Jacob "SaltedSquid" Howe
Technical Game Designer
Bird House
Project Status Finished
Platform: Android
Project Duration: ~1 Year
Tech: Unity, C#
Primary Role(s) Lead Programmer/Designer
Link: Google Playstore
Source Code: Github
Bird House is an idle sim where the player takes the role of apartment manager for humanoid bird characters each with different personalities and requests for the player to complete.
Overtime the player can unlock new tenants to add to their ever growing apartment complex. Along the way they collect more money, buy contracts for gathering materials for requests, and gain reputation and favor with the tenants.
Design
A lot of the concepts for Bird House centered around the idea of simple and relaxed. It was an Idle Sim designed to let children interact with colorful and energized humanoid birds of various personalities. To do this, all the mechanics were keep simple.
Player's didn't need to really keep track or manage much to progress. Things would just fall into place as they continued to collect resources, bought gifts for the birds, and completed quests that simply required a certain amount of items.
By definition it was a game that played itself. Player's only needed to spend a little bit of time here and there to refresh timers, collect resources, and start new quests as they continued to progress and unlock new bird tenants and increased their Reputation. A simple game that works well as a filler for people with a little bit of down time.
Inventory
The inventory system was designed to work like one found in an RPG styled game. The items were derived from a base structure that could be added and removed from the inventory if the player didn't have stock of that item. This allowed for spontaneous changes from the inventory screen and item placement to be changed as the inventory updated.
This functioned the same for both raw resources the player collects as well as the gifts purchased. If we decided to add or remove items and gifts from the game, it wouldn't affect the system, which was the aim. It was designed to be flexible with the item structure. Since all the resources/gifts were identical in function and no real use on their own aside from "use" for events, there was no need to define override functions but would be useful for other systems like for RPG games where consumable items have many different effects.
Systems could also request inventory numbers based on IDs or on names if either were required. If the inventory was much larger, this could be expanded upon and indexed if needed.
UI
The UI was fairly simple as it only updated with information as needed. I created a system to allow players to quickly swap from one menu to another. None of the menu options would lock players into anything. Right before a purchase with the confirmation buttons up, players can swap to another menu still. This includes everything outside of the tutorial and the finale of the game.
Ease of access is crucial in a game like this since it is primarily designed around menus. This was also why we limited the amount of menus. We tried to keep everything in central locations. All gifts can be bought on one screen. Player's can collect resources from all tenants at once. All raw resources are displayed on one menu and etc.
On a technical standpoint it was all about managing states. Each menu was more or less treated as its own state thus when swapping, would make sure no other "state" was active and would shut them down if they were and would reset upon activation.
Quests/Dialogue
Quests had to keep track of any active ones as they were all timed and players could only be working on one at a time. They would talk with a tenant, turn in some raw resources, and would need to wait X amount of time until the quest finished before turning it in. There was a static tracker in the tenant scripts that would allow each of them to keep track if another quest was active so that they couldn't double down on quests. Time also was tracked when they were offline just by keeping a time stamp on saves.
For dialogue, I essentially created typical dialogue system in many RPG games or visual novels. It would read the text from file, and play SFXs of the birds as the text rolled out. Player's could let the text roll manually or tap to fill out the text box. They would also need to tap to get to the next box.
Other
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Contract System
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Gift shop
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Reputation System
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Favor System