Birding: Dragon Valley Kiting

This project was developed by myself and twelve talented individuals, whom I had never met before, hailing from many parts of the world, teaming up for three days to work on this game jam. Our team consisted of 6 programmers, 3 artists, and 4 composers. We started our development by using Miro to create our mood boards, and color scheme, and collaborate on what kind of game we wanted to make. The game was made using Unreal Engine 5.

As we began development, we ran into communication issues, scheduling mishaps, and workload imbalances due to many of our teammates living in various parts of the EU and some living in the US. As a result of this, I decided to take on the role of a producer, scheduling the meetings and dividing workloads giving the team a set of goals/deadlines for items that other members of the team needed to progress their work.

When conceptualizing the idea for this game, I wanted to create a game that stood out compared to what I expected a traditional fishing game would be while also keeping the idea within a small scope due to the three-day time constraint and our limited knowledge of programming. I wanted to do a witty take on the idea while not presenting a challenge that would be too great for myself and the other programmers. At the time of the game jam, I had spent many months practicing programming within Unreal Engine so I had familiarity with the engine, but this would be the first time I tried pushing my skills beyond the classroom.

My concept was born from a question: “What would be the opposite of fishing but still be considered fishing?”

That question then transformed into the replacement of a fishing rod for a kite with a net and instead of fish, there are birds!

The artists took on the challenge of this idea to do a mixture of both allowing us to have our “birds” while still communicating to the player that we are fishing and collecting them.

For our map design we were inspired by games like Dave The Diver, so we decided to do something similar with one consistent level that had changing designs and audio as the player progressed higher into the sky. On the ground level, the player would see a small village where the dragons live. As you got higher into the sky the skybox art would change relative to where the player was and different musical compositions would play as you reached those new heights. I created collision boxes that determined what track to play at each respective elevation level, as well as wrote logic to detect where the player was which would stop and start each track depending on where the player was at any given time.