Birb Game news & patch notes

I've been away for quite a while, but now I've got a little bit of time, so I've been tweaking how the birb bot "brains" work, so they should now be able to fly better through both wide open maps and tight corridors, like the new train station map.

Hope you enjoy the new bot behaviour, let me know if you find any bugs with bots, or bugs in general.

The wait for new hardware is over! To celebrate the Steam Controller hitting the shelves today, Birb Game is 25% off.

We know you’ve been itching to try out those new trackpads and magnetic thumbsticks. Well, there’s no better way to test your "Bird-Eye Coordination" than in Birb Game.

Train station

This is a new map with fast flying and tight corridors, where you will need to put your reactions and steering skills to the test.

Map editor

I've created a separate tool on steam for creating custom maps for Birb Game and upload them to the steam workshop.

The map editor is a custom build of Godot engine.

You can use the BirbWorkshop Dock to upload the map to the workshop.

The editor template has RacePath node, that you can create the race path with and then generate the checkpoints.

There's also a ThumbnailCamera node that you can position where you would like to take the workshop thumbnail image from.

Everything you would like to be included in the level (meshes) has to be a child of TrackGeometry. Important to note is that the current conversion from the editor to Birb Game does not support scaled meshes. Every mesh will be imported at scale 1.

There's also PlayerStart node, which is the place, where the player starts (obviously).

And the last node Checkpoints does not need to be touched if you are using the RacePath which I would recommend. Otherwise it holds all the checkpoints.

Small fixes and updates

• Audio settings are now fully functional and save properly.

• You now don't loose focus when dismissing the leaderboard in the lobby with a controller.

• Made bots a bit smarter, but they are still fair

• Added "I'm not a Robot" achievement

For the last month or so I've been hard at work teaching birbs fly.

You can select if you want bots in the lobby even if you started the game in single player. The bots show up on the leaderboard as 'Government drone 1'

Even though I spent a lot of time on them, the bots are not yet perfect with flying, because I wanted for them to be fair and only have the same controls as the players do.

No one tells you how complicated it is to navigate fully in 3 dimensions and unreal isn't equipped for it. I managed to get around it, but it is possible for them to sometimes get stuck.

"High rise" is a map, where I can vouch for them getting to the finish 99% of the time and under 3 minutes. I will have to do more tuning of their digital brains to make them better.

Wing trails

I've added wing trail for birds, they can be disabled in settings and you can also change their colour from multiple options.

Small fixes:

• F12 screenshot on windows does not produce psychedelic images anymore.

Demo

I've updated the demo with the current game build, it still features the High Rise map and separate leaderboard for that one.

Small updates and patches:

• Added modal windows for quitting from main menu and pause menu

• Fixed some annoying focus issues on buttons in menus

• Added new trailer to the store page

Custom hats

You can now use a very beta and unstable feature, which is the birb hat workshop. You can create your custom hats in the Hat Editor in game (accessible in the main menu) and upload it to Steam Workshop, where other people can subscribe to the hats they might like and then wear them in the game.

For multiplayer matches, if you choose to wear workshop hats they can be automatically synchronized if other players have enabled a setting to allow these downloads.

(there's a type in the setting name)

This feature is still quite early in development even though it took a long time, so it's not yet translated and the editor is thus only available in english. If you have any problems regarding this new feature, or any other feature you can start a thread on the community page.

(Very simple hat editor)

Small patches

• Fixed tab switching in the lobby to react to both keyboard and controller

• Be your best birb self achievement should now be achievable every time you beat your personal best on any map.

I am also working on a native linux build, so you may expect that in a near future.

Flying Islands

I've added a new map, where you can fly through a lovely town on a flying island.

Map voting

You can now as a lobby host choose to either have the complete authority to choose the map, let all players vote on the map, or choose the map at random.

If you choose voting all the players will have 30 seconds to choose a map they would like to play and the map with the most votes gets selected.

New languages

• Polish

• German

• Chinese (Traditional & Simplified)

You can help with other languages here: https://crowdin.com/project/birbgame/invite?h=df279737795d293352fdf45f004b908e2464632

Small patches:

• Players now cannot move before the countdown has finished

• Leaderboard now gets shown in the lobby after a race

• Added a new achievement for beating your personal best time on any map

The radio silence is over

For the last almost a month I haven't published any update, but I have been hard at work, it might not seem like that even with this update, but I've done a lot of work, because I've rewritten almost the whole codebase to make it cleaner and easier to maintain, so right now new features and bug fixes shouldn't take as long (if I don't count university work, which might delay stuff).

You might notice

You might notice, that some stuff has changed, and thankfully some of that stuff are bugs missing (which is good). You can lookout for what I am doing at any point on my public trello board, where I update my progress as I am working on stuff.

