SkateBIRD is an upcoming skating game that stars birds. It's rare that a video game's name is so descriptive of its content, but that's SkateBIRD in a nutshell. SkateBIRD involves birds skating in mini-sized arenas, with the player able to choose from a number of different bird types and clothing for their pint-sized avatar. The game also features a story mode, where a bird's owner stops skateboarding, so the bird decides to take up the sport, in order to inspire its owner to pick up the board once more.
The skating game genre has been dominated by the same names for decades now, but a new challenger has entered the park. SkateBIRD creator Megan Fox recently spoke to Screen Rant about the upcoming avian skating game, where she discussed its inspirations, why it won't be sold on GoG, and how its low-fi/bird noise soundtrack came to be.
The first question is: Why SkateBIRD? What gave you guys the idea to combine birds with skateboarding?
Megan Fox: Just a GIF. At the time, I liked birds and was figuring out the next thing I was going to work on. Partner said, "Hey, look at this!" And they had a GIF of an actual living skateboarding bird on their screen. That was a light bulb moment, and that's why I did it.
I'm guessing you were a fan of other skateboarding games in the past?
Megan Fox: Oh, yeah. I played essentially every Tony Hawk game, every EA Skate game.
How do you feel SkateBIRD differs from the other skateboarding games in the marketplace, in terms of gameplay? Because the Tony Hawk games have made a comeback and a new Skate game was announced for development.
Megan Fox: The main difference is we're in the middle between the two. Tony Hawk games use - I don't know if I would call it accessible, but - a relatively straightforward control scheme; press button, do thing. But they pile that on top of essentially arcade degrees of precision and control.
Skate games' control is weird. I like it, but it's really hard to explain to a new player. "Jiggle the stick in this way, so you get an ollie with a kickflip," etc. We're trying to shoot between those. Where EA Skate is better is that once you get past the control scheme, things generally happen in a controllable way. Once you figure out grinding, it's not too hard to grind. Once you figure out ollies and combos, all that's basically doable. Whereas on Tony Hawk, you need to line up button controls or you bail instantly and you fail.
We're kind of in the middle between the two, where our control scheme is surfaced very clearly akin to Tony Hawk. You have an ollie button and grind button etc., and things do what you expect. But we're not expecting you to do arcade precision levels of control. The control scheme and game physics are more akin to EA Skate, so that they're more forgiving and more dynamic. Cool things fall out automatically based on whatever you're doing, instead of miss one button press and you bail instantly.
Which I think tends to make us more approachable than either [of the others]. I suspect we're going to be a lot of people's first skate game.
One aspect of SkateBIRD I really loved is the smaller stages. It reminds me of the old Micro Machines games. Was that an inspiration for SkateBIRD, and how did you go about designing micro-sized stages for birds rather than the regular-sized stages in regular skateboarding games?
Megan Fox: Micro Machines specifically wasn't, but I have played a ton of that kind of game. My go-to is usually more the Counter-Strike rat maps where you're running around a kitchen countertop or something. That kind of experience, I really do like that.
As far as how to design it? Yeah, that's weird. Because - not so much the current level one or the current rooftop, but - our first dev map, I actually spaced the size of the table based on travel time to be equivalent to Tony Hawk 1: Warehouse. Basically end-to-end, it was the same transit time.
What you essentially do is space the space like an actual skatepark, appropriate to whatever gameplay physics you're using. And then you work backwards from there to figure out, "Okay, the bird's about this big," and you use a really consistent scale. So you know that if your skateboard is this big, then the table has to be this big and the bed has to be this big.
That basically gets you there, but for the longest time... This was visible in the first Kickstarter demo: there was this huge wooden table. If you actually stood back and looked at it, that table made no sense, because it was just massive. No one's gonna have a 70-foot table. It was huge. But then you just work back from there to, "Okay, well, maybe they've got two ping pong tables shoved together." And while that doesn't make a ton of sense, you can see a college dorm young adults sort of thing. You just have to get it close enough. It doesn't have to be perfect, but close enough to pass the smell test.
The demo we played featured birds like crows and seagulls. Were there any birds you wanted to include in the game but couldn't due to the time constraints like a Shoebill or a Kookaburra?
