Cutscenes in Pigeon Simulator
Hello, all. It’s me, Colin, a newer face here at HakJak. I actually joined back on May 1st, but I’ve been basically non-stop busy since I started—in the best way.
When I joined, Pigeon Simulator was going through something of a transitional period, and still is! The original vision of the game largely embraced chaos, through an entirely procedurally generated world, loosely connected StoryMods, and goofy physics.
While Pigeon Simulator still embodies all of these things, a few things happened that led to us developing a slower, more deliberate narrative for our first milestone:
They hired me and my cohort Dave as writers, leading to an immediate influx of written content.
The switch to a Hybrid ProcGen model meant that there were more static locations to reference.
The internal announcement of a demo build meant that we had to get focused on building things, and revisiting the previous writers’ work would have to take a backseat.
So we took the existing Flamingo Franz character, sorted through the existing content for the Crow Magnus Flux Tape, did a few rewrites and edit passes, and began building.
Flamingo Franz in all his glory.
It soon became apparent that one of our bottlenecks was engineering time. Pigeon Simulator, despite a team of 16 at the time of writing, is a phenomenally complex game with tons and tons of systems working together. In order to tell the stories we wanted to, we needed the ability to create complex content. As a result, I asked the engineers if I could have access to Unity’s Timeline feature via StoryMod to enable building cutscenes.
Unity’s timeline workflow as I use it in my day-to-day.
Outside of the initial engineering ask of linking Timeline up to our StoryMod system, I was now free to build cutscenes as frequently as I wanted to. While it does have some limitations, I’m able to preview animations, enable and disable any object I want, and use Cinemachine (which we already use for the rest of our game’s cameras) to blend between shots with ease.
This meant that some ideas we had but didn’t have the engineering time for were still able to get in the game, and look real snazzy too.
While our next Flux Tape will likely be less focused on a linear narrative to ensure we capture the original destructive and zany focus of Pigeon Simulator, it’s been a lot of fun being able to build cutscenes in-engine. Until next time, here are some screenshots from our cutscenes to tide you over until you can play them.
