month. This should give you an idea of some of the RPG-like elements coming to the game :D

Design & Planning

We want to get a super early Alpha build into the hands of gamers like you as early as possible. There’s still a lot of work to be done first, so we spent a good deal of time this month designing any remaining core game mechanics or gaps in the overall project vision, and breaking things down into an actionable plan that ensure we’re focusing all of our efforts on the top priority tasks to make that happen!

Buuuuut, I don’t want to spoil any major surprises here, so I’ll just tease you with a couple of fun concept sketches instead.

The Nest

This will essentially become a ‘game world hub’, a constant home in the ever-changing world of Pigeon Simulator. Here’s a few early sketches as we toy with the idea.

Pigeon Shrines

They say an ancient organization known as “The Cult of the Coo” has built stone shrines in remote parts of the world for thousands of years. What secrets do they hold?

Beefcakes

We’ve been having fun developing a lot of unique, fake companies for this game universe. Here we’re tossing around ideas for some fast food franchises… they’re more than just scenery in Pigeon Sim.

Audio Production Has Begun!

We believe high quality sound will be essential for Pigeon Simulator, so we’ve planned for it from the start.

We’re using the Wwise Engine to handle all the audio—yup, just like those AAA guys! We even hired a professional, local sound designer who’s worked on titles like Last of Us 2, Gears of War, and State of Decay to make sure that every poop splatter, every explosion, and every pigeon collision sounds fantastics!

Turns out feather dusters are great for imitating pigeon wing sounds

In addition, we’ve designed an “adaptive music state machine” so we can alter the music to fit the scene—just like a movie! We’re also working with the super talented folks at tinyBuild to build this is Wwise and compose the core set of tracks for the game… and let me tell you, these are some beautiful scores already!

music state machine.png — Adaptive Music State Machine Magic

oooooooh fancy!

It’s all starting to come together now…

Join us next month as we add fancy environmental FX and start bringing scenes to life!

April 2021