Owl Country is a short game I worked on in collaboration with several TIGSource regulars. We hatched the idea for the project during GDC, wrote the bulk of it while we were there, and added the finishing touches in the weeks afterward.

The premise is that you are an owl tired of the sea of pigeons plaguing the Montreal skies, along with the humans indifferent to their infestation. It takes place over the course of one night, ending in sunrise, and you must swoop as many pigeons as you can in this period.

How To Play?

Spacebar Swoops. Steer your swoop with the left and right keys. Don’t hit lamps. You get more points for successive pigeons attacked in the same swoop and extra lives for knocking pigeons into humans.

How Did We Do It?

Aquaria‘s Alec Holowka wrote the music. Adam Saltman, myself, Kevin Coulton, and Ivan Safrin did the art. Voice talent includes Goo developer Tommy Refenes, Fez superhero Phil Fish, and Raptor Safari troubadour Steve Swink, among others.

The game is written in straight C by Ivan, myself, and Alec, using OpenGL, SDL, FreeType for text, fmod for sound, and libpng for texture loading. Interestingly, the entire game was written on a sum total of five different MacBook Pros, and then the finished version was quickly ported to Windows.

Why An Owl?

After Gamma 256 ended this past November, a group of us were standing around outside Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology chatting. Suddenly we heard a commotion above our heads and a pigeon dropped to the street beside us, freaked out for a second, and flew off. An owl had swooped in for an attack, failed, and had flown back several yards to perch in a tree.

And as we were all still processing this, pigeon feathers slowly floated down around us — eventually inspiring Owl Country.

Notes

It was a blast to work on a project with so many people I respect, and hopefully it will lead to other cool collaborative efforts in the future.

Read more on the Owl Counry TIGSource Forum Thread.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 3:42 am and is filed under Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.