Things are super busy on the audio side of things, but I wanted to drop a few sneak peaks of two cool audio moments in the game.
First, you have to blow up a building…
And I had a ton of fun designing the sound and effects for one of the abilities in the game, Slomo!
Smashing lots of windows
By William Pheloung - Programmer
I’ve got an exciting new update. We’ve changed how windows work giving the player the ability to smash a window while flying and then fly through a building. Previously it would take a lot of damage to break a window on a building. This was in part due to some performance optimizations we were doing to allow many buildings in game. Now it just takes one hit.
With this change, a pigeon being pursued by pigeon patrol can fly to a building, bust a window mid air and keep flying through the building. After losing the pursuers, said pigeon can bust another window and fly out. All the while flapping his wings at full speed.
We were able to continue to leverage the performance optimizations and instancing behavior we were using before. So all this was accomplished without losing a frame.
One thing our pigeon friend can’t do yet is break a window by crashing into it. We hope to add that functionality soon. It will be tricky.
A window
That same set of windows after being broken by a pigeon puke projectile
MUSCLE POWER FOR YOU!
For animation this month we focused on finishing up the animations for our Flamingo Franz character as well as animations for general working out and pumping iron for our standard Human A and B archetypes.
Pumping Iron, and diggin' dirt!
By Neelam “Nee” Jani - 3D Artist
Heyo! Neelam here!
This month has been riddled with filling our interior spaces with tons of items! namely workout equipment, store counters, grave digging and a lot of clean up with our materials!
For gym equipment, I created a treadmill, some floor mats, a bunch of benches, free weights, and dumbbells!
We also got some bouncy punching bags and speed bags coming through as well! :)
Aside from this, we also have our Wrestling Ring ready to go too! (The Colossal decal is just an example for future decals we can place for future wrestling events)
Outside of the gym, we also got some grave digging coming through as well! We have some dirt mounds, a grave, and a shovel, and of course a tombstone all for our faithful flamingo friend Franz (RIP buddy)
Moving forward to slightly more boring stuff, Material fixing! we’ve been working with our neat terrain tool to help with creating cliffs, so we started implementing and testing out the cliff rock face material I made!
These are some of the noteable highlights I have for you this month, super PUMPED for what will be coming next month! keep on a look out!
I Can See Clearly Now
One of the features we are really excited about this month is the implementation of Pigeon Vision! Everyone knows that pigeons are capable of many things, including the ability to see through walls, and knowing what food, friends, or foes are around the corner!
Update Dialogue View
By Madison Belka - Unity Generalist
Previously, we wanted to show dialogue within the world as a speech bubble above the speaker’s head. However, the world space dialogue was often difficult to read, and required the speaker to be on camera in order to advance the dialogue. To resolve these issues, we decided to switch to a more traditional setup found in other games.
New Dialogue View
In order to display any character the player may talk to, we create a 3D copy of that character on the UI. It took some tweaking to make sure that humans, pigeons, dogs, or even food look good on screen.
Building cracks and damage
By William Pheloung - Programmer
We added cracks to buildings that appear to indicate when damage has been done.
These appear on all procedurally generated buildings. DNA was added to enable unique buildings to show damage this way too. We were able to get this to work using decal sprites in Unity. This is the same method we used for pigeon puke.
Colliding with a building at top speed will result in a cracked building
Thank you for reading! VISIT HAKJAK.COM/BLOG FOR MORE FREQUENT DEVLOG UPDATES!!
Keep it coo,
— Team HakJak
Pigeon Simulator DevLog 5.23
Welcome back, fellow pigeon enthusiasts! It's time to soar through the latest highlights of our feathery adventures in Pigeon Simulator development.
Over the past three months, our dedicated team at HakJak Studios has been hard at work, spreading their wings and adding a plethora of exciting updates and features to our beloved game. Let's dive right into the extraordinary progress we've made!
The Nest Updates
The Nest 2.0, our game world hub and pigeon sanctuary in space, has undergone significant improvements. Visit between your daring pigeon adventures to upgrade your feathered hero, engage in conversations with important NPCs like Dr. O, and interact with fantastical sci-fi devices, all lovingly built by pigeons themselves, of course! The Nest serves as the heart of our game, offering a place to grow, evolve, and uncover the secrets of the Pigeon Sim Universe.
Behold—science pigeon technology!
RPG Mechanics and Fine-Tuned Controls
Our core RPG mechanics have received substantial updates, providing players with a more immersive and satisfying progression system. Discover new ways to level up, build your unique pigeon hero, and strategically mix and match DNA powers. The revamped mechanics seamlessly integrate with the game world hub, empowering you to build and upgrade your pigeon over time.
Also, our mission to create "the best bird character controller on the planet" continues, as we've further refined our pigeon controls. Take-off, landing, flight, object interaction, and even eating have all been enhanced to provide a fun and fluid experience like never before.
What will your pigeon’s DNA look like?
Hybrid ProcGen Level Design
We’ve revolutionized the way levels are generated in Pigeon Simulator. With the introduction of the "hybrid procgen level system," we've struck a harmonious balance between handcrafted and procedurally generated levels. Now the city feels much more real, organic, and fun to explore. Line of sight to key elements in the level are maintained, and it’s overall just a whole lot cooler!
