What Does it Mean to Build a Place?

Aubrey here.

On a clear day, the human eye can see for about 3 miles before a combination of atmospheric density and the curvature of the Earth put a hard limit on the horizon. If you’re one of the billions of people on the planet who live in a large city, this horizon is further cut by the massive brick-and-mortar obelisks we erect in our population-dense endeavors. I did not grow up in a city.

This was my view every day, to and from town, from my first day of preschool to my last day of state college:

I’ve heard this view romanticized as “big sky” or “rolling fields” — these phrases put flowers on a space that, at its core, is incredibly lonely. Especially after I got my driver’s license started driving, when I was the only one in the car and, very often, on the entire road, it felt like I lived on the edge of the world. The amount of sheer nothing often felt like an oppression to the soul, like a blanket of the void that threatens to turn upside-down and spill you into an eternal upward spiral for its own amusement.

Seeing the outer limits of the world around you, the scale of it, feeling the curvature of the Earth in every direction, feeling the silent existence of this planet condescending upon you, it recontextualizes the way you experience space, distance, place.

Pigeon Simulator is a game about place. It’s inherent to the premise, don’t you think? Pigeons are part-in-parcel to the experience of them being in places you wouldn’t expect them to be — a mass of winding overpasses, a veritable concrete jungle of girder boughs and pillar roots? You’re sure to find pigeons nestled under the canopy of roadwork. Bus stops, train stations, storefront facades? You can bet that if there aren’t pigeons there, you’ll find evidence of them having been there at some point. Pigeons experience place in a way that we humans could never fathom, and despite that, Pigeon Simulator attempts to fathom it.

I took some time in the past couple weeks to make a place for you, the humble pigeon. One who can fly, one who is about the size of a soccer ball, one who carries old hotdogs in their beak. You are not a human, and although I’m constructing a fundamentally human place it’s also paradoxically a pigeon place. When I look over the horizon of this constructed place, I think of the incredibly flat “big sky” place I came from. That place, although radically different, is a direct influence of the one I’ve been working on. I would hope that you too are influenced by your own history, by your own understanding of this place we all share.

The following is a small set of screenshots of the initial layout of place in Pigeon Simulator. I hope to further detail the smaller nooks and crannies soon, as we get ready to give you all a more personal interaction with it.

Those red buildings are taking up the general shapes of the final product, and I’d recommend keeping an eye on the HakJak Studios’ social medias to see what those will look like in the future.