You can also help translate Birb Game to other languages here

Rendering

I've also implemented some rendering updates deep in the engine and added a launch option on steam, so you can choose between DirectX or Vulkan as you graphics API of choice. If you experience terrible performance in game, adding -FeatureLevelES31 to launch options might help.

What's cooking

I am now working on adding more multiplayer specific features, like map voting, joining friends through steam's presence and more.

User facing error system, to let you know if and what went wrong when it inevitably happens.

I am also working on architecting a solution for a hat editor, that would open the game to the Steam Workshop with UGC.

Changes:

• Remade leaderboard from scratch (right now it's available in the menu and you can look through the times)

• The in game leaderboard on 'Tab' has been removed for now

• Fixed weird birb spacing on the powerline in lobby

• Fixed birb name tags not appearing in the lobby when returning from a race

• Fixed players not being able to join some lobbies

• Added loading screens for many things

Today I deactivated Birb game demo, because I don't think it is representative of current Birb Game. Demo will probably return later, but after I get to updating it to better represent the way Birb game's moving in. Sadly I'm not able to update both the full game and demo at the same time, because even if I try to, the day only has 24 hours.

On more positive note.

I've fixed some bugs, where the game could crash in multiplayer and after finishing a round, some players wouldn't get their deserved achievement nor would they see the winners screen.

Now I've been for some time working on few bigger update, for example update to the games rendering, so that it can run better on lower end hardware without a big hassle.

You can check out planned updates and possible bug fixes here: https://trello.com/b/8sVUFnMa/birb-game

Progress Bar:

I've added a handy Progress Bar to the top of player's screen that shows you your relative progress and also the progress of other players in multiplayer.

Player can see their progress indicated on the bar itself, but also with an animated full colour sprite. Other players' progress is indicated by black animated sprites

New Buttons:

I've made a big change to the UI by creating a new custom button system. Thanks to D1ckless Person the buttons have a nice fresh nest like style, holding onto that bird theme. Hopefully this is a beginning of a UI revolution.

Small changes and fixes:

• Singleplayer is now truly a singleplayer and you don't need internet access for it

• Visual identity revealed in the last post and available on the in development v0.8 branch is now the norm going forwards

• Added sound effects for flapping your wings

• Added force feedback and option to turn it off in settings

• Added music to the bird song in the main menu

• Fixed leader board not appearing in single player

Last few days I've been working on a new visual identity for this game to not be so bland. It's not yet in its final form, but you can try it out on branch v0.8 and let me know what you think. Here's a little comparison:

Also last week, I together with few of my friends took part in the GMTK game jam. We tried our luck again with Godot engine (we used it for the first time in a previous smaller game jam almost a year ago). Our final game wasn't much, but we might continue its development, you can check it out here if you're interested: https://gregstr.itch.io/coup-detat

• Multiplayer achievement Best birb far and wide should now be achievable.
• Fixed model graphical issues in Factory map (inverted meshes, sadly not big performance upgrade yet).

You can now race in a new Factory map that is not available in the demo

Full release has it's own scoreboards, so if you played the demo, your time is not carried over to the full game

Remember that this is just an early access release and a lot of stuff is going to change and be added. My plans are big, but I am just a single person developing in my free time, so it will take some time.

Hope you can enjoy this release and set some nice times in the new map.

If you come across any bugs or problems, let me know on the Steam Community or on Bluesky.

Thank you all for supporting this endeavour.

Last time I mentioned my fight with localization, I've now won and here are the fruits of my labor. I am ready for translations, right now I've translated everything to Czech, but that's about it with my abilities. You can help with translations and add languages you would be able to translate to

You can change the language in the Game settings

Help translate: https://crowdin.com/project/birbgame/invite?h=a831b28a87a320bc632fd664b0c1c9b82464660

I will be eternally grateful and you will be mentioned in the game's credits. Also I will try to make your translations process as smooth as possible, but there might be some bumps on the road there.

Small fixes:

• added time submission even in multiplayer matches

• Changed leader board dismissal to require a specific button press for controller and keyboard instead of any input (when using a mouse, you can click anywhere other than the leaderboard to dismiss it)

Bigger things I've been working on:

For quite some time now I've been building a new map for the birds to fly through, with more intricate maneuvers and more detailed environment. The progress has been quite slow lately, but now that I've graduated high school the progress might get quicker, there is a still a lot of optimizations to do to ensure the best performance, but here's a little sneak peek.

I've also been chipping away on localizing the whole game, which I thought couldn't be too hard, because the game doesn't have much text, but I've been successfully fighting with all the localization tools to possibly make the translation efforts more community driven, because the most I can offer for languages other than English and Czech is machine translation right now.

Controller support

Minor updates

The Birb Game demo has just been released