World locations can now be both handcrafted and procedurally generated.
Revamped Road Generation and Traffic Systems
Our road generation and traffic systems have undergone major improvements. Roads now have unlimited intersections, start and end points, and can seamlessly navigate hills and diverse terrain types. These enhancements create a more organic and believable hybrid procgen city environment.
Charming Pigeon Houses and Unique Buildings
Prepare to be smitten by our adorable lil pigeon houses! These delightful structures, scattered throughout the city, add a touch of whimsy and charm to the urban landscape. Furthermore, we're crafting a selection of handmade buildings that break the monotony and inject uniqueness into the cityscape. These buildings will not only serve as aesthetic focal points but will host specific StoryMod content, including boss battle arenas and top-secret facilities.
Expanding the World with Colorful Characters
Prepare to encounter an array of new personalities during your avian escapades. We've introduced several new human NPCs, including construction workers, cultists, and mischievous burglars. These characters add more variety to the street crowds, and give our writers fun new actors for StoryMod content.
Our canine and feline friends/enemies have received some much-deserved attention. We've meticulously rigged them up with delightful animations and floppy ragdoll physics, making their interactions within the game even more charming.
We’ve also updated several key friendly NPCs you’ll encounter along the way, such as the culinary master Chef Burns, who can turn trash into pigeon treasure.
Expressive Emote Animations
Interactions and communication just got a whole lot more exciting! We've added a plethora of emote animations for both humanoid characters and our feathered friends. Capturing the essence of emotions in some animals proved to be a challenging yet satisfying endeavor, resulting in some adorable animations that add a lot to player interactions and dialogue.
Immersive Dialogue with Narrator Mode
To add depth and immersion to the story, we've introduced a new Narrator Mode for dialogue. NPCs can now communicate with you through earpieces and other narration methods, allowing us to create a lot more types of storytelling situations. We are continuing to refine our dialogue systems to make them something you’ll enjoy interacting with, not something to be button-mashed through.
Audio Enhancements and Immersive SFX
We've added a wide range of UI sounds, footsteps tailored to different terrain types (including those delightful little pigeon footsteps), authentic pigeon foley, and an assortment of amusing puking, pooping, and farting sounds (naturally). Being a pigeon never sounded so good!
Growing Team and Stellar Collaborators
We're thrilled to welcome three new talented members to Team HakJak! With the addition of two professional comedy writers and a skilled music composer, we're poised to deliver an even more captivating and entertaining experience in Pigeon Simulator. Their contributions will elevate the game's humor, narrative, and immersive soundscapes to new heights.
Keep an eye out for future updates, as we continue to refine and expand the Pigeon Sim Universe. We’ve got some very exciting announcements in store later this year!
This month we focused primarily on the player hub, intro/tutorial scene, menus and build stability as we prepare for the upcoming playtester program. (more info on that soon!)
Some highlights include: - Pigeons in space - PP Juggernauts - Emotional NPCs - Crow Magnus merch - A mysterious warehouse - New vehicles; more ways to die - New quest type: Scenarios - Hover mode! - Impact audio - Menu madness - and more!
Interested in our Playtester Program? Join the Discord flock and be among the first notified when we begin (coming soooon!)
Pigeon Simulator DevLog 1.23
This month we touched on nearly every part of the game, as we prepare things for playtesting soon.
Check out our big end-of-year recap video where we reflect back on 2022 and look into the New Year!
Lots of behind-the-scenes and upcoming teasers to see, plus watch our studio lead, HakJak, act like a fool, haha!
Some excerpts below...
Q1 2022 Highlights Devlog
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!
December 2021 Devlog
Hello and welcome to our final devlog of 2021, where we reflect on everything that has happened to the Pigeon Simulator development throughout the year! Pull up a chair, grab some hot chocolate and join HakJak as he will walk you through everything in this incredibly wholesome video made with love.
[previewyoutube="GnrQnv4t6_I;full"]
Happy Holidays from all of us here at HakJak studios! We’ll see you next year!
May-June Updates
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!
[previewyoutube="YZL916mczIc;full"]
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.
[previewyoutube="if5otRIc4d4;full"]
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.
[previewyoutube="GFCKtrIh6rE;full"]
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.
[previewyoutube="slD2weh4-JA;full"]
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.
[previewyoutube="8YnziRrcgz8;full"]
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!
[previewyoutube="sNrIfWsW8P0;full"]
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:
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!
[previewyoutube="L05BAM0Ls-w;full"]
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.
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.
April DevLog
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!
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.
Ooooh, 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. Bwahahahaaaa!
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!
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.
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
Sweaty meats and icy treats
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. [previewyoutube="zqivv7cRGnY;full"] Turns out feather dusters are great for imitating some pigeon wing sounds.
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!
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!
It’s all starting to come together now…
Join us next month as we add fancy environmental FX and start bringing scenes to life!
March DevLog
Destruction and DNA System refinements, traffic AI, crowd simulations, and Hoomans 2.0.
