Devlog
Newest first. Also posted on X.
Parcels, hats and pats
Looked at the “bottom-of-the-screen” idle games on Steam. They all let the game run itself, but give you one small thing to do every time you glance over. So: birds now fly home with parcels you can unwrap — hats for them, trinkets for the nest — and you can finally give them a pat. Come back after a while and a little note tells you what you missed.
Bird fights
Birds from different players can now fight: three against three, a tiny pixel battle with health bars, crits and dodges. Win and you bring worms home; lose one and you can watch the replay and hit back. Before shipping, a simulated crowd of a few hundred players fought each other for a month, to make sure the strong can’t just farm the weak.
No more “warming”
The old rule stacked three ideas — temperature, cooling off, a daily warming allowance — and even the designer couldn’t follow it. Now it’s one sentence: eggs keep hatching, and hatch faster while you’re at your computer.
A new look
Tried stickers, tried a green LCD screen — both too loud. Settled on one rule: the scene is the only star, everything else is quiet paper. The sky now changes with the time of day, with a little pixel sunrise during early-bird hours.
24 birds
The birdbook grew to 24 species — kingfisher, flamingo, toucan, snowy owl, swan, ostrich, and a phoenix that only ever hatches as a legend. Every species also comes in pale and dark plumage. The hard part was making legends feel rare and strong without letting one lucky bird break the game; that rule now lives in the simulator, which complains loudly whenever it’s crossed.
Font day
Switched the whole interface to a pixel font — open-source Fusion Pixel for text in all three languages, Silkscreen for the big numbers. The catch: pixel fonts are only crisp at exact sizes, and bold turns them to mush. So the whole layout got redone, with hierarchy coming from color and size instead of weight.
Visitors
Birds now drop by and perch on a twig. Feed one a few times and it leaves you an egg — magpies and pigeons only ever arrive this way. And the whole game now speaks English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
From one bird to a flock
The first version was, honestly, a bit boring: one egg, one hatch, then not much. So the game changed shape — now you hatch a whole flock and fill a birdbook. Birds are assembled from parts (body, crest, eyes, beak, colors), and each keeps its own hours: the owl dozes on the branch all afternoon. The screen also went from wall-to-wall neon to a soft sky with white pixel clouds.
An egg in the side panel
The first prototype runs: an egg lives in the browser’s side panel, and just using the computer keeps it warm. The cracks spread, one line at a time, until an eye peeks out and stares at you. Tap it five times and it hatches. Everything is drawn in code for now.