It's been a while since we've given you a proper devlog update (2021 Recap Video), so let's take a look at what we've been up to this first part of 2022!

Enemy Concepts

When trying to transform the world into a Pigeon Paradise, you’ll naturally make some enemies along the way. Chief among these is a large organization known simply as the “Pigeon Patrol”.

This Human Faction is well-funded, with representation around the globe. Their primary objective is to control the pigeon population and clean the streets of "pigeon graffiti”.

As you play through your unique storyline in Pigeon Simulator, you’ll meet other Factions along the way—some friendly, and some not. Many dark forces are at work, behind the scenes, hell-bent on stopping you from living your best pigeon life. How you handle these interactions is up to you!

AI and Emergent Gameplay

We’ve been working hard to make the AI in Pigeon sim very dynamic and interesting when interacting with the player, other factions, and the environment. Although the AI is currently undergoing a major update, and much of the art you see here is placeholder/prototype stuff, we thought we’d give you a quick sneak peak now.

In this video you can see NPCs reacting to new obstacles, threats, and items in the environment. Some of these behaviors, such as running and hiding behind the vending machines or grabbing a gun mid-air, were unexpected—”emergent gameplay” as they say.

Sandbox Toys

Given our goal of making Pigeon Simulator feel like a mash-up of Goat Sim, GTA, and our favorite Roguelikes, we’ve spent a great deal of time ensuring that the general “sandbox gameplay” is very fun and rewarding in itself. In other words, we want players to be able to have a lot of fun just mucking around and ignoring their quests!

To this end, we’ve started building out a bunch of fun “DNA”. These power-ups alter your pigeon’s genetic composition, giving you access to all kinds of weird/powerful/fun abilities. A few prototypes are shown in the video here.

Environment

We’ve made more progress on the natural environment too!

Terrain is now randomly generated from a set of tiles with various attributes. Then we paint the ground with a texture that blends everything together nicely. For example, we can make the space around roads worn with dirt and fade into grassy areas for a more natural, handmade look. Finally, we use this info to place lush grasses, shrubs and trees.

Oh, and we even made the trees destructible too! Knock ‘em down, watch’em roll, or even get stronk and use them as a weapon?!

Building Interiors

What’s that? You want to go inside any room in any building? Well now you can!

Here’s a super early preview of this tech in action. You can now enter any space of a building and explore its interior. It’s all fully destructible as well Everything you see here is placeholder graphics, obviously, but you get the point. Pretty cool, right?

Too handle all this madness we’ve updated our shaders and destruction systems to be both extremely efficient and more detailed! Including a fancy window shader that really makes interiors feel more believable..

Our fine artists have just begun putting this new tech to good use, building out tile sets and textures to give each building a unique look!

Tell Me Morrre!

There’s so much more to tell you, but it’s just too much for one blog post! For now, here’s a teaser list of stuff we’ve begun working on this year….

StoryMods 2.0: a powerful dialogue and quest creation system!
TileSets: a system for creating handmade scenes you can discover and experience.
Core Lore: we worked with a professional Narrative Designer to weave a tale so epic it will blow your mind!
Glorious Animations: we hired an outstanding Animator who is bringing all these fine characters and worlds to life with superb motion.
Super Prop Redux: a fantastic Hard Surface Modeler has also joined the team and is turning our props and environment models from “okay” to “amaze-balls!”
Core Game Loop: we’ve prototyped, we’ve tested, and we’ve come up with a sweet game progression and RPG-like leveling system so you can be the best pigeon you can be!

Q1 2022 Highlights