Destruction Updates
[previewyoutube="DLgPrrgPwGo;full"] Pigeons fear nothing.
This month we wrapped up some work on our destruction system. Fragments are now more natural looking, with jagged edges and junk sticking out of them. They still have roughly box-like shapes for physics optimization, but once we add in the particle VFX it should be quite convincing. [previewyoutube="sSOQqsLBar0;full"] We use explosive balls of hot garbage to test the destruction engine… cuz why not?
Even at this early stage of development, it’s already a lot of fun to just fly around and destroy things randomly! I can only imagine how awesome it will all be once we finish it. [previewyoutube="i3fFIHBVaTw;full"] Nanobots repairing partially damaged buildings (timeframe is shortened for preview)
On the programming side of things, we made some important updates for performance, such as building repairs. After a damaged building is out-of-sight, or far enough away for a time, it will eventually get repaired by the city’s nanobots. (Hey, if Marvel can make silly excuses for inexplicable things, then so can we!)
DNA System
[previewyoutube="WjM9JrPNhyo;full"] Our “DNA System” in action…
We wrapped up work on something we call the “DNA System.” In a nutshell, this allows us to build super flexible gameplay mechanics—like granting the player fire breath and explosive turds when they eat a spicy burrito, making NPCs gain acid-spitting abilities and moo like cows, or suddenly giving the gift of flight to a garbage can, as seen here.
This is super important because in Pigeon Simulator we plan on having a very wide variety of wacky abilities for you to experiment with, and we needed a way to ensure that all this madness could interact properly. Exploring and discovering new abilities to experiment with may be a big part of the game.
Eventually we’ll put all this power into the hands of an “AI Storyteller” and there’s no telling what might happen then!
Roads & Traffic
We made major progress on our road and traffic systems this month! Roads are the first thing generated for each level, and then we spawn everything else based off of that, so getting the roads right is important.
We swapped all of the placeholder meshes with a nice-looking, modular set of tiles that includes proper sidewalks, intersections, and end caps. Getting randomly generated, curvy roads to play nice together was no easy task, but we eventually accomplished our goal and have a nice foundation for expansion. Once the roads were in place, we built an AI Traffic System to push vehicles around the city. Since everything is physics-based, this proved to be far more challenging than we anticipated! Our initial traffic AI was full of dangerous drivers. There were crashes and pile-ups all the time. Nobody wanted to stay in their lane… you know, a little too much like real life? As the number of vehicles spawned increased, so did the casualties. But eventually we got everything under control and they all drive about like good little citizens. We even added in some logic to manage traffic lights, and avoiding random obstacles like debris falling in the streets from massive pigeon mayhem.
Crowds
Work has begun on crowd simulations! After all, you can’t make a city feel truly alive without plenty of pedestrians hustling and bustling about.
This is no easy task though. Each pedestrian requires special things, like point-to-point navigation, collision detection, and realtime obstacle avoidance—not to mention more advanced AI features like running away scared or attacking the pigeon that just pooped on them! [previewyoutube="dqKqgEuuvdc;full"] Lots more work to be done here, but we’ve already made great strides in being able to render a large amount of characters on screen at once, and give them some basic behaviors.
Hoomans 2.0
We gave the human models a nice facelift this month. We scaled back some of the over-exaggerations, while still maintaining some of the stylized elements we wanted. Most notably the eyes and face. Overall they’ve got much less “creep factor”… but they’re still just asking to be pooped on by a pigeon. Additionally, we updated their materials to handle any color range and ensure each location feels like it has a diverse population. And we do mean any color, as seen below….
Drones
We prototyped some cool drone concepts this month, and began building some basic AI for flying NPCs. We’re toying with the idea of randomly generating some NPCs like this, or “leveling them up” to be more and more menacing as the game progresses. Then we worked on giving these little drones some brains. Our old flying NPCs would just move directly towards a target, driving right into buildings like idiots. Now they have some brains… though we still have a lot of work to do to make them actually attack the player, flee, etc.
3D AI navigation is a complex task, but we’re off to a good start! [previewyoutube="z5m1ENb0oVY;full"] Some day the flying enemies will be quite menacing… right now the pigeon just watches and laughs.
Interior Props
Right now all of our buildings are full of empty floors, but we aim to change that soon! We’ve started building up a collection of interior props, centered around various themes, such as: office, residential, industrial, etc. These will be spawned into various sets to fill out the building interiors and make them feel full of life. Most of the props in Pigeon Simulator share a common set of shaders and materials, and have simple collision geometry. This means we can have lots of them in a scene and it can still run fast! Though some of our industrial props are a little more advanced—and maybe even scary—like this industrial robot arm.
What Else?
Well.. I don’t want to give everything away!
We’ve built a unique HUD for the game, with some fun game mechanics around that. I’d show some screenshots, but I feel like even that shows too much right now. We’ve started working on our nature assets as well, to bring a little more green into the urban jungle… and we’ve started designing our storytelling system….
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Okay, fine… one more thing… here’s a little snip of some funny ability icons we made.