Megan Fox: Kookaburras are in, thankfully. But in terms of birds I wanted in but couldn't get in, most of them were the weirder birds like the [Pukeko]. I believe it's an Australian or New Zealand bird that's essentially a Roadrunner. There's a lot of weirder bird shapes out there.
Penguins were another big one. We had a ton of requests for penguins, but their body shape is distinct from all other birds, so it's not like we could just take one of our existing birds and paint it like a penguin. It's a unique model. There was a lot of stuff like that.
The way we chose what birds to do was through Patreon polls. I had a big list of all the birds that could be cool, and I tend to add to it whenever I see something that looks fun. Then I'd run a poll by our patrons for what to make next, and they tended to go for the really colorful birds. If I would put up a Pineapple Conure and a Blackbird, they would always pick the Pineapple Conure. They would always pick the most colorful parrots, which meant that we had a ton of colorful parrots, but we didn't have a magpie.
I grew up with magpies; they're awesome. But they'd never vote for a magpie, so I'm probably going to add a magpie after launch just because I really want them in the game. But we tended to overcorrect towards the colorful birds because that's what people on Patreon found the coolest.
How many levels and playable character options are you aiming for in the final version of the game?
Megan Fox: The final version has five levels. Gameplay goes around eight hours if you go for everything. All of our plays consistently seemed to be about an hour per level just to get through it, and that's with people that actually know what they're doing. And then if you're going back to find all the secrets, that's gonna take a while. If you really want to dig into it, there's a dev room in the game. Technically there's six levels, but good luck finding the sixth one.
It's actually really cool, too. I genuinely hope someone finds it. It's is actually in the demo; we put it in the demo with the same access to get to it, because I really want to see if anyone can find it or if I need to make it more obvious. We'll find out.
Has anyone found it in the demo that you've seen?
Megan Fox: They have not. It's not live yet, but specifically one of our testers is really into it. I said, "Okay, it's in there! Go find it." He couldn't find it. We'll see. I'm not gonna make it too easy, because I really think good dev rooms should be found naturally. They're not fun if you put a big glowing arrow on it and say, "Look here at the secret!" It has to evolve naturally. If people don't find it in the demo, that's fine. It'll still be in the launch, and then maybe someone will find it a couple of years. If it gets to a year or two and no one's found it, I will leak some hints. But we're not there yet.
Yeah, about five or technically six levels, depending on how you count it. Eight hours, probably. And then post-launch, we'll be adding more content. Part of the Kickstarter had some stretch goals. A lot of these we weren't getting in pre-launch because we don't want to grow scope and make this game takes 10 years to make. There was an outdoor level. Technically, the rooftop counts as an outdoor level - but I was really thinking more of a park, because of skate parks, etc.
There's also a skate heaven level, which will be distinct and cool. And if you've played Tony Hawk games, you probably know what that's going to be. I think those were the only two promised levels, but then there's also a couple of others that I really want to do.
In the game, we hint at a character named Anthony Hawk. You don't actually meet Anthony Hawk; he's like the skate legend. But you do meet Seagull, which is the friend to Anthony Hawk. And I really would like to do a standalone level where you actually go and meet the legend. and do fun things with the legend, and that whole progress.
And a lot of this depends on how well the game does. If we somehow release SkateBIRD and it totally craters and we make no money? Probably not. But in the event things go well, as they're kind of looking like they will, we'll be working on this for a while.
I appreciate the dev room. You don't really see that many games anymore, but Japanese games especially used to love doing that.
Megan Fox: Oh, yeah. They were my favorite thing growing up. And no one does them anymore, because it's mostly QA and cert difficulties. Getting it so that QA could test it and make sure that it was consistent with everything else and we didn't crash the game, and making sure Cert can see it so that they can verify that it works, adds a whole layer of complexity.
At our level, Easter eggs like that are fun, so it kind of makes sense. But you go any bigger, or on any bigger budget games, you're talking about putting pieces of content in your game that almost no one's ever gonna be able to find that could totally blow your schedule by a month. Because Cert goes in and realizes that there's a crash error or something, and it's one obscure corner.
But when you're talking about a game where there's 100 people - or more than 1000 people - a month, it's like, "Holy s**t, is it really worth that amount?" It kind of fell out of fashion, but I think they're cool.
Are there any plans for local or online multiplayer in the future? I know SkateBird's currently built as a single-player experience.
