- Playing the latest build, just tooting around having fun.
- Answering questions I get in chat
- Demonstrating how bad I am at playing while reading chat
- Likely tons of bugs
- Maybe the stream will even crash!
Skatebird
Watch Me Play With Birds
November Update
Oh and birb learned to dab, apparently. Still can't floss tho, sorry :(
Also, if you missed it, we did the stand-alone birb dress-up game SkateBIRD x Jazz Mickle's Pro Cap Wearer Do A Spoopy Combo. It's pretty neato! Also functions as a test of the customization system we'll be integrating into the main came, so it was double-handy.
SkateBIRD has a spoopy treat for you
It's free / pay-what-you-want, and all donations go directly to Jazz Mickle (the dev building our birb customization system). This is just a fun cross-over between our game and hers!
It is literally just a birb dress-up game. You can put birbs in hats. Seriously.
If you've never seen them before, the Jazz Mickle Pro Cap Wearer series (there's two!) is a tongue-in-cheek send off of a... particular skating franchise... that asks an important question: but what about the folks who just want to sit around the skatepark wearing cool hats, and generally looking cool.
At last, the same experience is open to birbs who can't really skate, but really wanna hang around the cardboard park with skatebirbs and just look cool in some hats. You could be that birb. RIGHT NOW!
Practically speaking, this is a stand-alone demo for how SkateBIRD's clothing customization will work. Over the next while here, we'll add the other clothing types (glasses, belts, etc) to this freebie, and eventually cap it off with an outfit export system so you can customize your birb in SkateBIRD x Jazz Mickle's Pro Cap Wearer, then import exactly that birb into the final SkateBIRD game!
So anyways, go have fun dressing up some birbs!
October Update
Birb's done a lot this month. We tried fitting them for a squashy vest, but weren't 100% with how it felt. We may revisit this later, or just skip vests in favor of belt-type objects - because belt-type clothing is super cute and work great. We also integrated our first set of branded merch! If you remember, we're working with DJ Skate to put their stuff in-game, so we built some hats that mirror actual hats they sell.
We're also of course working on new levels now. For some reason birb is exploring an office? Oh god they found the stairs.
Oh and we were at EGX!
We were there as part of the Leftfield Collection! It was cool! The booth was apparently packed enough that some press folks went home never having gotten to play it, which is sad but also cool? Glad people liked it, anyways!
We even made some best-of lists for games at EGX! Both from NME, and Rock Paper Shotgun. Yay!
That's about it, though... there's something spoopy on the horizon. More on that, uh, next week probably.
September Update
Just gonna quickly go over the stuff we've been working on, and show you some pretty pictures. If you're a Mac gamer and care about that specifically, just scroll to the bottom.
(all the links here are video tweets and the like)
Kookaburra are now in-game to go with the Kakapo, so that's neat! Birb tried to escape (gasp). Also got Budgies in the game, and Pigeons finally.
Most of the work this month has centered around the whole VHS tape system, and getting scenes working in it. That work is largely done, though now I'm expanding it to do more. Right now I can have a basic scene that loads in some birbs and plays dialog, but I want stuff like being able to focus the camera on the speaker, or have the dialog appear in such a way as to make it easier to tell who's talking, that kinda stuff.
The other big chunk of work was birb customization. Added some glasses, got physical clothing working and made a cute scarf that blows in the breeze, and now we're trying to figure out how to make hoodies and vests work, or if they should be in the game at all. Right now we're leaning too-weird-to-use.
Mac Build Stuff
Mac OS 10.15 and beyond is doing weird stuff with Gatekeeper which may complicate running the Mac build of SkateBIRD. We're not likely to sign our build with Apple for a bunch of reasons, but as far as we can tell, you'll still be able to run things by just disabling Gatekeeper or telling it to ignore apps. We directly tested this, just a week or two ago.
We're still about a year from SkateBIRD launch, though, and the new Mac OS isn't even properly out of beta yet, so it's all up in the air how this will look even 6 months from now. We'll keep you updated with how it's all going to work, whenever Apple and Valve stabilize with how they're going to handle it.
This is a problem hitting literally everyone that does Mac app development right now, with games a tiny part of that, so it's likely a solution will present itself. It would seem strange if, for instance, a cloud build solution didn't pop up that could fully sign et al your builds. Enterprises need that just to operate, and tiny game studios could hop on their coat tails and use the same pipeline.