Update 0: Groundwork and base asset building

Alright, I was in a jamming mood this weekend and found that this jam met my criteria:

• The jam had just begun -- I wanted to start working on something immediately, not wait a few days.
• Birbs!
• 2 weeks - I usually prefer planning out jam projects that wouldn't be possible to reasonably complete in a weekend. Also, having a couple of weekends in the jam schedule is important; I can't usually squeeze out a large volume of work during week nights after the day job.
• Did I mention Birbs? How does one NOT participate in a jam about Birbs?

The themes sparked interest in a few different genres for me. I immediately thought about building out a sort of side-scrolling platformer with Flappy Bird altitude controls. The mechanics would go something like: You need to fly up into the trees and chirp in order to find a mate, periodically returning to the deciduous forest floor in order to find food and manage stamina.

However, I wasn't really jiving with the idea of building a stressful mechanics-heavy game for this. The idea of gliding through a forest and casually swaying around in a more relaxing setting started to take over, and after fleshing out a few more genre maps I finally ended up choosing this one:

It's a game where you hatch and leave your nest in the morning, glide through a guided forest obstacle course with Star Fox 64-like rail shooter controls, and arrive at a new nest just as night falls, welcomed by the occupants of the new nest. The night completes and the game repeats.

From here, I started to gather reference material for the aesthetic. I haven't really done much of that hipster flatshading/small color pallet/cell shading style. It's kind of polarizing, kind of like it's the 3D version of pixel art. But I think it has a strong association with casual/relaxing games, and so it seems like a clear fit.

Below is a screenshot of some of the reference material that I quickly gathered to help inspire asset ideas (mostly sourced from Google images and Pinterest) for the look/feel. There's a few low-poly Birbs in different poses and wing anatomy references too, of course!

For the music, I liked the idea of having the melody sound kind of like a bird chirping. I got a bit sucked in and lightly mixed down about a minute worth of music.

There's ~30 more bars of very unfinished music off screen, but I might end up just cutting it and using this short loop in the interest of time. It feels like this loop could stand on its own with a little more polish and variation.

From here, I moved on to modeling the Birbs -- essential! Below is a clip of the initial modeled, rigged, and animated untextured Birb protagonist. Keeping the wings very low poly was a little bit tricky. After some mesh surgery and a couple of failed attempts at compressing the wing with 2-3 bones, I ended up with 4 carefully weighted bones branching out from the inner wing to make the wing look OK when both resting and flying.

More (hopefully) soon!