Megan Fox: It's something I'm curious about, but it's going to be very much later post-launch. It's going to be one of the harder things to pull off.
Definitely not online, just because I don't think the code I wrote is going to be compatible for that. Local, maybe. And then once you've got local online, there's Steam Play Together, and there might even be console approaches by that point. Basically, any of those local co-ops turned into online co-ops - we might experiment with that, just to see what happens. Because it might be fun.
The game is designed to be accessible, and part of accessibility is that you have to build around the idea that you won't die due to a little bit of input lag. Because the lag could be in the hardware or it could be in your hand, it's hard to say regardless. But because of that, I've made a game that likely is pretty tolerant of input lag. I suspect you could stream your screen to someone else and back again, and you'd have a couple of milliseconds of lag, but it'd probably still play perfectly fine. And it'd still be fun to play with a friend. So, I'm hoping that will end up giving people some kind of online, but we'll see. I don't know.
Regardless, that'll have to be the last content we attempt to add. I'm more interested in doing create-a-park; I think that will fill content gaps. We're going to add all of these levels post-launch, of course, if we can. But we're never going to keep up with people, they're going to get through those in an hour after we launch, and there went three months of work. So, create-a-park is probably the higher priority.
And again, same box co-op doesn't make a ton of sense without it, because that's usually what you do. You'd make a park and say, "Hey, play this with me." And then once you've got those two things, then maybe having an online link suddenly makes sense, because then all those gel together. So we'll do that, and then see where we can go from there.
Is SkateBIRD coming to [GOG] Good Old Games? I know you made a statement about that last year.
Megan Fox: Yeah, we're not doing Good Old Games. My issue was not that they denied sale - every store is able to do whatever they want; sure, whatever, fine. It was that they extended the offer and then immediately retracted it and completely undercut the developer. Come on. Be a forthright, upfront store if you're going to work with someone.
That wasn't the only thing they've done. They've got a relatively long history of community managers who tend to be edge lords, and then they get fired or moved somewhere else. But then they get another one who does the same thing, and there's a pattern here. So, I would rather work not with them as a partner.
On the other hand, Itch.io has been pretty consistently great.
Are there plans to bring SkateBIRD to PlayStation systems or streaming gaming services in the future?
Megan Fox: We're already on Amazon, Luna, so yes to streaming currently. Or we will be on Amazon Luna at launch. As far as PlayStation? Unknown. We needed to cut down what we were supporting at launch, because we are small and we were already straining at the seams to get what we got done in time. It's not currently on the table - it could happen, but right now we have no idea.
We try not to have too many plans or thoughts until we've made launch, and then we'll see how it goes.
You mentioned post-launch content. Do you have any sort of road map in mind? You said it depends on the game sales, but is there any schedule in your mind of what you'd like to do and in what order?
Megan Fox: Not especially. Mostly, we'll be looking at the Kickstarter stretch goals. Those are the highest priorities, since those are the things we said we're going to do.
As far as which of those we do: first, there's a photo mode in there, which we did promise. That will probably come towards the end, because to do a photo mode properly requires a rewind capability, and a rewind capability requires some concept of tracking players over time and storing values. There's a whole chain of events that gets you to a good photo mode. We can cheap out on it and make it really basic, like snap a picture and then apply tint, but we're trying for "make a cute little skate video" if we can. So, that's going to be later.
The petting of the bird will probably be relatively early. Pet the bird was another stretch goal. That's going to be relatively early, because we're likely going to stack post-launch features on top of that. Once we have petting the bird, we can make "petting the bird" do things in gameplay terms, and make it relevant to play. That makes sense to do early on.
"Bread slices of life" became a story mode, so that's in the game. I think the rest were levels, like the dev room level and then the outside level. I'm probably forgetting a stretch goal, but then the levels will probably happen between those two. Once we ship the game, we will essentially start working on a content update that has, I would guess, a level in it. Because if we're going to do a big content update, it makes sense to package it as much as possible. Since we're doing so many consoles, trying to dribble things out in small updates would be a nightmare. So, it really makes sense to do them in big, scheduled updates.
But, yeah, they'll probably be a level and petting the bird would be our first priorities. And as far as which level we did, I would guess it's Skate Heaven. We can make whatever we want there. It doesn't have to interact with anything. It doesn't have to make sense in the plot, so it makes sense as a starting point.
