May-June 2021
Buff Pigeon, Environment VFX, Procedural Building Updates, and Community Concepts
May-June was a crazy time for us as we did a big pitch to some major game companies and hired 2 new developers to grow the team! So, we preserved the sanity we had left and combined everything into one update post this time.
Buff Pigeon
Here’s a very early work-in-progress tease of Buff Pigeon. LOTS more to come here, but we couldn’t resist showing y’all a preview now, even in this raw stage. Punching stuff as this swole bird is just too much fun!
Jeremy has been hard at work, giving Buff Pigeon a final art pass. He’s updated the sculpt to make it more refined and “rage roidy”—bulging veins and everything! He’s also updated the rig and is currently working on all the unique animations required for Buff Pigeon’s sweet skill set. More to come on that next month!
Environment VFX
It’s time to start replacing our prototyping assets with final art, and what better place to start than with characters and the environment! We did a huge update on all of the main environment visuals this month, keeping an eye on optimization and scalability as we went.
Ocean
We implemented an ocean shader system that allows us to scale performance vs quality quite nicely to support low-end machines while also allowing high-end rigs to crank things to an 11. Lots of cool features here, but I won’t bore you with the details—it just looks really pretty!
Later we’ll add some buoyancy effects to this so stuff can float on the waves and bob around.
Sky and Clouds
As you can see in the GIF above, we also have volumetric clouds with realtime changes. Since the main character is a bird, we felt that having a sky with depth, color and movement was important. Clouds like these are more performance-intensive though, so we’re going to have have a fallback system for lower end machines and some way to scale between them as needed.
Below you can see a lower-end version of these as low-hanging clouds you can fly though! More work to be done here, but it’s off to a nice start.
Vegetation
Although the initial focus was on urban environments, we realized that vegetation will play an important role as well. Not only for creating beautiful backdrops, but lush environments you can explore and discover secrets. Since you’re a bird, moving about the level is a breeze and we wanted to make sure everything is interesting and interactive, no matter where you go in the scene.
However, having a main character that can fly creates a set of serious performance challenges we had to overcome. We wanted dense vegetation, with adjustable wind, realtime weather changes (snow coverage, etc) and some level of interactivity (collisions, ripping trees out of the ground, etc). Annnnd we had to pull all this off with long distance views, and look good when viewed from any angle, including high in the sky—all while being perfromant, of course!
After a bunch of hard work, trial and error, we managed to make great progress here! We’re able to render thousands of trees in a scene, viewable from any angle, and keep things running smoothly. So far things are looking great.
Next on the list is to add some interactivity, grass and flowers.
Weather
We also tied in some basic weather effects with the vegetation, to make things appear wet, sandy, or covered in snow. Lots more work to do, but here’s a preview.
Terrain Tiles and Procedural Texturing
We want each level the player enters to feel unique, and that starts from the ground up—literally! To keep things lightweight and fast, we decided to use a tile-based approach. This allows us to assemble terrain much faster than using a more traditional heightmap and mesh generation approach, is easier to optimize, and performs more reliably with physics.
We prototyped a starter set of tiles this month for “Alpha Island”, our early development level. These are manually placed right now, and then procedurally textured based on their slopes. Later we will use this for procedural generation of terrains and large environment geometry. So far it looks like this approach will work quite well for our goals.
And yes… that’s a volcano you see in the background.
ProcGen and Destruction Updates
Each building in Pigeon Simulator is procedurally generated from the ground up and fully destructible. Handling all this madness requires an extensive amount of optimization and performance management. Over the past couple of months, we’ve given this system several important technical updates that made substantial improvements to both generation and performance. This is important so we can ensure things run well on lower-end machines, and provides some extra performance budget for cool VFX and AI.
For instance, now we can allow for a lot more destruction debris to remain in a scene before we begin any cleanup. It’s really satisfying to see all your handy-work stick around.
Road and Traffic Updates
Continuing our process of swapping out placeholder assets, all of the road tiles got a nice model and material update, including: wider roads, full sidewalks, crosswalks, and even nice little corner ramps. We also setup a whole bunch of new street props that get spawned about randomly, like street lamps, alley dumpsters, intersection lights, benches, etc.
