Blackbird by Rongo Matane
Blackbird, your younglings finally hatched. Keep them alive and see them fly or die trying.
We hope you have fun!

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Please let us know what you think.
| Youtube | https://bippinbits.itch.io/blackbird |
| Youtube | https://bippinbits.itch.io/blackbird |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/blackbird-lives-matter |
Ratings
| Overall | 61th | 4.202⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 105th | 4.071⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 169th | 3.952⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 36th | 4.393⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 159th | 4.43⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 73th | 4.28⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
Hats off!
Try our game, we also made a sidescroller bird thing!
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/eat-preys-love
@bbkate98 Hehe, happened to me once too, surprised to come back to a "dead nest". I wanted to include a "free fly" mode with no hatchling pressure, but time was up, you know how it goes ;)
@stuembi Actually we hope she'll help us with it down the road. We are not clear yet if she leans towards programming or art though :D
@macdoom This is a great idea to be able to pick worms in flight. High risk, high reward as on option to the more conventional method. Thank you for the idea, i'll probably put that in after the jam :)
@glowt Thank you! Regarding landing, i was thinking about this a lot. I have a check, that if your landing angle is too steep, you'll crash instead of land. But i wondered if this was a good idea, as it might not be clear to the player when it's safe to land. Was this an issue, that you went down very steeply, or was it something else? Did you notice you kind of have to hold down brake to land, so that you have the appripriate speed?
@dankar Thank you :) Just to be sure, did you notice that you have to catch insects and feed them to your hatchlings in your nest?
@a-312 Did gamepad work for you? I did nothing towards gamepad, but it might work out of the box due to Godot's input map (probably only dpad, if so). I though about gamepads too, and different control schemes that would be possible with a stick (stick for direction, shoulder pads to brake or speed up). Would be interesting in any case :)
love the swishing sound when you goes faster and the fact that you flip automatically when you do a loop.
great feeling when you land and I also appreciate that you only tumble when you hit the ground instead of dying \( ̄︶ ̄*\))
If you want to know the timestamp of when your game was played you can see it in this spreadsheet:
https://tinyurl.com/yau8hjzn
And then look in my latest videos and find your game being play (after the current stream ends)
https://www.twitch.tv/ursagames/videos
So much polish to everything .
Great job!
Really great work!
I had fun playing it, a calm experience, great job !
It shows that as long as you have a strong theme, even the most simplistic game mechanics can turn into a good game with enough polish.
I loved the bird graphics and animations (the crashing one was painful to look at) Flight controls felt super tight once I got used to controlling the speed, which was not the case on my first run :sweat_smile: After that they just "clicked" and it became immensely rewarding to just speed up and turn. Landing still took a bit more work :smile:
Btw, that first playthrough ended abruptly on a black screen and I had to reload. I was still hearing sound, so I'm not sure if there was any kind of error or if I just hit a defeat condition. Luckily, it only happened once.
On my second run I did reach the end, which was kind of sad. However, I got a contradictory message between what I was seeing on the scene and the text that confused me a bit.
Despite those relatively minor things I really enjoyed this game. Congrats!
@ithildin Thank you especially for the details! Did you play web or desktop? There seems to be a tough bug left i need to check on. Regarding the end - i fear i made it a tad misleading. When your chicks are too small (aka no feathers), they start from the nest, fly a little but don't really take off - just a prolonged fall into the woods (where they are ultimately eaten offscreen). If they did make it, they soar into the skies. Not really clear to the player, sorry for that!
Thanks for clarifying the ending, it all makes sense now! (Pity, my poor little chicks seemed to be doing fine :_S)
Graphics and controls are incredible plus, watching your birdlings grow strong and survive, it made me emotional :stuck_out_tongue:
Superb work.
One minor tweak, if you do persue this further, is maybe to handle the bird animations / angle separate to the physics side. For example, I was messing around flying straight upwards, let go, and eventually the blackbird started flapping backwards. :smile:
If you're using 3rd party audio assets, please attribute them! :)
@sugarsores Yeah i think you are right regarding the title, only i haven't found one i like.
@ddrkirbyisq Thank you! :) Regarding the assets, yes most of them are not from us which is why we opted out. The end music is the only thing from us. Most of the sounds are public domain or creative commons 0. The others which require attribution are listed ingame, if you press ESC for pause and click the "Attribution" button on the bottom right. I fear though that only very few players know about the pause menu, so this might not be too effective :D Is this what you meant, or do you mean something more extensive?
None of my offspring made it, so I suppose I still won by keeping some cat alive? :P