No plans for paid DLC? You're just going to focus on free content for the time being.
Megan Fox: Yeah, I don't think we can. Nothing about the engine was built to do paid DLC. If I ever find a way to do it, maybe. But in this case, I would prefer to do it as content updates. That doesn't mean we won't ever do a paid update, but even if we did it would probably be paired with free content plus paid content. Because I really don't like splintering player bases if I can avoid it.
Soundtracks are a major part of the skating genre, and SkateBIRD has one that was made specifically to the game. How'd that come together? Because from the songs I've listened to, it's got some great lo-fi stuff with bird sounds mixed in.
Megan Fox: Yeah, lo-fi bird hop to skateboard to. That was in from the very beginning, because we knew that music was core to skate genre but did not initially have the money to license or anything. We still don't have the money to license anything. So, we needed something as far as the soundtrack went that would do justice to the skate genre. Music is critical to skate games.
Initially, you might assume that we would go for a punk sound because punk was what was core to Tony Hawk games. But we went with a hip hop sound more, because the only reason punk was core to Tony Hawk was because Tony Hawk came out in the late 90s, when punk was the sound of skateboarding. That was culturally tied.
If you look at skateboarding videos, especially skateboarding videos put out by kids now, the music they seem to gravitate towards is either directly inspired by Tony Hawk games - because that's still a cultural force - or it tends to be [what I call] SoundCloud rap. It's the modern streaming hip hop genre thing. It was born online, and it tends to not be used by large labels. Often it involves a lot of sampling. I've heard it called SoundCloud rap, and I have no idea what it's called now. But that sound, that's what you tend to hear.
We went with that, and then we worked in bird sounds because if we're doing sampling, then bird sounds tend to be a cute thing that we can work in. It thematically binds it together.
And then the third party music came about because either Illicit Nature or We Are the Union
initially approached us. It was one of the two. And then whoever approached us initially then went down and said, "Hey, this other person says they want to do it too." Somehow, we ended up with Illicit Nature, We Are The Union, and Grave Danger all coming to us and saying, "Look, we know you can't pay much. It's cool, we still want to do this." We worked something out, and now we have like 67 licensed tracks. We have more than most of the early Tony Hawk games. So, yeah, that was a thing.
SkateBIRD was pushed back from 2020 to 2021, so it's quite significant delay. But how has the game grown or changed since you guys first announced it?
Megan Fox: Whenever we announced it back in early 2018, it was meant to be just a simple little sandbox game. We didn't announce it with these graphics, but the original graphics were super lo-fi. There's a Tony Hawk-inspired game about unicycling, [Street Uni X], which uses extremely lo-fi graphics. Those kinds of graphics were the original idea. Then we put it together and realized we could do this large, flat picture style. It's essentially the artistic style that was employed in early aughts PC games - Max Payne being an obvious go-to example - where they had relatively few polygons, but really high-res textures stretched over those polygons. You've got a mix of high detail and low detail.
That's the style we ended up going with for the announcement, and the announcement went a lot better than we thought. And apparently, the style we went with gave it this higher polish look than we maybe thought it was gonna be. We didn't really know how people were going to take it, but they liked it.
And then from there, we went to the Kickstarter in 2019 and the E3 bonanza. We sort of won E3 even though we never attended E3 and we weren't technically in the E3 showcase. Kinda Funny Games was a stream showcase that had nothing technically to do with E3, so it was like setting up in a pop-up tent in E3's parking lot virtually. And somehow we got noticed by everyone, so that worked really well.
From then on, we really changed our trajectory. Since at that point, we had all of the stretch goals and everything else, and people clearly were interested in the plot content. At that point, we started looking into bread slices of life, which was the plot Kickstarter stretch goal thing. And what we quickly realized was that we pitched, which was these little side tapes that you would find and then watch, were way harder to make than we thought. It turned out it was actually just as easy to make in-game cutscenes. And then once we made the switch to in-game cutscenes, it was like, "We can just make the full story mode." We did, and that's really what took the extra time.
That last year was essentially making up the story mode. Whenever we announced the delay, we had essentially one level. We had just put it together, and it was like, "Oh, okay. This is gonna take longer," and so it took longer. But we have a lot more to show for it.
SkateBIRD will be released for Amazon Luma, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Xbox One on August 12, 2021.
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/3id9lCD
0 Comments