These roads are built with splines, which the traffic and pedestrian system uses to assist their navigation, keeping things running faster and smoother than a full AI approach.
We finally have more than 1 car model driving around the city now too, haha. Dakota spent a lot of time optimizing the vehicle models and getting them setup to spawn in the city.
Having more traffic driving around is nice and all, but it doesn’t matter much if you can’t blow ‘em up! Scott gave all the vehicles an update that lets us do just that—with spectacular results!
City Park and New Props
We added a central park to “Alpha Island”. This is where our feathered hero will spawn during these early stages of development. It’s a semi-safe space where we can also do a light tutorial and let the player experiment a bit before explore the rest of the city.
Additionally, we built a ton of new city props which will be spawned around the scene according to the procgen rule sets. Including some cool watch towers the Pigeon Patrol may use, playground equipment, outhouses, and a mysterious vending machine.
Music
Music production is fully underway now! Pigeon Simulator will feature an original soundtrack, with layered music that adapts to the player’s actions and scenarios. We’ve got a beautiful main theme song, with many other music states to match. We’re not ready to share that quite yet, so here’s a sample to hold ya over—the default Boss Fight music!
We’ve also been hard at work with a local Sound Designer to begin implementing a bunch of sound effects in the game (finally!), including ambient city sounds, wind, swooshes, explosions and more. Hoping to showcase some of that next month.
Morrrre Pigeon Updates
We’ve continued to update the main pigeon controller, improving the overall feel and adding new features, such as:
Completely physics-based movement, even while doing complex actions like grabbing and carrying objects.
Inverse Kinematics setup. Now the pigeon can aim his/her head—or butt— in any direction while firing off projectiles! IK also allows us to hint to the player nearby points of interest, or look at the NPC you’re talking to.
Grounded poop attacks. Aim your butt like a mortar cannon and fire off powerful charge shots!
Eating animations, expelling items, stomach inventory management, sound effect implementation, hooking things up to the new HUD, and more!
We’re continuing to work out bugs in the DNA System, but so far it’s proven to be a lot of fun to create weird new abilities and use them on unsuspecting humans. Like this instance, where we combined the DNA of Watermelon and Spicy Burritos for rapid-fire explosive results!
Community Updates and Concept Art
One of our big goals here at HakJak Studios is to foster a close relationship with players and actually listen to and implement a ton of community-driven features requests!
Although the project is still in its early days and no public build is yet available, we’ve been listening to all the crazy ideas pitched so far and started implementing the ones that made sense during this stage, such as this Statue of Li-bird-y, a concept pitched by a fan.
For others, we had fun sketching out some sweet concept art, below. These help us plan out the work involved in actually producing them, to see which are worth pursuing first. These are a mix of fan and team concepts.
Here we have a “ChocoBob Rider”… we fully intend to make this one a real ability with some special perks.
And we received many pitches for a dinosaur-like pigeon power, so we present to you: Pigeosaurous!
Or there’s this one, perhaps inspired by D&D’s "OwlBear” monster… the PigeBear.
We’re also concepting out variations to the base Pigeon Patrol unit, and player’s hub location known simply as The Nest.
What Else?
New Hires!
We’ve been busy recruiting new folks to join our team and grow the studio size. We just hired two new people and we’re excited to introduce you to them soon!
Cloud Builds
After a bit of toil and trouble, we managed to get a Cloud Build system up and running. This let’s us automatically create builds after every new commit, enabling us to catch game-breaking issues right away and do internal testing much quicker.
In the future, this could mean a faster process for pushing out public game updates as well.
Business-y Business Meetings of Important Business Stuff
We want to bring Pigeon Simulator to as many platforms as possible and give everyone the opportunity to experience life as a feathered god/goddess, and we want to continue ramping up the team, so we’ve been putting on our business hats and doing the work to make that happen.
And also trying to convince Microsoft that the world needs a Master Chief Pigeon!
Those are the highlights for this update!
Join us next month as we begin building a bunch of new pigeon abilities in earnest and paint the town red—err white. Gross.
