Pigeon Patrol.

I know it's been a while since I last made a post, frankly I didn't think I had much in the way of content for one of these. I'm hoping to change that in a big way. Starting with this...

I am making a new game. I suppose you want to know what it's about. It would be silly of me to make a claim like that and not say anything. I guess that means I've got a fair bit of writing to do now, huh?

Inspiration

The idea technically came from looking at my peers. I was struggling with the idea of making a new project as I had a lot of self-doubt, brought on by my endless job applications being slapped down by the word "unfortunately" in every reply I received (Isn't it funny how AI can be used to throw out a Resume and Portfolio, but they can't be used to tell you briefly what to improve on? Sorry, rant over). I attended the Game Dev Local Expo as a volunteer in order to spend more time with indie devs and have half a chance of being a face they'd come to recognise. At the very least, some saw me as a bright purple high vis jacket that could answer questions. Others were happy to spend time talking about development stages and struggles they had while making the game they were showcasing. Spending this time talking to devs, I realised that most weren't looking to make a fantastical, polished game with all the bells and whistles. The advice I got was to keep it small and keep it simple. Stick with one or two mechanics and see what you can do.

This didn't mean they sacrificed making a game about a topic that interested or was personal to them. Instead, they'd lean into that as a narrative for the game. I left the event thinking about what I find important and the impression I want to leave behind in a game for my players to find. It look me virtually no time at all to think of my dog. One thing that she does which makes me smile, is she scrambles around the garden like a mad thing chasing any pigeons or squirrels that enter the back garden. It's gotten to a point where we can't even say the word pigeon without it sending her flying to the back door, yapping away at whatever happens to be out there. I should note that she isn't a vicious dog, frankly if she ever managed to catch or corner a pigeon, she wouldn't know what to do with one.

From that, I wanted to make a game about a dog that runs around and chases pigeons. I figured that this project would be easy enough to keep small and simple. I just have to stop myself from going over the top. If done right, I felt that this project can be a sort of minigame.

Developing

As I do with any project, I sat down and wrote a bunch of words to do with birds, dogs and game mechanics. I actually spent a lot of time working out the kind of environment I wanted to build for this game. Did I want a dog park, a forest, a beach, hell maybe even a town or city environment (which was something I'd touched on before in another project). Looking at keeping it small, I settled on a garden setting.

So at this point, I had a sandbox game about chasing pigeons in a garden environment. Piecing together how this garden would look. Patio, garden shed, potted plants, table, parasol, Barbecue. The visuals were coming together, but I actually didn't know how I was going to make this a game with any form of challenge. I mean we're talking about a dog that runs rampant after birds, but I had to find a way of getting people, getting players to run around. This pretty much brings us to today in terms of making the game. I have been working with a set number of 10 pigeons in the garden that spawn at random. The current play is that players need to chase off all 10 pigeons in the fastest time possible. I'm working on a leader board that will show the fastest time for rounding up the pigeons. There's currently a boost function with a cooldown of 15 seconds, which means that players will have to decide when or how to use it. I might change timings or even cap it to a number of boosts per play. Another challenge I want to look at is the use of breakables. I want there to be time penalties if the pigeons or the player knocks over plant pots or garden furniture. Meaning that while boosts gets a faster time, it would mean risking penalties.

Current challenge

I'm working in UE5 and don't have any fancy visuals to show you yet. The moment I start making props and animations you will be the first to know about it. As I sort of noted above, I have a working counter for pigeons. Though it needs some TLC in the way of replacing the word "pigeons" with a picture of one. I plan on making that change once I have a character model to use.

Other than that, I am working on game mechanics before visuals so I have a solid game that can be enhanced by the way it looks. Mind you, I'm the only one working on it... So we'll sit tight and see how it goes. The mechanic I'm working on is a timer, not like a countdown so much as a "how long does it take to finish the level?" type of thing. The timer currently works to show how long you are taking while playing the game, but doesn't want to show a fixed time for how long it took. Yeah, so that's what's giving me a headache at the moment. I did find one thing out about my game that's confusing me.

Okay, I've written the enemies to roam freely. For which I mean they pick a direction, head in that direction then stop for a couple of seconds and the process begins again. This process gets interrupted when the pigeon detects the player, it'll then run away from the player and settle back into it's routine (I felt this was pretty accurate for a pigeon). Only problem is, if you leave the game running idle long enough, you'll complete the game. Somehow, the pigeons hit a point where they bump into the dog and de-spawn as intended (if you're playing the game properly that is). So the question I want to leave you with is this:

Should I leave this in and create an AFK achievement around taking over an hour to complete a game that currently takes 30 seconds to finish?