Flocky Birds
Type
Position
Date
Personal Project
Main Programmer & gameplay designer
February 2018
Links
C#
Artificial Intelligence
Unity 5
Game Design
Flock AI
Fast prototyping
Casual Game
Flocky Birds is a prototype of a game where the player needs to guide a flock of birds to collect objects, increase the size of the flock and avoid obstacles to prevent them from dying. To interact with the flock, the player will be constantly creating different kinds of stimuli that will make the flock react differently, like the positive (that attracts them) and negative (that repels them) ones, among others.
The game was created in 2 days when I was researching about how to implement a flock behaviour in 2D. As I found this AI algorithm really interesting and beautiful to watch, I decided to try to implement it in Unity for fun. After I had a basic version of the algorithm and I showed it to a group of friends, they really liked and told me that it was delightful for them to just see them fly and regroup. When I realized how much people liked to see the flock of birds fly, I decided to create a quick prototype of a game based on this algorithm so people could interact with the flock, to test how fun could it be & to prove if the idea has potential for a casual videogame core mechanic.
In the final version of this first prototype, the birds fly freely without being directly controlled by the player while two types of objects are constantly spawned randomly. The first type of object is an obstacle, and if a bird collides with it, it will die. The second one is an egg that, it is touched by a bird, it will spawn two more birds that will be added to the flock. By default, the birds are not attracted or repelled by any of these objects, so the players will be in charge of making the flock avoid or collect them by creating positive or negative stimulus. The flock of birds will always try to avoid the negative stimuli, whereas they will be attracted towards the positive one. Creating this stimulus allows the players to interact indirectly with the flock, and the constant spawn of objects gives them a basic objective or mission.
Once this simple prototype was finished, I ask 4 different people to test it so I could use their feedback to prove if the game concept was fun and the stimuli system was a good way of interacting with the flock. Among the positive feedback I received it was said:
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People enjoyed playing with the flocks and seeing them fly.
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People liked to try to make big flocks instead of several smaller ones, and that this also made it easier to control the birds and prevent them from dying.
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Sometimes people liked to just add a negative stimulus inside a big flock of birds to see how they reacted, even though this made some of the birds die.
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It was also said that it was pleasant to see how the flock grows as they collect eggs and have a big flock birds.
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It was also valued the reward/risk balance between having many birds and being more difficult to avoid obstacles and control them in this situation.
Among the negative feedback, it was said:
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Sometimes it was hard to maintain a flock of birds alive
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Sometimes going for a reward (egg) made them loose more birds than the ones created.
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The controls are fun but maybe an adjustment to make them more accurate would make it better.
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Even though they enjoyed playing with the flock, after a while the rewards and obstacles started getting repetitive and the lack of changes or progression made it less fun.
As the idea was to spend the least time possible creating the prototype before allowing people to test it, many features were parked for later, such as adding animations for the birds being born and dying that provide more visual rewards or sound effects to provide auditive rewards. Another feature that wasn’t implemented for the game was he addition of other types of stimuli that would increase the complexity and level of entertainment of the game, like, for example, stimulus that make birds gravitate around them or create different formations, as well as other types of obstacles, boosters or a progressive increase of the difficulty of the game to make it more interesting. Also, the feedback provided by the testers can be used to create new features for the game that make players enjoy it more.
Creating this prototype was an interesting experience where I got to learn about fast prototyping, artificial intelligence, game design and testing, so even though the game wasn't the most complex I have worked on, it was very useful to improve these skills.
